Reforming the Security Council veto

Reacting to a recent posts on the Security Council veto power and prospects for reform, Yale doctoral student Lionel Beehner sends along an interesting idea for reform: Why not expand the permanent members of the UN Security Council to 10 (to more accurately reflect today’s realities and not 1945’s) and then require two vetoes to ...

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

Reacting to a recent posts on the Security Council veto power and prospects for reform, Yale doctoral student Lionel Beehner sends along an interesting idea for reform:

Reacting to a recent posts on the Security Council veto power and prospects for reform, Yale doctoral student Lionel Beehner sends along an interesting idea for reform:

Why not expand the permanent members of the UN Security Council to 10 (to more accurately reflect today’s realities and not 1945’s) and then require two vetoes to block a resolution instead of one? That would require coalition-building of sorts and prevent any one member from unilaterally obstructing a resolution. Perhaps it would be DOA as it would weaken the power of the single veto, but seems like the best way forward to avoid what’s taking place today with regards to Syria.

I have doubts that the proposal would ever fly with the P5 and stand by my assertion that the U.S., China, and Russia in particular will not tolerate a Council that could have binding power over them; I can only imagine, for example, the ferocity of U.S. Congressional opposition to a proposed dilution of the U.S. veto power.

But at the same time I do not share the views of some of my commenters that the P5 will never allow Council reform. Somewhere, deep in their shrunken great-power hearts, they all know that the current structure is unsustainable and, in many respects, illegitimate. For that reason, I do think they would acquiesce to new permanent members. The key will be for the bulk of the UN membership to get behind a reasonable plan and then shame the P5 into reform.

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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