Calls are growing for the UN Security Council to be reformed after the US became the only member to use its veto power to block a Gaza ceasefire resolution, a move welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The UN chief says he will keep pushing for peace.
The problem in this case is depending on the security council to act on an issue it isn’t designed to address.
The main purpose of the UN is to prevent global war, and the Security Council is the primary way in which that goal is achieved.
In that context, the P5’s veto power makes sense. It prevents resolutions pitting the world against one of the superpowers that can sustain that kind of war.
How does the security counsel prevent global war? They’re powerless to do anything to any of the super powers and by proxy also won’t do anything to anyone else either.
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That’s the neat part! It doesn’t!
Or the wonky intertwinement is the peace mechanism? How much more bloody would the world have been without it?
“Global War” isn’t all war on the globe. It’s war that pulls in the whole world. Having 4 of the P5 gang up on the 5th in a military campaign authorized by the UN would very likely result in WWIII.
The veto power prevents the UN from taking military action against a country the interest of countries that can sustain a war against the rest of the world.
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That’s actually pretty impressive if you think about it. We survived the height of the cold war so hopefully we won’t wipe ourselves out now.
We literally can’t. I don’t think there’s a multi-cellular species that would be harder to wipe out than humanity. We live on all contients and enough humans have their own bunkers. Even the 100k nuclear bombs they had in the cold war wouldn’t be remotely sufficient to kill us all. We’d need ** at least** a thousand times that many.
We may however end up bombing us back into the dark ages and the collapsing food supply could kill most humans. I personally don’t think that’s much better than getting wipee out.