Russia’s doomed campaign against Security Council ambiguity

Interviewed recently by Bloomberg, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Western powers not to tantalize Syrian protesters with the possibility of military intervention: It is not in the interests of anyone to send messages to the opposition in Syria or elsewhere that if you reject all reasonable offers we will come and help you as ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Interviewed recently by Bloomberg, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Western powers not to tantalize Syrian protesters with the possibility of military intervention:

Interviewed recently by Bloomberg, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Western powers not to tantalize Syrian protesters with the possibility of military intervention:

It is not in the interests of anyone to send messages to the opposition in Syria or elsewhere that if you reject all reasonable offers we will come and help you as we did in Libya. It’s a very dangerous position.

Lavrov also insisted that any future Security Council authorizations of force must be much more precise:

If somebody would like to get authorization to use force to achieve a shared goal by all of us, they would have to specify in the resolution who this somebody is, who is going to use this authorization, what the rules of engagement are and the limits on the use of force.

The vagueness and ambiguity of council resolutions has long been a complaint, not least by peacekeeping commanders who have to put confusing resolutions into practice. But Lavrov’s call for clarity is quixotic. Council resolutions are ambiguous because they must incorporate different political positions and paper over disputes. Unless Russia is prepared to start using its veto power much more assertively, the council will keep churning out vague resolutions.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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