US to propose overhauling of UN Security Council

Diplomats in Washington are developing a proposal for “overhauling” the UN Security Council, which may be presented at the September meeting of the General Assembly, the Washington Post reported in June. 

President Joe Biden’s envoy Linda Thomas-Greenfield is currently consulting with member states to “solicit feedback about a potential expansion” of the council, the Post said, adding that US officials hope this will ‘restore confidence in the world’s preeminent governance body by recognizing today’s diffuse map of global power’.

The Security Council consists of five permanent members – Russia, China, France, the UK and the US – and ten rotating members, elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms. Under the current rules, two of those seats go to Latin America, five combined to Africa and Asia, one to Eastern Europe, and two to Western Europe and “other.”

The US proposal is “evolving” but is expected to include adding six more permanent members, who would not have veto power. Officials who spoke to the Post mentioned Germany, Japan and India as possible candidates, while Britain and France want Brazil and at least one African country. 

Expanding the Security Council to “become more inclusive” and limiting veto power to ‘rare, extraordinary situations’ were brought up in Biden’s General Assembly speech last September.

The US proposal seeks to address the frustration of its proteges in Kiev. Last year, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky demanded that the UN declare Russia an aggressor and remove it from the Security Council, or dissolve yourself of which  Washington sees the second option as going too far.

The Ukrainian conflict is about the future of global order, a senior Russian diplomat told the UN Security Council during an April session.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov outlined that the “current massive over-representation of the West in the UN body undermines the principle of multipolarity, and argued that the council needs expansion of the representation of Asian, African and Latin American countries in it.

Moscow continues to emphasise its intentions to help change the world order. In his remarks, Lavrov outlined the nature of the current conflict, which he said was really between the UN Charter and the “rules-based order” of the collective West.

The USA abuses the veto and that the UN headquarters situated on American territory. He noted that the US had effectively denied visas to his accredited media pool.

The UN-centric system is going through a deep crisis caused by some members’ desire to replace international law with their rules-based order, such rules are invented ad hoc and applied to stop independent development.

They are enforced through means ranging from military force to embargoes, financial sanctions, the confiscation of property, “destruction of critical infrastructure” and “manipulation of universally agreed norms and procedures.”

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been paralysed, market mechanisms have collapsed, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been turned into “an instrument for achieving the objectives of the US and its allies.”

The “Western minority” has no right to speak for the entire world, Lavrov said. Its “rules-based order” amounts to rejection of sovereign equality, the key principle of the UN Charter, as evidenced by EU commissioner Josep Borrell’s infamous statement about the European “garden” and the “jungle” outside it.

In addition to the string of US military “adventures” from Yugoslavia and Iraq to Libya, the worst violation of the UN Charter was its meddling in the affairs of post-Soviet states, Lavrov said. As examples, he brought up the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and the 2014 coup in Kiev. When the UN sought to stop the ensuing war by endorsing the Minsk Agreements, they were “trampled by Kiev and its Western masters, who recently cynically and even proudly admitted that they never intended to fulfill them, but only wanted to buy time to pump Ukraine with weapons against Russia,” the Russian foreign minister added.

The West has made a “brazen attempt to subjugate” the UN by taking over its secretariats and other international institutions, Lavrov told the Security Council. Washington and its allies have abandoned diplomacy and demanded a battlefield showdown within the halls of the UN, created to prevent the horrors of war. Genuine multilateralism “requires the UN to adapt to objective trends” of emerging multipolarity in international relations, the Russian foreign minister argued. The Security Council should be reformed to increase the representation of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as the current “exorbitant overrepresentation” of the West “undermines the principle of multilateralism.” 

For most UN members the most important issues are things like access to cheap energy sources rather than the transition to “green” technologies, socio-economic development rather than human rights “in an ultra-liberal interpretation,” and security and sovereign equality rather than the artificial imposition of electoral democracy according to Western patterns.