Global Policy Forum

By Jeffrey Laurenti*

"Et tu, Brute?" These dying words of Julius Caesar, as he saw his supposed friend and ally Brutus advancing, dagger in hand, to join in his murder, could have been on the lips of Japanese diplomats last week. The Bush administration's unexpectedly sharp rejection on July 13 of their plan to add a half-dozen permanent members to the United Nations Security Council has derailed Japan's hard fought campaign, along with Brazil, Germany, and India, to gain access to the inner circle of the world's premiere political body.

Their drive was already in trouble. The normally discreet Chinese had already cast aside their customary inscrutability in April to denounce a permanent seat for Japan. African countries abruptly announced their support depended on a deal-breaking condition - that new Security Council permanent members must immediately have the same veto power as the five existing permanent members. But the Americans' blunt repudiation came as a shock.

The administration was right to refuse support for a promiscuous expansion of the Council's size. In their quest for the votes of 128 U.N. member states—the two-thirds majority necessary to amend the U.N. Charter—the four aspirants to permanent status had agreed to add not only permanent seats for themselves, but two more for undetermined African countries. On top of that, they proposed to expand by four the 10 existing seats elected by the General Assembly for two-year terms, adding one each for Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

A membership of 25 would, Americans across the spectrum have agreed, be much too large for an emergency-response executive committee like the Security Council. Even the Clinton administration, which actively promoted adding more heavyweight states to the Security Council, fixed 20 as maximum size it could accept. The four aspirants have expressed incredulity about Washington's adamance on size, but none of them has had to assemble an international coalition to take or enforce hard decisions in the Security Council.

The United States uniquely has had to put together those votes and, at times, the muscle needed to implement them, in crises as varied as Kuwait, Haiti, and Bosnia. It is not easy to assemble and sustain majorities for tough action, at any level of politics; and when a measure of coercion may be involved, many countries' political leaders turn faint-hearted. It is hard enough, seasoned American diplomats have found, to be an effective "majority leader" among 15; they shudder at the prospect of doubling the number of countries they would have to court in a crisis.

To be sure, even at 15 members Washington cannot control the current sized Council. Its members overwhelmingly rejected what they saw as George Bush's flimsily justified war against Iraq, and they closed ranks to force him to accept the International Criminal Court's activation on Darfur. But 25 would, most U.N. observers acknowledge, risk converting the United Nations' crisis management organ into yet another U.N. talk shop.

So would the Africans' demand for vetoes for new permanent members. While the "Group of Four" aspirants all want equal veto status with the 1945 permanent members, they recognized such a demand would be unanimously rebuffed by all five, whose ratifications are required for a U.N. Charter amendment to take effect. So they opted to get permanently onto the Council first, and then come back for the veto entitlement in fifteen years, under a provision for mandatory reconsideration of the Council's makeup.

But the Africans-who in the normal optic of geopolitics bring the least power resources to the table-see the veto differently, as we have recently explained elsewhere. The main reason for them to give up their cherished attachment to the absolute equality of all states—pygmies accorded equal weight as giants—is the hope that if some African governments have a veto, they can use it as bargaining leverage with the United States: Do X or Y for African crises, or we will block your urgent calls for action in crisis A or B. But if the United States is ready to work around the U.N. Security Council when a large continental power like Russia threatens a veto on something like Kosovo, the notion that it will horse-trade on a Nigerian agenda rather than bypass the whole institution seems surreal.

For most member states, the problem with the Security Council is not that it has too few members that can unilaterally thwart the collective will of nations, but that at five it already has too many. The African demand for vetoes has thus unraveled the tenuous two-thirds majority that diligent diplomacy by the Japanese, Germans, Indians, and Brazilians had hoped to assemble. The "cappuccino club" of major peacekeeping contributors that the expansion resolution would have marginalized—led by Italy and Pakistan, and including such other pillars of peacekeeping as Canada, Argentina, Korea, and Spain—had marshaled opposition to the very notion of expanded permanence. The American call to vote down the resolution was just the coup de grace.

What next? The aspirants for permanent membership have vowed to bring their resolution back in the fall session of the General Assembly, but it is hard to imagine that the September summit will endorse their plan. The fallback, if any revision is to happen in the coming year, will likely be the model that Secretary-General Kofi Annan's high-level panel on global security recommended last year, which the four aspirants to permanency fiercely rejected as inadequate to their global standing: the addition of several heavyweight countries, scattered among the major regions, elected to specially extended terms, until a mandatory revisiting of the Security Council's makeup after 2020. Perhaps the respective regions might provide for some interim terms of 15 years, to spare sensitive foreign ministries the humiliation of seeking reelection in the meantime.

But what the Security Council needs is not so much a rearrangement of its furniture and name plates as a much tighter link between Council membership and a firm obligation to commit troops on the ground when Council members adopt a decision. None of the reform proposals for 2005 have dared to address this fundamental disconnect between power to decide and responsibility to implement. That is what real Security Council reform needs to address in 2020.

About the Author: Jeffrey Laurenti is senior fellow in international affairs at The Century Foundation.

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