Kal Raustiala and Viva Iemanjá Jerónimo
At the Crimean resort town of Yalta in the winter of 1945, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to plan for a “United Nations organization.” Roosevelt’s health was in steep decline, and the grueling journey to Crimea may well have hastened his death weeks later. That he undertook the trip at all showed how central he believed great-power cooperation would be in the coming postwar order. The United Nations, as Roosevelt imagined it, would be the “Four Policemen,” a consortium of the victorious wartime powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China. This group, with the addition of France, ultimately became the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the centerpiece of the new order that Roosevelt sought to construct.
Just three years later, however, in response to the revelation of Western plans to unify their zones of occupied Germany, Soviet forces blockaded roads and railways into Berlin. The dramatic move marked a turning point in what was increasingly called a “Cold War” between the Soviet Union and its former allies, principally the United States. By the time of the Berlin crisis, relations between the great powers at the nascent United Nations were already frosty. The vision at Yalta of a cooperative postwar order seemed to have swiftly faded.
Many believe the Cold War scuppered Roosevelt’s dream of a UN that restrained conflict and produced constructive collective action. As the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer has argued, the superpower rivalry made it “almost impossible” for the UN to adopt and enforce meaningful resolutions. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has insisted that the Cold War “emasculated” the Security Council. In this line of thinking, it was only with the end of the Cold War that the UN could finally engage in the muscular joint action imagined at Yalta. Madeleine Albright, a former U.S. secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the UN, summed up this view years later when she stated that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “the barrier to coordinated Security Council action had come down.”
Today, great-power rivalry is again intensifying. Many analysts perceive a new cold war brewing between the United States and China. Observers of the UN fear that its past will be prologue. Superpower competition could once again paralyze the organization. The UN’s inability, after all, to end the war raging in Ukraine makes it easy to jump to the conclusion that it is incapable of managing the defining events of the age.
Mounting competition between the United States and China need not doom the organization to irrelevance, however. Indeed, that competition may even result in more cooperation at the UN, not less. Both China and the United States share an interest in preserving—and ideally extending—the powers of the Security Council, the UN’s core body, and one they dominate. To do so, however, they must rein in zero-sum thinking and find areas of common ground that serve their shared interest: retaining power over others. As was true during the Cold War, the UN remains in the twenty-first century a unique venue for great-power coordination and cooperation on many issues of global order. The UN may never completely fulfill Roosevelt’s vision. Yet history suggests that the institution, now approaching its 80th birthday, still has legs.
THE UN IN THE COLD WAR
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Cold War rendered the UN impotent, the postwar Security Council was in fact surprisingly active. To be sure, Soviet vetoes poured forth in the early years, blocking a host of measures from the admission of Ireland in 1946 to an attempt by the Security Council to intervene in the conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir in 1957. The first 50 vetoes wielded at the Security Council were all Soviet. (By the 1970s, the United States was following suit, vetoing resolutions censuring Israel and South Africa.) The UN proved powerless in major crises involving Soviet and American interventions, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Vietnam War. The veto had been designed in Yalta to ensure that the interests of the Security Council’s permanent members were always protected, and the superpowers were only too willing to exercise this privilege.
But Moscow and Washington also came to recognize that paralysis at the United Nations ultimately did them no favors. In an era of bipolar competition, in which a win for one was seen as a loss for the other, both the Soviet Union and the United States appeared to realize that if they failed to find ways to cooperate at the UN, their special powers and privileges would be deeply diminished. A Security Council that could not act placed itself on the sidelines of world politics. After a rocky start, the pace of successful resolutions in the Security Council began to grow. By the end of the Cold War, the average number of resolutions passed each year had more than doubled that of the 1950s.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Cold War did not render the United Nations impotent.
Many of these successful resolutions involved the complex process of postwar decolonization, which both superpowers sought to manage. These joint decisions often led to the creation of peacekeeping missions in postcolonial states. When Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, for instance, it swiftly disintegrated into civil war. But the UN acted concertedly to control the spreading chaos. Within days of the eruption of the crisis, the Security Council authorized a massive peacekeeping force, one that remained in place for several years and even engaged in combat using armored vehicles and airpower. Each Cold War antagonist also found the UN to be a useful tool to limit the influence of the other. This was especially true when it came to the Congo. As a U.S. official later put it, once the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba sought closer ties with Moscow, the UN’s presence “sort of buffaloed the Soviets. …They knew how to have a confrontation with us, but they didn’t know how to have a confrontation with the UN.”
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the UN was involved in a wide variety of crises—not only in Congo but also in Angola, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, India and Pakistan, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and elsewhere. The Soviets and the Americans did not always concur on exactly how to handle these myriad challenges. But their frequent agreement—and the Security Council’s many actions in this period—belie the notion that great-power competition left the organization frozen. Moreover, the historical record shows that this growing cooperation was not the result of merely cherry-picking less important crises. The council often tackled serious issues, and it did so with resolutions that were, on average, stricter than those that were vetoed or failed to garner the requisite majority. In 1970, for instance, in response to what it strikingly termed the “usurpation of power by a racist settler minority” in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the Security Council required all UN members to sever diplomatic ties with the regime, ordered the withdrawal of South African troops, and suspended Southern Rhodesia from all international organizations.
The rising levels of cooperation in the Security Council also reflected growing competition within the organization. As empires dissolved in the decades after World War II, a huge array of formerly colonized countries streamed into the UN. The General Assembly, the UN body that includes all member states, was soon dominated by the countries of the Nonaligned Movement, which increasingly used the UN as a platform to amplify their disagreements with the superpowers. As a more assertive General Assembly threatened to seize the initiative, both the Soviet Union and the United States saw advantage in demonstrating the Security Council’s primacy through decisive action. The “great power pact” Roosevelt forged at Yalta granted them unprecedented powers, but to deploy those powers, they had to cooperate.
A NEW ERA
The end of the Cold War augured the advent of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed in Foreign Affairs “the unipolar moment,” with the United States now the world’s undisputed superpower. The UN was increasingly active in this new political landscape; though there were major missteps, such as with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the organization was often a central player in the geopolitics of the era, from the Gulf War of 1990-91 through crises in the Balkans, Cambodia, East Timor, and elsewhere. Peacekeeping operations expanded further, especially in Africa, as the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that many regimes lost external support and began to crumble. The UN also became deeply engaged in tackling a host of newer issues, including the environment, public health, and international criminal justice.
With the dramatic rise of China in the twenty-first century, the world has entered a new era of great-power competition. Under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Beijing is increasingly powerful, nationalistic, and bellicose. In a fractious Washington, one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus is a heightened, often hawkish opposition to China. Many analysts have already described this growing rivalry as equivalent to a “new Cold War.”
Yet as many have argued, the competition between China and the United States is different from that of the Cold War witnessed decades ago. China is deeply integrated into the global economy, and U.S. firms and consumers depend on the Chinese market. China’s interest in participating in multilateral institutions to advance its policy preferences has also grown markedly over the past two decades. Indeed, in recent years, Xi has directly called on Chinese diplomats to learn more about international law and to “participate in global governance, make rules, set agendas.”
In line with these precepts, China has become far more active at the UN. China traditionally played a muted role in the organization. (Until 1971, its UN seat was held by Taiwan.) China frequently abstained in the Security Council. But beginning in the 1990s, it began to vote—and exercise its veto—far more often. Indeed, since 2011, China has wielded its veto a dozen times. (By comparison, the United States has vetoed only four resolutions in that time period.) In the General Assembly, China recently proposed a global development initiative, a comprehensive plan for economic progress, and at the Boao Forum for Asia, a global security initiative that purports to address “complex and intertwined security challenges” with a “win-win mindset.” Both proposals seek to reorient global governance and ensure that China is in the driver’s seat.
China is convinced of the importance of the United Nations.
Today, China is the second-largest financial contributor to the UN (after the United States) and has stocked the organization’s bureaucracy with its nationals. Indeed, it is currently the only member state whose citizens lead more than one specialized agency. China now has far more peacekeepers participating in UN missions than any other permanent member—double the other four combined. It is often depicted as a revisionist power, eager to overturn the U.S.-led international order. Yet far from seeing the UN as irrelevant or replaceable, China appears increasingly convinced of the organization’s importance.
China’s commitment to building its influence within the UN comes at a time when the United States is often ambivalent about the institution. The United States and its allies dominated the UN’s early years. Since at least the 1980s, however, Republicans have exhibited substantial hostility toward the UN; indeed, many conservatives never trusted the organization to begin with, viewing it as a repository of revolutionaries and Russian spies. But even as the halcyon early years have receded into the distance, American officials (especially those serving in Democratic administrations) continue to see the UN as a crucial tool for diplomacy. And the Security Council, reflecting the balance of power of the mid-twentieth century, affords the United States enormous advantages in a rapidly changing world.
Both the United States and China, in short, benefit from the status quo enshrined in the UN. The institution’s highly unequal allocation of power works to their advantage, even if it often frustrates other member states. (Indeed, one reason for the diffidence of many African states toward Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, as Tim Murithi wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, that it is merely a “continuation of the reign of the powerful over the less powerful.”) Working with other Security Council members, the United States and China have authorized recent peacekeeping or “stabilization” missions in the Central African Republic, Mali, and South Sudan and have imposed sanctions, arms embargoes, and other restrictions on Haiti. In 2023 alone, resolutions addressing the threat from North Korea, censuring the Taliban in Afghanistan, and extending support for reform in Iraq were passed. The White House and Zhongnanhai do not see eye to eye on all details, but when it comes to dominating smaller states—whether through imposing sanctions or extending support—they often find ground for agreement.
As the Security Council’s ambit has grown in recent years, encompassing topics as disparate as climate change, HIV, and food insecurity, so, too, have the structural advantages enjoyed by the permanent members. Although discussed for decades, the reform of the Security Council to make it more inclusive seems a distant prospect. For the time being, then, the UN remains an organization designed by, and still dominated by, the great powers.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The United States and China are likely to be increasingly adversarial in the decade ahead. But politics makes strange bedfellows. Although there is substantial scope for disagreement and division at the UN, the history of the Cold War suggests that there are also powerful incentives to cooperate.
As always, the organization will remain unable to tackle issues that directly implicate core interests of the great powers. That is not a bug in the system, but a feature. It was Roosevelt’s belief—one shared by Churchill and Stalin—that the great powers would only participate in the institution if they possessed the added protection of a veto over Security Council actions. By embedding the leading powers in a body with the unprecedented capacity to impose its will on others, the framers of the UN ensured that the UN would not suffer the fate of its predecessor, the League of Nations, which proved unable to halt the outbreak of a major conflict in the 1930s.
As a result, serving as a venue for great-power cooperation remains the chief way the UN maintains its relevance. There are currently a dozen active peacekeeping missions in the field and 15 ongoing sanctions regimes against member states. The cooperation of the United States and China was required to set up and sustain each of these. Together, these actions make an important difference on the ground. But they also permit the Security Council, collectively, to command and control a wide variety of global actors.
Discord in Turtle Bay is likely—indeed, inevitable—as China and the United States jostle for supremacy in the twenty-first century. But as long as the UN remains the primary institution of global governance, those who dominate the organization will find compelling reasons to preserve it. The UN continues to be the best tool for achieving a rules-based international order—at least one in which the leading powers set the rules.
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