Some political battles seem so obviously over and done with that you can forget that the losing side’s grievances are still important. I discovered this because of a comment I made in a recent interview for a German website: that “discussions of Security Council reform are dead” at the United Nations. This is not quite true, technically speaking. Diplomats do continue to hold periodic meetings on ideas to change the council’s composition and rules. But nobody actually believes that these are going anywhere, so it seemed safe to write off the whole process almost in passing. Once the interview was [...]
It is Cold War time at the United Nations again. Last week, Russia caused diplomatic uproar by vetoing not one, but two Security Council resolutions extending a U.N. investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Moscow is angry with the investigators for accusing the Syrian regime of using sarin gas and chlorine bombs. Russia has now used its veto 11 times to block resolutions over the Syrian war since 2011, four of them this year. Every veto sparks a ritualistic bout of outrage in the Security Council. All sides seemed especially tetchy last week. Nikki Haley, the U.S. [...]
On Nov. 15, the United Nations Security Council will meet to decide on the fate of the U.N. mission in Central African Republic, known by its acronym MINUSCA. In stark contrast to the debate over the U.N. mission in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, which the U.S. pushed to reduce last April after citing its ineffectiveness and cost, few in New York expect cuts to the Central African Republic (CAR) mission. To the contrary, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited CAR at the end of October and called for increasing the mission’s authorized troop ceiling, currently just over 12,000, by [...]
