This brought to bear the dichotomy between the Security Council’s role with its stultifying and feckless veto constraint and the ability of all or some UN member States to take collective action to save a nation or community.
by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne in Montreal
“Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just between democracies and autocracies but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force… Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this." Fiona Hill, former official at the U.S. National Security Council
Whether predictive or premonitory, the portentous prospect of a nuclear war looming on the horizon is something to be concerned about. Fiona Hill stated in an interview with Politico “There’s lots of danger ahead… Putin is increasingly operating emotionally and likely to use all the weapons at his disposal, including nuclear ones. It’s important not to have any illusions — but equally important not to lose hope. Every time you think, ’No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would…And he wants us to know that, of course. It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared…. We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off”.
The last sentence of Ms. Hill provokes much thought and inscrutable intrigue as to what nations can do to persuade Russia to retreat from Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has reportedly warned that if there were to be a third world war, it would involve nuclear weapons and be destructive. The pernicious situation in Ukraine makes the global community fearful of the ultimate evil of a global war where an aggression can progress and transcend from vituperative diplomatic rhetoric to the realm of perfidious insouciance costing millions of lives.
To make sense of the current situation we may need to go back to post World War II days when the world had to address the recrudescence of human folly. For one, the world consensually adopted the Genocide Convention with the vociferous slogan “never again”. Addressing the United Nations on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan stated: “On occasions such as this, rhetoric comes easily. We rightly say ‘never again.’ But action is much harder. Since the Holocaust the world has, to its shame, failed more than once to prevent or halt genocide.”
As far back as 2001 The International Community on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) emphasized the role of the UN Security Council on the preservation of sovereignty of States as paramount. The World Summit Outcome in 2005 introduced the concept of “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” calling for collective action of nations to protect individual States whose peoples’ life and limb were threatened by aggression. This brought to bear the dichotomy between the Security Council’s role with its stultifying and feckless veto constraint and the ability of all or some UN member States to take collective action to save a nation or community.
More recently, on 18 May 2021, following the annual UN General Assembly debate on R2P, member States voted to adopt Resolution 75/277 on “The responsibility to protect and the prevention of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”. This was the first resolution on R2P adopted in the General Assembly since 2009 and it pledges to include R2P in the UN agenda with a requirement that The Secretary General gives an annual report on R2P to the General assembly. Under this umbrella The International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICR2P) works as a community of commitment made up of civil society and non-government organizations (NGOs) from around the world. The Coalition - founded in 2009 by eight organizations - currently includes members representing all regions of the world and is dedicated to the promotion of human rights, the prevention of atrocities and effective and consistent implementation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle. Additionally, there is The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect which vigorously pursues its objective of saving lives by mobilizing the international community to act in situations where populations are at risk of mass atrocity and crimes. The Centre claims to robustly uphold the R2P principle on the basis and foundation that the international community never again fails to halt the mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Aligned to the aforesaid trend, Richard Haas, Chief of the Council on Foreign Relations writing to Foreign Affairs introduced a concept called “sovereign responsibility”, which means that sovereignty should not stop at borders but extend to helping countries and their people who might suffer as a result of arbitrary and capricious decisions of leaders taken under the shroud of national sovereignty.
On Wednesday 2 March 2022 The U.N. General Assembly voted to demand that Russia stop its offensive in Ukraine and withdraw all troops, a vote which involved the most powerful States as well as the smallest member States who were largely consensual in condemning Moscow’s actions. The vote was 141 to 5, with 35 abstentions. The last UN emergency session of the General Assembly was in 1997 which goes to show the gravity of the current situation. Although Russia vetoed a similar vote in the Security Council on 26th February 2022, there is no veto power in the General Assembly. The only snag is that should the General Assembly adopt a Resolution with a view to ascribing legal legitimacy to the vote, it would be destitute of legal effect as United Nations Resolutions are no more than the outcome of political compromises. The only thrust of a Resolution lies in its ability to reflect the view of the global community in general.
So where does that lead us? Certainly not to resort to military conflict, where an unequivocal pronouncement as to the devastation it would cause has already been made in public. The only way to go is compromise. My take is that neither Russia, nor Ukraine, nor the NATO allies should be forced to have their backs against the wall. The focus of negotiations should be on the safety and inviolability of human life rather than historical rhetoric and “who provoked who”. Barbara Tuckman, in her book The March of Folly – From Troy to Vietnam (1984) attributes the moribund ineptitude of governments to progress to four factors: tyranny or oppression; excessive ambition; incompetence or decadence; and folly or perversity. The relevance of this statement might be worth to consider today.
Cataclysmic disaster that a confrontation between the then USSR and the United States was avoided in the sixties when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promising not to invade Cuba. In this spirit, the principle of adversarial collaboration, propounded by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, although applicable in a scientific context might be a suitable analogy for diplomacy and negotiation. The principle posits that in science, adversarial collaboration is a term used when two or more scientists with opposing views work together. Kahneman says : “ Why is it that we may agree in advance that a particular result is a fair test of our theory, then see so much more when the result is known? Why can't we anticipate our response to results that we do not expect to materialize? The psychology of this is straightforward. The normal flow of reasoning is forward from what you believe to a possible consequence. When someone proposes a serious critical test, you cannot get from your theory to the result without adding an extra wrinkle to the theory. The extra wrinkle is hard to find—if it were easy, this would not be a serious critical test. On the other hand, the result probably follows from the adversary's theory. The lazy solution is to concede provisionally”.
Taking the Khrushchev action in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kahneman’s theory together, perhaps the Russians could be persuaded to similarly make an offer and we can take it from there?
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