This week, Security Council ambassadors are visiting Bangladesh and Myanmar to investigate the suffering of the Rohingya. In doing so, they are facing up to one of the U.N.’s most significant failures of recent years. Both U.N. officials on the ground and council members in New York vacillated over how to respond to the ethnic cleansing campaign of Myanmar’s military against the Rohingya Muslim minorities in mid-2017. This weekend, the council saw the results of that failure when they visited a refugee camp that houses half a million of the victims.
According to an update on the trip by the think tank Security Council Report, meeting the precariously housed and “emotional” Rohingya refugees was a sobering experience for the diplomats. In the short term, the main challenge is to prepare for monsoon season. The council representatives may help direct more humanitarian aid to the problem, but they are unlikely to find a political solution to the persecution of the Rohingya. China and Russia remain firmly opposed to the council taking any firm action on the crisis, and Western diplomats worry about upsetting Myanmar’s tenuous transition from military to civilian rule.
The council’s inaction over Myanmar encapsulates one of the biggest challenges to the U.N.’s political credibility: its lack of political relevance across Asia. Yet if the Security Council is limited to only mitigating the plight of the Rohingya, the emerging peace process on the Korean Peninsula may make the U.N. relevant to the region again.
The U.N. has a long history of engaging in Asian crises, from authorizing American-led troops to fight in Korea in 1950 to helping end Nepal’s civil war just over a decade ago. Yet it is now a marginal player in most of the region’s trouble spots. Whereas the organization has roughly 90,000 peacekeepers in the Middle East and Africa, its only peacekeeping operation in Asia involves 42 military observers in Kashmir.
The U.N. has a few other political assets scattered around the Asian landmass, including a political mission in Afghanistan and a conflict-prevention center in Ashgabat which helped tamp town ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan in 2010. But the U.N. has been entirely absent from efforts to manage other recent Asian crises, ranging from tensions in the South China Sea to last year’s Sino-Indian standoff in the Himalayas.
As Sebastian von Einsiedel and Anthony Yazaki noted in a 2016 report, this lack of presence “should be of concern to the U.N. because its role, relevance and legitimacy in international security depend on the buy-in of key member states into its collective security arrangements.”
Yet over the past year, the Korean crisis has suddenly and unexpectedly shown how Asian powers could use the U.N. in the future.
Major Asian powers that do not hold permanent Security Council seats do not want the U.N. to turn into a place where China and the U.S. cut deals at their expense.
There were no U.N. officials on hand to celebrate last week’s peace talks between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Yet the Security Council, and to a lesser extent the organization’s secretariat, had laid the groundwork for their meeting. Throughout 2017, China and the U.S. used the council as a clearinghouse to authorize increasingly robust sanctions against Pyongyang, ignoring parallel disputes over situations like Syria. A senior U.N. official, Jeffrey Feltman, visited North Korea in early December with U.S. backing to nudge Kim toward making a political opening.
Neither council pressure nor U.N. diplomacy would have made much difference if Moon and the U.S. administration had not also been willing to talk to Kim. At most, the U.N. has been a helpful diplomatic channel for handling the crisis, not a primary actor. Nonetheless, the council and international officials are likely to play a significant role in cementing the nascent peace process if it moves forward.
Kim has already said that the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, will be able to inspect his nuclear sites. As Enrico Carisch has noted, China and Russia are likely to insist that the Security Council should oversee any final peace agreement and long-term security arrangements on the Korean Peninsula, in part because they fear becoming marginalized by bilateral talks between the U.S. and Pyongyang.
The U.N.’s substantive role in the peace process is likely to remain limited. It is hard to imagine an international peacekeeping force replacing U.S. troops in South Korea, for example, although the American forces are technically part of a “U.N. Command” first authorized by the Security Council in 1950.
Nonetheless, a successful peace agreement and nuclear bargain for the Korean Peninsula could give the U.N. renewed prominence in Asia. Such a bargain would validate the Security Council as a framework for China and the U.S. to manage further tensions in the region.
This might not make other powers entirely happy. Major Asian powers that do not hold permanent seats on the council, such as India and Japan, do not want the U.N. to turn into a place where China and the U.S. cut deals at their expense. Even Russia is a little jittery about the extent to which Beijing has managed diplomacy over Korea at the U.N. without deferring to Moscow, in contrast to its largely passive approach to debates over the Syrian conflict.
The worst-case scenario is that the Korean talks collapse, or Pyongyang makes a deal but then breaks its promises, compounding the U.N.’s Asian irrelevance.
But even if the U.N. can help manage the Korean crisis and future geopolitical standoffs in Asia, that does not mean that it can do much for less strategically essential but humanly awful situations such as the persecution of the Rohingya. Beijing’s approach to using the U.N. to manage crises in its hinterland is liable to remain selective, just as the U.S. and other powers only turn to the Security Council inconsistently.
China will only let the U.N. play in Asian security affairs when it suits its interests. But a U.N. that can do some good in Asia is better than one that can do none at all.
Richard Gowan is an associate fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and nonresident fellow at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation, where he was previously research director. He also teaches at Columbia University. His WPR column appears every Monday
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