Peace Road
There is no road to peace; peace is the road
Gandhi
The end of war is a goal we may never attain, but is it an impossible one? We already have an international institution, the United Nations, that is charged with preventing war, but it has never been given the power or resources to achieve this lofty ambition.
The UN has a number of humanitarian branches that endeavour to deal with the conditions that lead to war, but they are chronically underfunded. The UN also has a Security Council to deal with the wars that it cannot prevent, but its capability is limited by institutional constraints.
A key issue here is that the Security Council can only intervene to prevent or end a war if the permanent members of the Council will allow it since they all have the power to veto any resolution the Council tries to make.
The are situations where war is seen as justified, which is based on the following criteria:
- It must be declared by a lawful state with the authority to do so.
- The reason must justify going to war—i.e. innocent life must be in imminent danger, and the intervention must be to protect life.
- The aims of the war must be achievable.
- War must be a last resort, and all non-violent options must be exhausted before going to war.
There are also rules governing behaviour during a war, which are based on the principles of proportionality and discrimination. The ends must justify the means, and no more force should be used than is necessary to achieve the aims of the war.
Greed and power appear to have been the main reasons a country has gone to war in the past, but is not the country that starts a war, it is the leaders of the country. The majority of the population are often opposed to going to war, and have to be manipulated into accepting it. Historically religion, or more aptly religious fervour, was used to achieve this, but in more recent times other methods have been employed.
There is a new reason why nations go to war in democratic societies, and that is to help the government win an election, since going to war is usually guaranteed to win votes. This seems to be changing, and during the Second Gulf War in Iraq the European politicians who opposed the invasion were supported by the public. When it later became apparent that politicians had lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction there was a backlash in Europe, and especially in the UK, where Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to resign. Unfortunately the Americans did not follow suit and re-elected George W. Bush, whose public approval rating depended on whether the US was winning the war, not whether he deceived the American people into going to war.
Greed is still a key motivator in going to war, with many of the people behind the push to invade Iraq in 2003 profiting substantially. Much of the gains came via the share market, so if it were illegal for companies to profit from supplying arms to a country at war it would reduce this incentive. There is also a lot of money to be made in post-war reconstruction, so we will need to address this too. If companies associated with a country that starts a war were banned from the post-war reconstruction they would have less reason to support them going to war.
Dealing with international disputes is the primary role of the UN Security Council, but it has struggled to achieve this due to its inbuilt deficiencies and the politics of the Cold War. After the Cold War ended in 1991 the Security Council became far more effective, and far more active, but it is still shackled by the powers of veto of its five permanent member—the P5.
The P5 are the US, Russia, the UK, France and China, and they have had effective control of the UN Security Council since its formation as an alliance of the Allied nations at the end of World War II. The mind-set at the time was that of a world at war, and the primary goal of the UN was to prevent another world war. To ensure UN interventions did not lead to a third world war the P5 were granted the power to unilaterally veto Security Council resolutions. They can veto any resolution though, not just those that could lead to a global conflict, which has left the veto open to abuse.
The worst abuser of the veto has been the US, which has blocked over 40 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel since 1982, more than the total number of vetoes cast by the rest of the P5 during the same period. The US also vetoed resolutions condemning South Africa during the apartheid years.1
The UN is charged with representing the interests of the entire world, a herculean task of epic proportions, so it will obviously struggle to achieve this goal under its current structure. There have been many advocates for reforming the UN to make it more effective, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who proposed a reform package he named ‘In Larger Freedom’ in 2005.
One of Kofi Annan’s reform ideas was to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights with a more potent UN Human Rights Council. This received overwhelming support from the General Assembly, where 170 out of the 191 nations voted in favour of it. Only the US (which had been voted off of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2001) the Marshall Islands, Palau and Israel voted against it. Considering Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the USA’s treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, it is not surprising that they did not support it.2
The fact is that the main resistance to effective funding and reform of the UN comes from the US government, which represents the interests of the major industries, not the American people, and peace is just not good for business. Nor is an end to world poverty (it provides cheap labour) or debt in developing countries (it facilitates the exploitation of natural resources). So, for the Security Council to become an effective instrument of peace we must end US/P5 control of the Council.
There are two ways we can do this. One is to get the P5 to relinquish their power of veto, or at least the power to veto resolutions that do not directly threaten their national security, but it seems unlikely they would agree to this. The other is to dissolve the existing Security Council and create a new one. This could place ongoing operations in jeopardy, but it may be the only way to wrest control from these nations.
Other than restricting the power of veto, I do not think the Security Council needs a lot of reform, but it could have a better balance. The Council is currently the P5 plus ten non-permanent members elected by the General Assembly from regional groups for two-year terms, with five being replaced each year. Three are chosen from Africa, two from each of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and Others, and one is chosen from Eastern Europe. One member must be an Arabic country, alternating between the Asian and African bloc. With eight members being European and European colonial countries there is a clear western dominance of the Security Council.
Under Article 27 of the UN Charter, Security Council decisions require 60% of the vote for approval (9 of 15 members). Expanding the Council to include Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, and Egypt as permanent members would improve the balance, and increase Asia’s representation, which is currently just three or four members out of fifteen despite Asia having half the world’s population. If the new permanent members had the right to veto any resolution it could cripple the Council, so the veto will have to go. Uniting for Consensus, a movement headed by Italy, is calling for more non-permanent members of the Security Council, and either abolishing the power of veto or limiting it to Chapter VII matters (those that involve maintaining the peace).
If we do abolish or limit the power of veto then the Security Council should be able to act with more autonomy. The next step in making it truly effective is to provide it with enough funding to do the job. We need to do this for both the Security Council and the humanitarian branches of the UN. It is important to do both since the latter are the institutions that address the conditions that lead to war. If these are not adequately funded then we will need to spend more on dealing with the wars that do start.
Funding the humanitarian branches of the UN is simply a matter of handing over the cash, and the consensus is that a relatively small amount of money, just 0.7% of GDP, would be enough. The money must be donated unconditionally to the UN, so it can allocate it as it sees fit. This should resolve two problems.
First, it will stop countries from using foreign aid to support their own financial interests. An example of this was Britain’s dam for arms deal with Malaysia, where the Pergau hydroelectric dam in Malaysia was built with a £234 million grant from the UK aid budget, while at the same time the Malaysian government bought around £1 billion worth of arms from the UK.3
Giving the UN control of aid money would also stop donor states from using it to manipulate the recipient nation’s government. An example of this occurred when the US wanted the UN Security Council to pass a resolution to invade Iraq in 1990. First the US bought the votes of Zaire, Ethiopia and Columbia by getting Saudi Arabia to give them free oil. Then, after Yemen voted against the resolution, the US delegate told the Yemeni delegate that it was the most expensive no vote he would ever make. Three days later the US cancelled $70 million of annual aid to Yemen. This was not an isolated incident. Buying influence with aid money is standard practice for the US, and countries elected to the UN Security Council receive, on average, an increase in US foreign aid of 59% during their tenure.4
Ensuring that the Security Council is capable of managing all operations imperative to establishing a long-term state of peace in the world will require a high level of funding. There is a simple way to achieve this—impose a levy on military spending.
Total global military spending was $2.44 trillion in 2023. If UN Security Council funds were raised by applying a 10% levy on military spending it would have received $244 billion that year. This is 38 times its current budget of $6.4 billion. If this is not enough then we could make it 20%, or even 100%. If the Security Council’s budget is equal to the military budgets of the entire world combined then a lack of resources would not be a problem.5
There are several advantages to funding the Security Council by a levy, one being that it would stop countries delaying payments to the UN (in February 2026 the US was $1.8 billion dollars in arrears for peacekeeping operations, and owed a further $2.2 billion to the UN’s regular budget). Another advantage of a levy on military budgets is that Security Council budget would be self-adjusting—the more conflict in the world the higher their funding.6
Nations with low levels of military spending will likely accept the levy, but it will be unpopular with the big consumers of arms. The US, which spends 4% of its GDP on arms, would likely object to it, as would dictators who depend on their military to maintain control of the populace.7
The main financial contributors to the UN Security Council might see merit in this funding method, since a fully funded Security Council would allow them to reduce their military spending without compromising national security. These were, at the time of writing, the US, the UK, Japan and Germany (the top suppliers of peacekeeping troops were Bangladesh, Nepal and India).
A key advantage of fully funding the Security Council is that it will have military resources under its direct control. Under the existing system the Security Council can only act when its member states allocate it the troops it needs, and this has, on occasion, led to a failure to act during a crisis. Examples include Rwanda and Somalia, where the Security Council could not get enough support from its member states to intervene effectively and millions of people died in ethnic cleansing. This led to accusations that some countries will only supply troops for conflicts in which they have a strategic or financial interest.
Endnote
While empowering the UN Security Council so it can deal with ongoing wars is essential, if we want to end unjust wars then we need to make going to war without UN approval illegal, and target the people who start the war. This should include the head of state and the military command. Being a head of state does not give you the right to kill people in other countries, and military leaders who follow these orders should be held accountable.
References
- Monbiot, G. ‘Obama’s Rogue State’ September 9, 2013. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vetoed_United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions
- https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/04/world/for-first-time-us-is-excluded-from-un-human-rights-panel.html www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/about-council; https://theconversation.com/why-the-us-left-the-un-human-rights-council-and-why-it-matters-98644; www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/about-council
- ‘Dam Lies: Aid and Trade. A look at the Underbelly of Foreign Aid’ The Economist, November 17, 2012.
- Simons, G. L. ‘The scourging of Iraq: sanctions, law, and natural justice’ 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, pp. 197–198; Simons, G. L. ‘Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam’ 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 1996, p. 358. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/507155
- https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2024/global-military-spending-surges-amid-war-rising-tensions-and-insecurity https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/how-we-are-funded
- https://press.un.org/en/2024/gaab4462.doc.htm https://apnews.com/article/un-us-budget-dues-trump-payment-7d68c072d470f989006b7d674ba85aaa
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#/media/File:U.S_-_China_-_Russia,_Military_Spending.svg