Gallons of ink have been spilled censuring the Trump administration’s response to the monthslong coronavirus pandemic— much of it legitimate, some of it not. But there is another stakeholder that has been missing in action ever since the first case of COVID-19 emerged in China’s Hubei province: the United Nations Security Council.
It’s a relatively effortless affair to poke fun at the Security Council for its overly bureaucratic nature, obsession with legalese, and penchant for boring speechifying. One can fall asleep five minutes after tuning into a Security Council debate, where delegates seated around the table deliver the usual bland, rehearsed colloquies about the importance of international law, the sanctity of state sovereignty, and the urgency of conflict resolution. Indeed, the entire U.N. system can make the U.S. Senate look like the apex of speed, productivity, and efficiency.
COVID-19, however, has taken a significant bite out the Security Council’s credibility as the embodiment of collective action on global problems. The U.N.’s top policymaking body is literally failing, abysmally, to perform the one fundamental duty the U.N. charter ascribes to it: maintaining international peace and security.
Consider the fact that it took more than three whole months before members of the Security Council even devoted a session exclusively to the coronavirus outbreak, the literal definition of a global crisis. When the Security Council did finally meet on April 9 (by video link) to talk about the virus, the session was a heavily formalized talk-a-thon and a big, fat public relations exercise. The one product to arise out of the meeting was a glossy, wholly insubstantial readout for the media complimenting the work U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is doing to get the world to think seriously about its worst and most dispersed health crisis in generations.
The Security Council is the sum of its parts. It’s impossible for the panel to take any action whatsoever if members of that panel, the permanent five (the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain) and the 10 other members who serve two-year terms, are unable or unwilling to compromise and forge agreement on common action. As we’ve seen over the last decade in Syria, a single member (in many cases, Russia) can veto a resolution and grind the council down into a symbolic debating society.
What is inexcusable and unexplainable, however, is the complete lack of Security Council consensus on the COVID-19 threat, a disease affecting millions of people across 180 different countries. The U.S. and China, for instance, are more interested in using their megaphones to paint each other in the worst possible light in the battle over the public narrative than they are in getting their heads together on the best way to mitigate a disease that doesn’t discriminate (just ask British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who spent time in the intensive care unit with the disease).
Is there anything the U.N. Secretary General can do on his own? The answer is yes. Guterres can continue delivering speeches about the need for international collaboration. He can dispatch his special envoys to the world’s most active conflict zones to try to push for ceasefires, which would enable healthcare agencies and humanitarians to prepare for the virus’s emergence. He can appeal to individual states and informal groupings such as the G-7 or the G-20 for trillions of dollars in economic pledges to protect the world’s most vulnerable people and backstop health systems around the world that may struggle to cope with patients. The Secretary General, to his credit, is already doing that.
But the reality is that none of those initiatives will be taken seriously unless the Security Council, the U.N.’s most powerful arm, gets into the game. Unfortunately, there is no sign of this happening.
During his remarks on April 9, Guterres called the coronavirus a test of the entire U.N. system. As he told the member states watching over a live video link, “This is the fight of a generation — and the raison d’être of the United Nations itself.”
Let’s hope Guterres is wrong. Because if he isn’t, the U.N. might as well pack up and sell its real estate to the City of New York.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
