Author: Mark Malloch Brown
Publication: The Observer
Date: Friday, 9 January 2025
Summary:
Former UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch Brown argues that the United Nations has abandoned its "responsibility to protect" principle, allowing authoritarian leaders to act with impunity.
He criticizes the US's unilateral action against Venezuela's Maduro regime while acknowledging that international organizations have failed to address such crises through proper multilateral channels.
The article examines how early missteps in implementing the responsibility to protect doctrine, particularly in Libya, led Russia and China to effectively discard it, forcing the UN to defer to state sovereignty even when governments persecute their citizens.
Brown notes that Trump's recent executive order withdrawing US support from 66 UN and international bodies reflects his "America first" approach based on spheres of influence rather than rules-based international order.
He contrasts Trump's emphasis on quick action with the UN's perceived inertia, warning that many post-1945 gains in peacekeeping and decolonization are now at risk. Brown calls for a revival of rule-based multilateralism rather than accepting either Trump's unilateralism or alignment with authoritarian powers, arguing the international community must choose to revive the UN's founding principles.
Quotes:
"It is a core premise of the UN that strong states don't invade their neighbours."
"We learned the hard way that the UN could not be an idle bystander, hiding behind the protocol of state sovereignty, as governments killed thousands and sometimes millions of their citizens."
"Maduro should have been ousted by the combined efforts of regional and international organisations working by the book through agreed rules."
"Countries hiding behind the sovereignty argument, and international organisations eager not to cause offence, have created an epidemic of bad governance: aid is squandered, countries persecute their citizens without consequence, and the rash of bad governance, instability and conflict widens."
"Trump's world spelled out in his new national security strategy, is one of spheres of influence where the US dominates the western hemisphere as Russia and China do their own regions."
"The UN model imagines collective action based on respect for universal principles and norms. That version of how the world should be run should now be fighting for its life. So far, it appears not to have stirred from its deep sleep."
Multilateralism is here, or should that more appropriately be called Multipolarity?
ReplyDeleteFor decades, many Western thinkers, particularly on the political left, have advocated for multipolarity, a shift in global power away from the West toward a more balanced constellation of powers. Today, that world has arrived. Though its consequences may prove less of a triumph of the political left than a harvest of ignorance, naivety and introspection.
In the optimistic textbooks of the early post-Cold War era, the West was envisioned as shepherding a rules-based order rooted in liberal norms, free trade, and human rights. That unipolarity was more naive than ideological.
For many on the progressive left and their isolationist counterparts on the right, this overreach was the problem. Progressives blamed Western supremacy on colonial legacies and structural inequities; isolationists saw little reason to care about conflicts far from their shores. In both camps, the notion that the West should cede ground, whether for moral redemption or domestic tranquillity, took root.
The unintended consequence is that both movements have unknowingly become allies to hostile powers that seek the eclipse of Western influence.
What is striking about this is its source, ideological self-critique at home, has external costs abroad. A civilisation denouncing its own history and downplaying its strategic interests becomes a civilisation in retreat.
Western retrenchment coinciding with Eastern ascendancy is no coincidence. Where the left in the West demand accountability for past sins, rivals interpret weakness; where leaders call for disengagement, adversaries see opportunity. The result is a new landscape that is multipolar by default, shaped by Western detachment and weakness.
The multipolar world that many insisted was inevitable has indeed arrived, but it looks rather different from the one its proponents imagined. It is a world where only power matters, and where the West in general and Europe in particular finds itself defending the very principles it took for granted. That is a historical irony worthy of reflection.