The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (87 page)

President Roosevelt hoped that the UN, headquartered in America, would so anchor US participation in international affairs as to provide the world order with the preponderant backing it had lacked after US withdrawal into ‘isolation’ in 1920. In addition, the Security Council (whose ‘Military Staff Committee’ was to ‘consist of the Chiefs of Staff of the permanent members’)
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would institutionalize the cooperation between the Big Three (the US, the UK, and the Soviet Union), and more especially the US-Soviet cooperation, that Roosevelt had set such store by since 1943. However, the conflict dominating the forty-five years after Roosevelt’s death was the Cold War, a largely bipolar struggle between the US and Soviet superpowers. UN involvement was slight. Iran’s reference (with US backing) to the Security Council of the USSR’s refusal to withdraw its troops from Iran played a significant role – though probably a lesser one than direct Iranian-Soviet negotiations – in resolving an early crisis. But, later in 1946, the US turned to traditional fleet movements to stiffen Turkey’s resistance to Soviet demands for (in effect) control of the Black Sea Straits. Indeed the UN’s role in the early Cold War was chiefly as a propaganda forum, with the USSR’s repeated vetoes earning it a bad reputation. Only on one occasion did the Security Council respond to a Cold War challenge more or less as initially envisaged: in 1950, a Soviet boycott enabled the Security Council to authorize intervention by a multinational, if essentially US, force to counter North Korea’s invasion of the South.
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The Korean War opened up the possibility of the United Nations becoming aligned in the Cold War, much as the League of Nations came in the 1930s to represent (for many) an alignment against the revisionist powers. Had the USSR and its satellites walked out in protest, as Japan, Germany, and Italy had left the League, this might indeed have happened. But Moscow was too prudent to hand
the West such an advantage, and soon resumed its Security Council place and veto. The United States sought to bypass this by securing from the General Assembly, where it then commanded a large majority, the 1950 ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution. This resolution provided that, if a veto stopped the Security Council exercising ‘its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace’, then ‘the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making recommendations… for collective measures, including… the use of armed force.’
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The resolution impacted for a time on the internal workings of the UN, but markedly less so on the Cold War itself. Though the Assembly in February 1951 condemned communist China as an aggressor and in November 1956 called on the USSR to withdraw from Hungary, it showed no disposition to invoke ‘the use of armed force’. Nor indeed could it, since the United States (though occasionally tempted) always decided not to expand the Korean fighting into China, and since it saw no possibility of safely challenging Soviet actions in Hungary.

Mutual restraint usually stopped Cold War rivalries reaching the point of ‘clear and present danger’. However, there were occasions when World War III seemed far closer: the years of hectic mutual rearmament that followed the outbreak of the Korean War, during which the USSR was run by an increasingly paranoid Stalin of whose intentions in 1950–3 nobody can be sure; the 1954–5 period, encompassing the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the first Chinese ‘off-shore islands’ crisis, of which one historian wrote that ‘[f]ive times in one year [1954] the experts advised the President to launch an atomic strike against China’;
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the better-known Cuban missile crisis in 1962; and autumn 1983, when the ageing Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, convinced himself that NATO’s ‘Able Archer’ command-and-control exercise was cover for a real ‘first [nuclear] strike’.
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Why, then, were these issues not brought before the Security Council? In theory, Andropov could have taken his fears to the Security Council; but he would have had nothing to go on except suspicion. Equally there was, in 1950–3, no definite crisis situation (beyond Korea) for the UN to focus on. But this cannot be said of 1954–5. Here, however, the UN was debarred from any useful role not only by the prospect of Soviet or US vetoes in the Security Council, but also by its own non-recognition of one of the major participants, the People’s Republic of China. Any worthwhile negotiations would therefore have to be – and in fact were – conducted more directly, outside the UN format. Finally there remains the Cuban missile crisis; here the Security Council did play a role, but only as a forum in which the US could prove the installation of strategic missiles in Cuba and expose unwise Soviet lies on the subject. This gave the US diplomatic and public opinion advantages. But
the crisis itself was resolved by a combination of direct Soviet-American diplomacy and mounting US military pressure. Had it not been, we now know that Kennedy hoped, as a last resort, to invoke UN good offices, but those of the Secretary-General not the Security Council.
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Besides the Cold War, two other rifts may have had the potential to provoke Armageddon, that between the now nuclear India and Pakistan, and that between China and a Taiwan backed by the United States. In neither case has the Security Council played a significant role.

The Indo-Pakistani dispute is more fully treated in
Chapter 14
. It has, of course, generated real, though deliberately limited, conventional wars. But there have also been occasions when something much bigger seemed in the offing: in early 1987, though the crisis was dispelled by Pakistani President Zia’s diplomatic visit to India, ‘ostensibly to watch a Test cricket match’;
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the long-continuing post-1989 violence in Indian-held Kashmir, which India believed (with some justice) to be fomented by Pakistan; the 1999 ‘Kargil conflict’, from which Pakistan eventually withdrew in the face of ‘mounting military losses and intense pressure from the US government’;
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and the climactic confrontation that followed terrorist attacks in 2001, first on the Kashmir State Assembly in Srinagar, then on the parliament building in Delhi. India moved troops to the border and, in 2002, tensions ‘rose to the point where armed conflict, with a possible escalation to a nuclear exchange, seemed a definite possibility’.
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Indian ministers talked, in the language of the ‘War on Terror’, of retaliation against militant training camps in Pakistan-held Kashmir or, more generally, against Pakistan itself – following one militant attack, India’s Prime Minister secured parliamentary backing for an (unspecified) fight against ‘cross-border terrorism’. Unsurprisingly ‘frantic international diplomatic activity’ ensued, but, as in 1999 and 1987, this did not extend to the Security Council.
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Open war, such as might have required at least verbal UN involvement, did not break out, and nobody seems to have thought UN resolutions likely to help prevent
one. It might have been considered that Great Powers are more readily influenced behind the scenes, and Pakistan might, in any case, have been protected by China’s veto. In any event, though Pakistan would welcome international mediation over Kashmir, India (the stronger party, but also the one more vulnerable to pressure for ‘self-determination’) stands irm on Kashmir’s 1947 accession to India, and insists that other aspects of the question can be resolved only by direct talks with Pakistan.

Like Kashmir, the Taiwan Straits have witnessed intense confrontation since early in the post-war era. Things seemed to ease with China’s economic reforms and the investment they engendered from Taiwan. However, Taiwan’s democratization has tilted its political balance away from the post-1949 Kuomintang refugees, and towards the locally born majority, which is more prone to stressing the island’s separate identity. While ready to contemplate a long transitional period of ‘One Country Two Systems’ on the Hong Kong model, Beijing’s rulers were viscerally opposed to the idea of Taiwan instead edging to sovereign independence. Accordingly, they sought to prevent overseas visits by its leaders. In June 1995, China responded to Taiwanese President Lee’s visit to his alma mater, Cornell University, by firing missiles into the sea off Taiwan. Quiet US remonstrances were rebuffed, which drew a signal in the form of the dispatch of a US aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait for the first time since 1979. Then in the run-up to Taiwan’s 1996 elections, China staged military exercises and fired missiles close to Taiwan’s major ports. In response, the US sent two carrier groups to the positions they would occupy if they really had to defend Taiwan.
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Before the 2000 Presidential elections in Taiwan, Beijing declared that if Taiwan ‘indefinitely’ refused negotiations on reunion, China would be ‘forced to take all possible drastic measures, including the use of military force’, and warned the Taiwanese not to vote for a ‘pro-independence’ candidate.
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Taiwan elected Chen Shui-bian, who had in the past spoken of declaring Taiwan an independent state (rather than the old ‘Republic of China’). He did now promise not to do so unless China invaded, but he continued to explore formulas emphasizing Taiwan’s distinctive statehood. There have been a string of Chinese warnings, notably a 2004 statement that military action by 2008 could not be ruled out if Chen persisted with his plans for constitutional reform. In March 2005, the passage of an ‘Anti-Secession Law’ formalized the warning of military action in the event of moves toward a Taiwanese declaration of independence.
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All this is reflected in a major Sino-Taiwanese arms race, with China targeting missiles at Taiwan and developing amphibious capabilities,
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while Taiwan’s strategy supposedly includes a threat to destroy Shanghai. Behind this alarming prospect
lurks that of US-Chinese catastrophe. The US could not easily permit a dictatorship to conquer a democracy, and, in 2001, President Bush, while discouraging overt Taiwanese assertions of independence, promised to do ‘whatever it took to help Taiwan defend itself’.
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This posture, in turn, has drawn at least unofficial warnings that China might respond to US military action by a nuclear attack on American cities.
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The scenario does not at present appear very plausible, and tensions are currently subsiding. But though many parts of the world seem more immediately dangerous, perhaps none has the same potential for escalation if things really go wrong. The Security Council, however, plays no role. Faced with the prospect of US and/or Chinese vetoes, it is hard to see how it could. Beijing would, in any case, see UN involvement in what it regards as a purely domestic Chinese problem as highly inflammatory.

Thus far we have been concerned with potential Armageddons, in which the UN has played only a marginal role. But there have been plenty of actual conflicts since 1945. Again UN involvement has been far from automatic: of the five wars with the highest ‘battle’ deaths,
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Vietnam (1954/1959–1975), Korea (1950–3), the Chinese civil war (19469), Iraq-Iran (1980–8), and the Afghan Civil War (1978–2002), the UN was only heavily involved in one (Korea), though it contributed to the eventual ending of the Iraq-Iran war. From the list of conflicts in
Appendix 7
, it emerges that the United Nations, and a fortiori the Security Council, has not really been involved in most post-war conflicts most of the time. This cannot simply be blamed on the Cold War. As Elizabeth Cousens writes, there is a ‘long list’ of post-Cold War ‘crises and conflicts that have been left unaddressed in any significant measure – Algeria, Burundi, Chechnya, Colombia, Nepal, Sudan, and, curiously, even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which despite being an object of Council consideration has not seen the Council contribute productively to its resolution’.
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Some of the reasons for the Security Council’s non-involvement relate simply to the UN’s internal functioning. As discussed in a previous section, in 1950, with the Council seemingly paralysed by the Soviet veto, the US sought to transfer security questions to the General Assembly. Indeed, though the Council had authorized forcible intervention in the Korean war,
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it was the General Assembly that endorsed the crossing of the 38th Parallel boundary between North and South Korea. Following China’s intervention, it was before the General Assembly that ceasefire proposals were floated in December 1950-January 1951, and, when China rebuffed them, it was the General Assembly that declared China an ‘aggressor’.
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Of more lasting importance in the UN context was the 1956 Suez crisis. Here too the Council was paralysed by (Anglo-French) vetoes, and the question passed to the Assembly. After US pressure outside the UN had forced a ceasefire, the General Assembly authorized a ‘United Nations Emergency Force’ (UNEF I) that supervised the Anglo-French and later the Israeli withdrawals, and was then deployed along the Egypt-Israel border and on the strategic Sharm el-Sheikh.
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It was this that blazed the trail for ‘peacekeeping’ as opposed to ‘peace-enforcing’ forces. Peacekeeping forces – present by the consent of the parties, to interpose between them, not impose on them – were to become the UN’s hallmark and (though not absolutely novel)
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were a major innovation in the international system. UNEF had been put together largely by Secretary-General Hammarskjöld, who thereafter ventured forth on the international scene as a major player, backed by the UN’s prestige and looking for support chiefly to the General Assembly. His high point was, perhaps, the diplomacy that defused the 1958 Middle East crisis through a General Assembly resolution that the rival Arab states could all sponsor.
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