Let's democratize the United Nations and make it relevant again
I think it would not be an entirely crazy idea to suggest it could be a net win to abolish the special veto rights enjoyed by privileged nations.
A veto-free and empowered UN should greatly reduce the need for biased military alliances such as NATO and CSTO.
We only need one universal international organization to maintain peace and security; the United Nations.
This is obviously an extremely complex and difficult system to make changes to, due to all legacy, but hopefully something can be done.
As a Swede, I would much rather prefer fixing the UN, than joining the NATO.
Thoughts?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadA poor country would then have no incentive to actually vote for the crazy idea, as they would not be able to present proof of their vote in favor of the crazy idea, and could therefore not collect the bribe.
A bad actor would need to persuade the majority of nations to as a collective agree on the benefits of the bribe outweighing the consequences of the crazy idea. It would need to be a huge bribe, as without knowing who voted in favor, they would need to agree on splitting it among the majority of nations who promised they would vote in favor, and if the proposal passes, the bribe would be paid out.
Hopefully a majority of the nations are not bribable. Can we think of some way to estimate how many nations we think would be bribable?
Start at 100% and subtract for each of the nations that will not act in the best interests of themselves.
Rounding to the nearest meaningful number - 100%
Foreign aid, trade deals, trade, soverign debt, technology exchange, defence contracts, visas, student exchange, sanctions, tourism, visits by heads of state, state dinners, world bank, imf, un missions, peace keepers the list goes on and on - all bribery, some with extra steps, some literally writing a cheque in exchange for something on the world stage.
I highly suggest you read up on corruption in other countries and even on the IMF.
Regarding your comment "would much rather prefer fixing the UN, than joining the NATO". I don't understand how you can compare them. I see NATO as a military alliance and the UN as communication platform for countries (writing and voting on resolutions). I don't see where one can replace the other.
Given that, I like the tone of OP's point - why can't the UN members (which is all countries right?) come together and just establish a list of sovereign countries and their borders and then humanity can be done with invasions? I realize there would be some tough conversations, maybe intractable regarding Taiwan, possibly other areas as well. Start the conversation though. Move humanity from focusing on military pacts to economic/aid pacts and focus on human rights.
That assumes a lot of trust between all nations, their leaders and potential future leaders. A military alliance is just the manifestation of stronger bond between particular nations. With humans being the way they currently are I don't see this being realistic without larger societal changes around the world.
The UN has already done this to the degree agreement is possible. Without the military power to enforce those boundaries, the agreements are useless.
I do agree the org needs to adjust it's rules, but how will you impose the plan without a member leaving due to perceptions that the plan is biased? And what if that member is a superpower country? Where are your armed peacekeeping forces coming from then?
In fact the resolution was invoked by the Security Council yesterday,[1] and in such a procedural vote there is no veto.
The special session of the UNGA will be held today at 10:00 New York time (15:00 UTC).[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
[2] https://www.un.org/en/ga/info/meetings/76schedule.shtml
Your proposal won't work because it misunderstands that any U.N. "cooperation" happens at the convenience of the members. So let's imagine UN gets rid of veto rights. You've now made the U.N. organization less relevant to powerful countries. So China, Russia, and United States no longer have veto rights? Then their self-interest means they'll just quit the UN.
With the UN, you have to balance game theory incentives for powerful countries to participate and respect its rules.
The UN membership and cooperation (preventing wars) is a different dynamic from an economic trade organization like the WTO.
Say the US do something that the UN does not like. So what? The US are too powerful and have too much influence in the world to care. So ultimately the UN is and will always be limited by what the most powerful countries decide.
You would need total nuclear disarmament to begin with, because a world in which nuclear powers have a veto as a first line of defence and a nuclear weapon as a last line of defence, taking away their veto they would have just a last line of defence.
But then you need to somehow engineer a system in which perpetrators of major war crimes can be brought to account. This would be a world in which ASPA was repealed, the FBI would be able to arrest and investigate the US president, and every living US president would be in prison.
In such a world it might be conceivable that a) Putin be brought to justice by his own internal security apparatus and sent to the Hague, in this astonishing new system of democractic and lawful governance the likes of which humanity has neverbefore seen, or b) that it would be possible for chapter 7 article 51 to be applied and for the security council to assemble a military coalition to repel a war of aggression without risking the termination of the human experiment due to a nuclear exchange.
The UN isn't a war-fighting organization. It sometimes sends peacekeepers into tiny, local conflicts, but that won't work on superpowers.
Getting rid of the veto would do nothing in Ukraine. Even if the remaining powers decided to send forces, those leading the vote would be precisely the NATO powers.
The UN already serves as an important force in peace among superpowers -- not with weapons, but with words. It's a place where ambassadors talk to each other, daily, to smooth over conflicts and prevent them from turning into crises. It creates a world where cooperation and economic, rather than military, competition is the way to get wealthy.
It has worked well so far. This is the first time in decades that Russia and the NATO forces have come close to direct war. And it's bad, to be sure, but it won't be fixed by turning the UN into a warfighting organization to oppose them.
It has broken down because a superpower has decided to threaten its neighbor in a way that the rest of the world finally sees as a prelude to even more violence. That isn't fought by simplistic measures. It's being combated with economics, and via an incredibly uneasy reinforcement of that neighbor.
The key decision-makers are exactly those NATO countries who are most directly threatened. If Peru and Guyana and other countries would like a say, they're welcome to participate, but the countries at the forefront are exactly the NATO that you're so worried about.
The UN is not magic. It's not a world government, and nobody really expects it to be. It's a place for jaw-jaw to be better than war-war. When that breaks down, the best option is to use as little force as you can to drag it back to jaw-jaw.
Removing them from the formal UN process would decouple the UN from reality and defeat its already limited usefulness.