Limited UN Role

An entry that is not in line with the East Asian nature of this blog.

In Paul Kennedy's fairly riveting book The Parliament of Men (Penguin Books, 2006), Kennedy wrote about the limited role of the United Nations in resolving conflicts.

That's especially when "a permanent member was directly involved and would not let any criticism or hostile resolution advance in the Security Council."

For example, there was no UN intervention in Algeria because of France.

There was also no role for the world body in the Vietnam War because of American sensitivities, or in Cambodia because of China.

Kennedy pointed out that the UN's incapacity to intervene in these disputes might be something of a blessing in disguise.

"Both the Algerian and Vietnamese wars were extraordinarily violent, complex and expensive. Even if there had been no threat of a veto, the idea that the Security Council might send in peacekeeping forces to either struggle, as it had done in the Congo, beggars the imagination; they would certainly have been blown away in the fighting," Kennedy wrote.

But as Kennedy pointed out, since the UN's beginning, "its high ambitions have contrasted sharply with the constant jostling of peoples and governments and with the assertive claims of sovereign states."

"It was, perhaps, President Dwight Eisenhower who offered the best justification for the world body when he said: "With all the defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the UN still represents man's best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield."