Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
military action against North Korea for the invasion of South Korea. This first ever
realization of a centuries-old Liberal dream was, however, very much a fluke event
never likely to be repeated during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and China did
not use their vetoes to avert action against their Communist ally because neither of
them were present in the Security Council when the vote was taken. Communist
China had not been able to take up their seat in the UN, and with it their permanent
place in the Security Council, because the USA had refused to grant diplomatic
recognition to the new regime following the 1949 revolution. In protest at this the
USSR boycotted a session of the Security Council allowing the USA to opportunistically
push through a resolution that would otherwise certainly have been vetoed.
The USSR never repeated this form of protest and the Security Council
remained paralysed until 1990 by the fact that the permanent five (including
Communist China from 1979) were unable to find unanimity to sanction any full
military action against acts of aggression violating the UN Charter. The veto had
been envisaged as a rare option of last resort for the permanent five, necessary to keep
them on board for the maintenance of international peace, but became a routinely
used tactic to protect Cold War allies. In the first Cold War it was the USSR that made
most use of the veto and in the second, when the changing UN membership began
to deprive them of guaranteed support, it was the USA. This placed out of bounds any
action against both countries’ own military adventurism in Vietnam and Afghanistan
or in response to the interventions of their ‘client states’ such as Israel (in the
Lebanon) and Cuba (in Angola).
Collective security, covered by Article 7 of the UN Charter, is not the only
peacekeeping option open to the Security Council and other, lesser, measures
aiming to keep the peace were utilized during the Cold War. Article 6, which calls on
states to resolve disputes peacefully where possible, has been used as the basis for
many Council resolutions sending in multilateral teams of UN monitoring troops to
uphold ceasefire lines while diplomatic solutions are sought. Such UN forces were
sent into Kashmir and Palestine in 1948 to assist in resolving the Arab–Israeli and
Indo-Pakistani territorial disputes. The fact that both these conflicts are still far from
resolved today gives an indication of the limitations to this UN peacekeeping strategy.
The realization that UN-assisted mediation was a limited means of restoring
peace and that collective security was hamstrung by Cold War politics, prompted
efforts outside the Security Council in the 1950s to try another approach to peacekeeping.
UN Secretary General of the time, Dag Hammarskjöld and the General
Assembly, in which all UN members are represented equally, were central to this
process. The 1950 ‘Uniting for Peace’ General Assembly resolution, sponsored by the
USA, aimed to pre-empt the inevitable presence of a veto-wielding USSR in a future
scenario similar to the Korean War. Uniting for Peace gave the General Assembly
a role in security issues, previously considered the exclusive domain of the Council.
A special session of the Assembly could be called and be able to recommend international
action in the absence of a Security Council agreement. There are no vetoes
to be wielded at the General Assembly and every UN member is present, so the
required two-thirds majority for a Resolution is far more likely than at the Security
Council. Hammarskjöld put this new power into practice when he became a far more
active Secretary General than his predecessor on taking over the job in 1953. A UN
Emergency Force was sent in to supervise the withdrawal of British, French and
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