Ukraine Crisis Exposes the Impotence of International Bodies

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, March 17, 2022

 

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, delivering a virtual address to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, stated a hard truth plainly: “The wars of the past have prompted our predecessors to create institutions that should protect us from war, but they, unfortunately, don’t work. We see it. You see it. So we need new ones, new institutions, new alliances, and we offer them.”

 

It feels like a long time ago, but it is easy to forget that less than a month ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began as the United Nations Security Council met to discuss and denounce it. The security-council meeting was chaired by Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, because the month of February was Russia’s turn in the rotation. One by one, security-council ambassadors denounced the invasion . . . and then nothing happened. This is how that meeting ended:

 

“There is no purgatory for war criminals,” [Ukraine’s ambassador, Sergiy] Kyslytsya said. “They go straight to hell, ambassador.”

 

After a bit of silence, Russia’s ambassador responded calmly.

 

“We aren’t being aggressive against the Ukrainian people, but against the junta in power in Kyiv,” he said.

 

He then announced the meeting adjourned.

 

Think about it: The U.N. didn’t even have a mechanism or the will to decide that the Russian ambassador shouldn’t be allowed to chair the emergency meeting about how to respond to Russia invading Ukraine. The institution is so obsessed with protocol and avoiding an accusation of being unfair that it shrugs helplessly as the guy representing the invading country declares the meeting over.

 

Then on March 2, the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for a resolution demanding that Russia “immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” And again, nothing happened.

 

The United Nations doesn’t have the power to enact any economic sanctions on its own. The U.N. doesn’t have an army capable of forcing Russia out of Ukraine. The U.N. has peacekeeping forces, but they are frustratingly ineffective, infuriatingly corrupt, and have a jaw-droppingly horrific problem with the sexual abuse of the populations they’re supposed to be protecting.

 

Back in 2019, the American Foreign Service Association published an excerpt of the book, Why Peacekeeping Fails, by Dennis Jett, a former U.S. ambassador to Peru and Mozambique who also worked in U.S. embassies in Argentina, Israel, Malawi, and Liberia. 

 

Jett did not mince words:

 

The most recently launched peacekeeping missions will therefore fail, because U.N. peacekeeping has become a way for rich countries to send the soldiers of poor countries to deal with conflicts the rich countries do not care all that much about. The fundamental problem is that there is no peace to keep, and U.N. forces are incapable of imposing one because they are peacekeepers and not warfighters. If the international community wants to try to impose a peace, it should send troops that are capable and willing to do that.

 

The United Nations is largely irrelevant to the world’s biggest problems. When push comes to shove, it’s an impotent debating society that fails to pay its parking tickets.

 

To give credit where it’s due, international-relief agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children, and the U.N. World Food Program, among many others, are responding quickly to help desperate refugees and victims in Ukraine. Maybe big international institutions can work when the task is straightforward and a matter of logistics: getting aid to those who need it.

 

But beyond that, score one for the nationalists: When a really important task needs to get done, it’s usually a national government that makes it happen. The sanctions that are devastating the Russian economy are being enacted by individual nations. Individual NATO countries are shipping arms and supplies to the Ukrainians. Individual nations’ police forces are seizing those oligarchs’ yachts.

 

Meanwhile, two years after the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a screeching halt and turned everyone’s lives upside down, the World Health Organization is still begging the Chinese government to cooperate more in probes about how the pandemic began. You can argue that one of the most consequential early decisions in the pandemic was the WHO leadership’s decision in early January 2020 to keep mum about its suspicions that China was hiding the real extent of the problem, and to instead repeat China’s claim that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission:

 

“Those concerns are not something they ever aired publicly. Instead, they basically deferred to China,” says AP’s Dake Kang. “Ultimately, the impression that the rest of the world got was just what the Chinese authorities wanted. Which is that everything was under control. Which of course it wasn’t.”

 

Separately, the international crime-fighting organization Interpol is growing less and less effective, because authoritarian governments are abusing its system to pursue dissidents abroad. Countries such as Russia, China, and Iran are using the agency’s global reach to arrest and extradite exiled activists and political opponents.

 

The International Olympic Committee banned Russian athletes after Russia invaded Ukraine — after turning a blind eye to egregious Russian doping scandals that caused a debacle at this year’s winter games.

 

Most international institutions have mastered the art of looking like they’re doing something without doing much of anything: meeting at conferences, convening special panels, issuing grave-sounding statements of concern, hosting drawn-out negotiations over treaties with few enforcement mechanisms and plenty of loopholes.

 

Most of us on the right side of the aisle lost any remaining faith in big international institutions a long time ago — some out of an instinctive disdain for multilateralism, but often because of the mountain of evidence that big international institutions just don’t get the job done when it counts.

 

It doesn’t matter how much you may want the U.N., the WHO, Interpol, or the IOC to work. What matters is that they don’t work well, they haven’t worked well for a long time, and there’s really no sign that they’re capable of the reforms that would be needed to make them work well.

 

The problem with these institutions is not that they’re underfunded, or that the U.S. is being too unilateralist, or any of the other tired excuses. The problem with these institutions is that shameless regimes such as Russia, China, and Iran have figured out how to manipulate, strongarm, and exploit these international institutions to serve their agendas. The WHO isn’t supposed to be a public-relations megaphone for Beijing’s spin. Interpol isn’t supposed to be a dissident-hunting service for Moscow.

 

Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues that the Biden administration would be wiser to selectively cut ties with certain international institutions that simply no longer serve any useful purpose:

 

The U.N. Human Rights Council demonstrates the futility of U.S. engagement with an unreformable body. In its 15-year history, it has passed more resolutions condemning the Jewish state than all other countries combined, even as China, North Korea, Syria, and other countries perpetrate repeated crimes against their own people. Accordingly, Biden should work with like-minded nations to scrap the council — and instead form a new group with only democratic states as members.

 

Similarly, Eli Lake argues that since the U.N. can’t stand up to the world’s most brutal and oppressive regimes, it no longer has a true purpose, and that the U.S. should think about establishing a replacement institution:

 

The State Department should declare a new policy toward the U.N. Security Council. It’s time to stop pretending that it is a font of international law when a country like Russia remains a veto-wielding permanent member. With that in mind, Western diplomats should explore the prospect of demoting Russia’s status on the grounds that there was no General Assembly vote for Russia to join the U.N. after the collapse of the Soviet Union. If that doesn’t work, America and its allies should issue an ultimatum: It’s us or Russia. If the U.N. cannot or will not demote Russia’s status, then the West should undertake to build an alternative to the United Nations that excludes Russia and eventually China.

 

I suspect that in most Democratic foreign-policy-thinker circles, proposals such as this are unthinkable. They’re still operating in the foreign-policy landscape of a generation ago, when the U.N., the WHO, Interpol, etc. were relatively reliable international institutions whose goals and objectives broadly aligned with those of the U.S. Those days are long gone. But I guess a country that elects Joe Biden isn’t looking for forward-thinking adaptation to changing times.