"Hi, this is Linda Richman. I'm vaklempt! Excuse me… talk amongst yourselves! Here, let me give you a topic: The Security Council is neither making the world really secure these days, nor is it a truly representative council of today's world. Discuss."
On December 23rd a tepid Security Council unanimously passed a watered-down sanctions resolution against Iran. Do these resolutions mean anything anymore – unless they are required as some sort of justification prior to military action against a condemned country? And, what's with this need for unanimity – which is invariably inversely proportional to the efficacy of the resolution being passed. Besides, unanimity in democratic forums is almost oxymoronic. In any case, Russia and China got western nations to so dilute the sanctions against Iran that they might as well have not passed any resolution – because it resolves nothing, nada, zip, zero…
In 2006 alone, the Security Council has passed eight different resolutions on the "Situation in the Middle East" – has this made the Middle East even appear any more secure than it was last year? The Security Council also seems to have passed a resolution for every country on the African continent in 2006 – but do we see any improvements in Darfur or Somalia? What is the point in a world body that seems to spend countless hours talking up a storm, but ends up effectively doing nothing?
President Bush appointed John Bolton as our Permanent U.S. Representative to the United Nations with the hope that Ambassador Bolton would shake things up from its foundation as opposed to its top ten stories that he had once joked were irrelevant. But alas, the UN bureaucracy is too deep-rooted for even a straight-talking US Ambassador to loosen up in a couple of years. We need to approach this step-by-step and my first step would be to abolish the UN General Assembly. But knowing that this body of perpetually dissatisfied and largely third world dilettantes is going nowhere real fast, I would rather tackle reforming the UN Security Council on a priority basis.
It should be apparent to any rational person that the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council represent a world that existed in 1945. In the six decades since, the economic and geo-political realities of the world have substantially changed, but these have not been reflected in the make up of the Security Council. The first thing we all need to agree upon is that the veto-wielding membership needs to be raised from five to eight. The second thing that we can all easily agree upon is that France no longer deserves to be a veto-wielding member. Au Revoir, Mon Ami. No hard feelings, but Germany is now certainly more representative of the European Union than vous.
So the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Russia, and China will become the five veto-wielding members of the new Security Council. With Asia and the Far East making up nearly half of the world's population, it's a no-brainer that they should get at least four of the eight veto-wielding seats in the new Security Council. If Russia and China take up two of these four Asia/Far East slots, it's apparent that India (with its one-sixth of humanity and an exploding economy) and Japan (the world's second largest economy) qualify for the other two Asia/Far East positions. Finally, it is rather obvious that Brazil should get to represent South America as a veto-wielding member of the new Security Council.
After this new Security Council has been in place for a decade, we might want to consider raising the veto-wielding membership to ten by adding a member each from Africa and Eastern Europe. However, for now, it would make sense for the incoming UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, to take the necessary steps to immediately increase the veto-wielding membership of the UN Security Council to eight nations as follows: United States of America, United Kingdom, Russia, China, Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil.
With this new Security Council in place in early 2007, we can look forward to seating a body that is truly representative of the world and thus making hopes for a real peace all the more plausible.
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