The superb Marc Lynch has an interesting post up on the post-veto Syria landscape in which he argues that the vetoes have damaged the UN and rendered it less relevant:
The U.S. and its allies will continue to find other ways to try to deal
with the Syrian crisis, even without the UN. But the failure of the UN
to act, as Secretary General Ban Ki Moon suggested,
harms the institution itself by revealing its inability to act in
defense of the Charter's promise. The next stages, whether military or
not (and I expect not), will more resemble the Kosovo and Iraq
campaigns which were launched without international legitimacy. This
will significantly undermine the prospects that such actions will
contribute to the positive development of international norms of
atrocity prevention or the more controversial "responsibility to
protect." That is tragic for an administration which has prioritized
the UN and, with the exception of its hopeless diplomacy on the
Israeli-Palestinian file, has done well with it.
In a narrow sense, Lynch is of course correct that the vetoes have marginalized the institution; until the situation in Syria changes appreciably on the ground, I'd expect the Council to stay on the sidelines. But he is arguing, I think, that the UN has lost relevance in a broader sense. And here, I'm very skeptical. There's often a tendency to take discrete Council decisions or non-decisions and extrapolate to an argument on the organization's trajectory. After the U.S. bypassed the Council over Iraq, op-ed pages were full of commentary on how the diplomatic punch-up had damaged the institution. Who would have guessed that an explosion in UN peacekeeping was just around the corner and that two years later the Council would refer Sudan to the International Criminal Court?
The point is this: the Council is a political body whose value and role depends almost entirely on the shifting political interests of the P5. Those interests vary from crisis to crisis and will change, sometimes quickly. A Security Council that looks impotent and dysfunctional now may well appear formidable, or at least quite serviceable, in some other context.
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