On September 17, the United Nations General Assembly will meet in New York for its annual session. This time, New York will also serve as a venue for further talks between the United States and Russia on how to secure, control, remove, and dispose of Syria’s chemical weapons. The matter was made urgent by the use of poisonous gases near Damascus on August 21, as confirmed in the report by a group of UN inspectors, published today. It may look as if the United Nations, finally, has started to put its hands on the Syrian civil war.
It has taken a while. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General, who became the UN–Arab League Joint Special Envoy to Syria in early 2012, quit several months later in deep frustration. The Geneva communique which appeared to offer a glimmer of hope that the war would be stopped in favor of a political process, unraveled within days, not weeks, after its adoption on June 30, 2012. Lakhdar Brahimi, the veteran Algerian diplomat who bravely agreed to take up where Annan had left off, was close to quitting himself. Even before last month’s use of sarin, the Syrian civil war had passed the 100,000 deaths mark, as certified by the UN.
The reason for past failure and for the emerging possible success is essentially the same. The United Nations can move on matters of peace and security only when its principal members agree. The General Assembly with its universal global membership expresses opinions. The Security Council with its five permanent members passes decisions—or blocks them due to internal discord. The composition of the Security Council has been often criticized for its antiquity, going back to 1945, or, in the cases of China and Russia, for its lack of or insufficiency of the democratic credentials, but the only real alternative was going around the United Nations, as indeed happened over Iraq in 2003.
Ten years later, the United States is in no mood for military action, and even its closest ally, the United Kingdom, has had to say no. It was U.S. Congress and the UK Parliament, rather than Moscow and Beijing, that de facto vetoed the punitive strikes against Damascus announced by President Obama. It was in this situation that Russia stepped in with its plan for Syria’s chemical disarmament, for which it had secured agreement by the Assad government. The U.S.-Russian accord on the issue reached in Geneva over the weekend is unprecedented in its goal to rid a country of chemical weapons under conditions of a civil war. Everyone realizes that success is anything but guaranteed, and most dread what happens if it fails.
Back to the UN Security Council. The Syrian war, so far, has offered important insights into the global system. The United States may have passed the zenith of its interventionism, with the American people increasingly focused on domestic issues. Europe still lacks a foreign and security policy for its union, and individual European countries are too weak for the diplomatic heavy lifting required in matters of war and peace. China is moving up, but, outside East Asia, it remains an economic player par excellence. India, Brazil, and other emerging powers are testing their voices, but are not yet global players.
This leaves Russia, a much-discounted but fiercely independent former superpower, with its vast and varied experience and first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, as America’s partner in Syria. In the last two weeks, Moscow has won diplomatic parity with Washington and is ready to engage on that basis. This should be welcomed. Russia has managed to step up from a naysayer and a spoiler vis-a-vis U.S. actions Moscow disapproved of to an independent full partner where there is enough common ground between the United States and the Russian Federation. With this, Russia has again earned its permanent Security Council seat. This is good news for the world, including for the United Nations.