The U.N. Still Has a Role to Play on Crisis Management

Richard Gowan

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2021 has been a dispiriting year for advocates of multilateral conflict management. The ignominious end of the international intervention in Afghanistan was an embarrassment not only for the U.S., but also for those institutions, including NATO and the United Nations, that had supported it. The U.N. Security Council has bickered fruitlessly over how to deal with crises ranging from the coup in Myanmar to the war in Ethiopia. Regional bodies such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, and the African Union have done little better at handling conflicts on their doorsteps.

As if that weren’t enough, as the year draws to a close, the U.S. is warning that Russia could launch a new assault on Ukraine within months. And American strategists are taking the possibility of a war with China over Taiwan increasingly seriously. Both conflicts may fail to materialize. But the rise of major power friction seems set to make international diplomacy over crises ever more difficult.

That looks like bad news for organizations, like the U.N., that took on a greater role in crisis management during the post-Cold War era of relatively limited major power tensions. These institutions have not reverted to Cold War levels of paralysis quite yet. But as I warned in June, bodies like the Security Council will often be “muted” by geopolitical tensions in future.

Yet, as I argue in a paper for the Council Foreign Relations released today, this does not mean that multilateral crisis management mechanisms are irrelevant in an era of major power competition. Geopolitical factors will indeed constrain multilateral agencies’ role in resolving conflicts, but those agencies can still help to both mitigate the crises and contain their fallout.

With regard to conflict mitigation, multilateral bodies—and especially humanitarian actors like the World Food Program—retain the capacity “to get aid to the suffering, support local ceasefires and take other steps to lessen the harm of the war.” This has even been true in Syria, where the U.N. continues to provide aid to beleaguered, rebel-held areas with the blessing of the Security Council. Russia has repeatedly threatened to veto this mandate when it has come up for renewal in recent years, but the U.S. succeeded in persuading Moscow to extend it for another year during high-stakes talks this summer.

Mitigating and containing conflicts may sound like tragically unambitious goals for U.N. agencies, but it can reduce the human costs of conflict.

As for “conflict containment,” major powers still use multilateral bodies as venues to “create frameworks for dealing with large-scale refugee flows as well as arrangements to limit threats from terrorist organizations and weapons of mass destruction.” For all their differences, Security Council diplomats continue to cooperate reasonably well over counterterrorism issues. And the U.S., China and Russia still try to work together to address the nuclear activities of Iran and North Korea. Even the Trump administration, which renounced the Iran nuclear deal, turned to the U.N. for help on sanctions against Pyongyang during the 2017 nuclear crisis.

Mitigating and containing conflicts may sound like tragically unambitious goals. In the post-Cold War era, diplomats and U.N. officials emphasized the need to grapple with the factors causing wars, rather than just alleviate their impact. Yet in an era in which many security commentators frame U.S. rivalry with China and Russia in increasingly zero-sum terms, it is important to remember that multilateral agencies can reduce the human costs of conflict, while providing channels through which the major powers can communicate on narrow areas of cooperation.

These new realities are already reshaping the contours of international crisis management. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Security Council frequently turned to U.N. peacekeeping operations to manage conflicts. Yet in the current geopolitical climate, it falls primarily to humanitarian agencies to lead the international response to situations like those in Ethiopia and Afghanistan. This will add to the strains that these agencies are already experiencing due to funding shortfalls and attacks on their personnel. Recognizing these challenges, the U.S. and other major humanitarian donors should double down on their support to these agencies.

It is also important not to write off policy tools like U.N. peacekeeping forces altogether. Blue-helmet missions remain important in stabilizing countries such as the Central African Republic, where local actors cannot maintain security alone. And international officials can still pull off unexpected peacemaking successes. In 2020, in a process largely ignored by the Security Council, U.N. officials forged a cease-fire and laid the groundwork for a power-sharing agreement in Libya, after the country’s warring factions had fought themselves to a standstill.

There is of course a risk that a further worsening of major power relations will make even limited multilateral cooperation harder. Diplomats in New York worry that if Russia engages in an extensive military action against Ukraine, it will make it impossible for the U.S. to compromise with Moscow on other questions, like aid to Syria. Nobody knows what impact an even more serious direct clash between China and the U.S. over Taiwan would have on the Security Council. It is hard to see how the council could navigate such a confrontation between two veto-wielding powers without immense damage.

Nonetheless, absent such hypothetical conflicts—and perhaps even in their aftermath, if they do break out—the U.S., China and Russia have a shared interest in keeping a lid on secondary disputes that can still significantly complicate their relationships if they escalate too far. The international conflict management system we know today may be a product of a period of unusually light international tensions. But it is too early to give up on it just yet, as it still has the capacity to mitigate and contain conflicts arising in an era of heightened geopolitical competition.