UN Security Council Reform

🇺🇸 We do not support any of the proposals we have seen for reform of the UN Security Council. The UN General Assembly resolutions are not binding, but they do give us a space to see how countries view the world and who they are aligned with. We see in the UN General Assembly that the majority of the world is aligned with authoritarian powers, even refusing to denounce terrorist attacks against liberal democracies. That's alarming. That's problematic. It poses a serious threat to our liberty. Our biggest concern with many of these UN Security Council reform proposals is that liberal democratic powers will not have a way to protect themselves from authoritarian powers. Without veto power, as the current reform proposals would eliminate, we will not be able to prevent authoritarian powers from passing binding resolutions that obstruct our liberty. We do not trust authoritarian regimes or countries that align with them to have that kind of power. We do not trust them to do the right thing. We will not live in a world where authoritarian regimes have power over liberal democracies. We reject that kind of world order. We will never tolerate that kind of world order. If you pass a binding UN resolution that a superpower is vehemently opposed to, it will ignite a world war, not prevent one. The UN was created to prevent world wars, and the current UN Security Council design has been successful thus far at preventing one.

Permanents seats are for superpowers, and superpowers have the right to veto. That part of the UN Security Council design is essential in preventing world wars. We will agree to a UN Security Council reform that reevaluates which countries are superpowers or permanent members, because that has changed since the founding of the UN. You can't define a superpower based solely on nuclear power anymore, there are lots of nuclear powers, and everyone will then try to become a nuclear power if it means they can secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. One could argue that there are only two superpowers now, the USA and China, and therefore there should only be two permanent seats. However, we do not recommend a bipolar UN Security Council design. One could also argue, as I have done in previous notes, that Russia should be replaced with Japan as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, because Japan has surpassed Russia as both an economic power and a military power, and it will create a more balanced distribution of permanent seats in the UN Security Council. A multipolar design, as the UN Security Council currently has, is wise. But one can't claim that poor countries are superpowers, when they clearly are not, simply because one thinks it is a nice thing to do. That is not a reasonable argument. The distribution of permanent seats in the UN Security Council must reflect the distribution of real world power, not as you wish it to be, but as it truly is, otherwise the whole entire process will become corrupted. False superpowers would sell their veto power as a service to other nations. If you have no real world power, which is measured in economic power and military power, you are not a superpower. The point of the veto power is to prevent those with real world power from starting a world war. xo