RW Johnson: The mirage of UN reform

Key topics:Iran's legal claims dismissed due to terror links and global distrustUN's authority weakened by rise of Global South and power shiftsCalls for UN reform risk making it irrelevant and deepening divisions.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By RW Johnson.Ever since Israel and Iran began exchanging strikes and again since the US entered the fray over Iran’s nuclear programme, Iranian spokesmen have been making indignant speeches about these moves as breaches of international law and of the UN Charter. Even though this has now ended in a Trumpian peace deal before the actual damage to Iran’s nuclear programme has been ascertained, these charges hang in the air and are doubtless well-founded but in practice the world treats them as mere empty noise. After all, Iran is openly and avowedly a genocidal state, publicly committed to the annihilation of Israel and of the Jews in general. It is also quite openly the sponsor of terrorist groups – Hamas and Hezbollah – and the backer of the Houthis who have been doing their best to interfere with international shipping and to hurl missiles against Israel. Iran is also charged with conducting terrorist activity in many foreign countries. Last month three Iranian spies in the UK were charged with planning to commit serious violence against various UK journalists, while the Director General of MI5 said that since the start of 2022 the UK had responded to 20 Iran-backed terrorist plots in the UK. Given all this, Iran's attempts to stand on international law are merely laughable. Indeed they conjure up memories of “Comical Ali”, the Iraqi presidential spokesman during the Allied invasion of Iraq who announced the complete defeat of the American invader while US tanks could be seen moving into Baghdad just behind him. But quite a few nations of the Global South seem to share this sense of fun. Pakistan denounced Trump’s assault on Iran the day after it had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.Amidst all this merriment there still lurk serious questions, such as what has happened to the United Nations ? And does international law have any validity if it can be so easily ignored ?The UN’s high point was, in retrospect, the Korean War when the North Korean invasion of the South led to the “Uniting for Peace” resolution in 1950 which authorised a coalition of UN members to come to the aid of South Korea. This was only possible because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time and therefore could not veto this action. (And, of course, China was then represented by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan, and not by Beijing).By then, however, the UN had begun to change. Initially membership was granted only to those countries who had declared war on the Axis powers but after 1947 there was a stream of new Asian members – India, Pakistan, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia etc. In 1965 President Sukarno of Indonesia so strongly objected to Malaysia becoming a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council that he launched CONEFO (the Conference of the New Emerging Forces) as a comic opera attempt to rival the UN. (He had already launched GANEFO (the Games of the New Emerging Forces) to rival the Olympics in 1963.) But CONEFO, which was headquartered in Jakarta, was wound up by President Suharto when he overthrew Sukarno in 1966. From 1960 on, however, the UN was transformed by the arrival of the far more numerous African states – ultimately all 54 of them were members. Thereafter the main additions were island states in the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean and they too were reckoned as members of what was by then known as the Afro-Asian Bloc. That is, the Global South had arrived in force. .Read more:.BRICS unity tested as new members clash over UN reform push.This completely transformed the UN. Initially, there had been a fairly easy pro-Western majority in the General Assembly, consisting of Britain, the West European states, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Nationalist China and America’s allies in Latin America. Even the early arrival of new Asian states had upset this balance and led to major powers avoiding the UN. Britain and France made no attempt to involve the UN in the 1956 Suez crisis and nor did the USSR seek UN sanction for its invasion of Hungary in that year. By 1962 it passed almost without comment that President Kennedy imposed a naval blockade around Cuba without seeking UN authorisation.By then this had become an established pattern. From the point of view of the Great Powers the General Assembly was a chaotic marketplace. Many of the countries represented there had no real connection to the major issues of the day, be it Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Falkland Islands, Serbia or Iraq. It was well known that the votes of many African countries could be bought. If a Great Power lobbied for their vote such countries would all demand quid pro quos and otherwise they might vote purely on the basis of vague ideological preferences. Far better simply to by-pass them all and act either unilaterally or as limited “coalitions of the willing”. And, for the last fifty years and more, that is just what has been happening.For the Global South this has been deeply frustrating. Many former colonial countries had made great use of the UN in their struggle for independence and for a while they held great sway on the issues of apartheid, Algeria, Rhodesia and Namibia. Because the UN has been such a crucial site of struggle many Global South countries placed great emphasis on their UN membership – only to find that their very arrival into the General Assembly had caused power to migrate elsewhere. As a result – and South Africa is a classic case of this development – such countries began insistently to demand “UN reform”, which they usually rolled up together with their frustrations with the IMF and World Bank to demand a wholesale reform of the entire “architecture of international relations”. What is meant by “reform” is that Global South countries like South Africa must be given a lot more power over the World Bank and IMF and they must also be given permanent seats on the UN Security Council, preferably with veto powers. In order to argue for this the Global South insists that these changes are necessary in order to make these institutions more representative. In the past this has not been the criterion: the World Bank and IMF, like all other banks, give management control to those who fund them, while the UN Security Council gives veto power only to Great Powers.The clamour for these changes has already been going on for many years with no visible result. Unfortunately, the latter day critics of these Bretton Woods institutions are seldom sophisticated and they also don’t understand the history of these institutions. They all result from the monumental struggle against the Axis powers in World War II. As Joseph Stalin put it, Russia contributed blood, America contributed money and Britain contributed time – from September 1939 to late June 1941 Britain alone stood against the Axis. At war’s end the three Allies, having conducted this epochal and successful war, assumed that Great Powers must play a key role in the future. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met repeatedly throughout the war and were in constant contact with one another, dealing with one crisis after another. They were sure that the key to the peaceful new world they hoped to found at war’s end would depend on the continuation of this partnership. As Roosevelt put it. “the three of us and only the three of us are capable of resolving the fundamental questions of war and peace”. In fact, as the war neared its end and much against the wishes of Stalin and Churchill, Roosevelt insisted that China too must be included as a Great Power – and much against the wishes of Roosevelt and Stalin, Churchill insisted on the same for France. That is why those five states have veto powers in the UN Security Council. Everyone could see that the League of Nations had failed because it didn’t include all the Great Powers, so the UN would include them- and treat them as Great Powers. If the Global South states were to get their way, two things would happen. First, with more Security Council permanent members with vetoes, there would be permanent deadlock. And secondly, all the Great Powers would continue to conduct their wars and other business outside the UN. This might well be the end of the UN – who would want to pay for a moribund and useless body ? So the Global South would merely find that once they had invaded the Security Council, power would – again - have moved elsewhere. Moreover, in that new multi-polar world only the Great Powers would really count. So the unhappy truth is that the avalanche of new Afro-Asian members into the General Assembly has merely made that Assembly an empty debating society and if they then managed to succeed in their campaign for “reform” they would merely perform the same magic on the Security Council – and quite probably end up with no UN at all. Similarly, if they manage to get control of the World Bank and IMF, capital will simply move elsewhere and the Bretton Woods institutions will either become China-dominated or wither on the vine. In place of the UN there would be a number of regional or ideological groupings – a European bloc, the AU, BRICS, the Organisation of American States and a sort of Indo-Pacific group (India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore) and the existing APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation) group. Only the more pro-Western groups would have any solidity or coherence. The AU depends on foreign donations and is barely a serious organisation at all. BRICS has no coherence and APEC is very weak and exists only because it avoids politics. Many Global South states might join BRICS but they would then merely revolve around the de facto dominance of China and Russia. China and Russia already have their own group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which has security and defence ties. Its other members are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Iran, India and Pakistan.Any pretence to international law would be a casualty of such a process. In effect the only real “laws” would be the rules that these regional groupings came up with for their members or, occasionally, arrangements reached between two or more groupings.In other words, the present dispensation, with all its weaknesses, may be as good as it gets. The Global South should be concerned that it might get what it wishes for.

RW Johnson: The mirage of UN reform

Key topics:

Related Stories