Former officials urge great-power backing for next UN chief

US, China, Russia hold disproportionate capacity, essay says

Alex Rondos, a former envoy of the European Union, and Mark Medish, a former senior US national security and Treasury official, published an opinion essay in The Guardian on Oct. 30 titled ‘The world needs the United Nations more than ever. It needs a new lease on life.’ They contend that “to save the United Nations from the irrelevance in which it now wallows, the next secretary general will require the concerted backing of the few powers that govern the security council.”

The authors describe a paradox at the heart of the institution’s predicament: “the great powers who created the institution in the 1940s and recently treat it with a cavalier cynicism are now the ones who need it most, as does the rest of the world.” They write that the argument “is not about nostalgia for what was created after the second world war” — “that world has changed” — but warn that it is “carelessness of high order” to assume “some mystical process will create a world” while “the most powerful give license to some dangerous pathologies that have brought us to ruin in the past.”

“The resort to war over dialogue and diplomacy has reared its head again,” they write, and “restraint has given way to calculated recklessness.” They argue that “changing facts on the ground before talking now creates leverage,” producing “an unprecedented multiplication of centers of violence” in which “militias and mercenaries abound.” Collective security, they write, “is now supplanted by a petulant isolationism,” while a rush to secure minerals and supply routes is “upending traditional notions of sovereignty.” “Drone warfare has made violence much more affordable,” they add. “Frontiers are now up for grabs.”

The authors argue that “civil wars, border wars and the return of imperial ambition are not relics,” and that they “drive the war in Ukraine, the drift toward conflict in the Horn of Africa, the instability around the Gulf and the Red Sea, and the standoff over Taiwan.” They note that the Security Council’s permanent members remain “anachronistically still composed of the victors of the second world war.”

Rondos and Medish give particular weight to artificial intelligence. “Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, pandemics, climate change will either be fueled or managed by artificial intelligence,” they write. As AI is woven into military planning, early warning and command systems, it “compresses the time leaders have to think before they act” and “multiplies the tools of deception and destabilization.” They draw an analogy to the nuclear age: “A world that learned, slowly and at great risk, to live with nuclear weapons must now learn to live with machines that may shape decisions about using them.”

The authors say these dangers can be contained only if two “misplaced assumptions” are dispensed with. The first, they argue, is that the UN is “a club of the like-minded,” when “the UN exists so that states that distrust or even detest one another have somewhere to meet” — “a place that offers hospitality to adversaries.” “It is about co-existence, not convergence,” they write. The second assumption, they say, is that power “can be evenly distributed,” which they call “idealism to the point of fault.” “A handful of states possess the disproportionate capacity to contain these dangers or to unleash them,” they write — “in practice, today this means the United States, China and Russia,” though they see “no reason to exclude India or a better integrated European Union.”

That assessment, they write, “should temper the fashionable faith in ‘middle powers.’” They call the middle powers’ activism “understandable, even admirable,” but add that “they are called middle powers for a reason”: they “cannot, on their own, end a major war or govern a technology developed mostly elsewhere.”

“This does not mean that might makes right,” they write. They argue that “power checked by reasonable deliberation, negotiation and diplomacy is a core principle that inspired the charter of the United Nations” and that the moment “calls for a rededication to principled pragmatism.” Looking to history, they note that “when the plague swept Europe in the 14th century, the city states of Italy established the practice of quarantines and an early form of health certification” — a system about which “the science may have been wrong and the system imperfect,” but one that “worked well enough” and “rested on self-interest, not virtue.” They also cite nuclear proliferation since the mid-20th century, “contained, so far, through a lengthy process of negotiation and agreements.”

The authors envision “a renewed UN that is a problem-solver rather than a bystander, a credible forum rather than a costly talking shop, and the prime instrument for collective action.” “None of this happens unless the great powers want it to,” they write. “Choosing a secretary general is one of the few moments when they must agree on a qualified person and a timely agenda,” they argue. “The superpowers, middle powers and emerging powers of the global south may each have reasons for skepticism,” they add, “but they share a stronger reason to make this effort.” The essay closes: “We need neither ‘peace in our time’ nor ‘perpetual peace’ – but enough peace to keep civilization.”