The reform of the UN Security Council (UNSC) remains a contentious issue despite recent discussions at the Summit of the Future. While the US ambassador to the UN expressed willingness to consider two permanent seats for Africa, these seats would lack veto power, effectively relegating African representation to a second-class status.
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.The reform of the UN Security Council emerged as one of the most contentious and polarising issues under negotiation in the lead-up to the Summit of the Future, held in New York from 20 to 23 September.
For the two intervening decades, all the permanent five members of the UNSC — the US, UK, France, China and Russia — have paid lip-service to the idea of UNSC reform, and Africa’s inclusion as a permanent member, and rejected any genuine attempts to place the issue on the agenda. The fact that the US proposal excludes the veto is a strategy that Washington’s foreign policy mandarins have carefully calibrated and calculated as opening gambit purposefully designed to precipitate rejection from African countries and provoke widespread opprobrium from China, Russia and the Global South.
The insistence on maintaining the status quo, which has its supporters not only in Washington, but also London, Paris and Brussels, will only push countries from the Global South away from decaying and dysfunctional multilateral institutions, such as the UNSC, to seek alliances in emerging geopolitical groupings, such as Brics and the Non-Aligned Movement, which will ultimately lead to the formation of parallel, and competing, institutions.
The US “offer” to the African continent is analogous to a back-handed slap with a leather glove, an act that European nobility would practise on antagonists they considered not worthy of physical contact. Washington has set the status-quo cat loose among the pigeons of change and might be surprised to find that these birds will not fly!
UN Security Council Africa Veto Power US Foreign Policy Summit Of The Future
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