UN and Commonwealth must step up or step out
If Nato is the Oscars, CHOGM is a garden party, with an acronym that sounds like an Oxbridge drinking game. While Jacinda Ardern has joined the cool kids at Nato, Prince Charles and Boris Johnson are at CHOGM in Rwanda, where the UK is trying to send refugees in flagrant violation of its legal obligations.
The UK’s lawlessness is being ignored, in the lazy way international institutions do these days, betraying universal values in airy conference rooms where the out of touch negotiate with the out of line.
In contrast to CHOGM, and the equally moribund UN, we are seeing a Cold War outfit, Nato, rise to the defence of international law and the right of states to be free and independent. Nato is meaningfully supporting its values by sending weapons to Ukraine, and helping to rally more than 40 countries to contribute more, and increase their aid. This muscular response to Ukraine has made Nato increasingly popular with voters too.
Nearly 80% of member-country citizens now support maintaining or increasing defence spending. More than 70% support their countries’ membership in Nato. Finland and Sweden are joining after more than 100 years of neutrality.
No-one is really talking about the UN or the Commonwealth.
There are obvious structural reasons that the UN failed to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and before that failed Syrians when their own dictator, Bashar al-Assad, chemically poisoned them: One permanent member of the UN Security Council – Russia – invaded another country, while acting as president of the Security Council, whose one job is to keep the peace and prevent war.
That Russia is still on the Security Council four months into an illegal war makes last month’s rotating appointment of nuclear North Korea to chair the Conference on Disarmament look normal.
The visit of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to Kyiv made the UN look even more insignificant. There was no peace deal, no agreement to send blue helmets in. Russia cared so little that it fired at Kyiv while he was giving a speech. The message that the UN doesn’t matter to Russia could not have been clearer.
We face a long war in Europe, global economic stress, poverty, an emerging new Cold War between the US and China, and the global problem of climate change. International organisations need to step up or lose the social licence to exist.
They have been effective in the past. The UN oversaw the post-colonial independence era and helped prevent continent-wide war for 80 years.
The Commonwealth’s 56 members range from India to Nauru, 2.5 billion people who comprise a third of the world’s population. It had a decisive role in ending apartheid in South Africa. Trade between Commonwealth countries will be worth US$2 trillion a year by 2030.
The need for change in the world today is as great as it was in 1945. When Allied countries came together in a burst of optimism they created the UN, the World Bank, the OECD, to make the world a safer place. We need the same vision and muscular courage today to defend universal values, international law, and human rights.
If they were relevant they would insist that the war in Ukraine must not end with a betrayal of brave Ukraine. Talk of an ‘off-ramp’ or a compromise for Vladimir Putin to end the war quickly is a mistake. As Russia expert Anne Applebaum has written, Putin’s goal is to conquer the entire country, break up the EU, undermine Nato, even re-establish the borders of the old Soviet Union. None of these goals have changed. Any ceasefire would be temporary.
The need for change in the world today is as great as it was in 1945.
If war is to end, either Nato troops or UN peacekeepers will be needed to maintain a presence, so Ukraine can rebuild, investment can flow, and refugees can return. Putin and his war criminal generals must be punished. His funders and the Russian people must see the war was a terrible mistake.
New security architecture would extend to any other country threatened by a militant bully.
The Commonwealth could be the strongest international voice for law and democracy because its singular bond is our British colonial past. For all its flaws, colonial Britain was a wellspring of modern ideas of democracy, trade, and rule of law. The colonised can now hold their former colonialists to account.
Historian Francis Fukuyama told Christine Amanpour on CNN, ‘‘What has happened in the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall is that people living in democracies have got complacent . . . They assumed that the peace and prosperity they were enjoying would always be there, and they didn’t have to work very hard for it.’’
Nato alone has understood this moment. The crises we now face demand that the Commonwealth and other institutions step up, too, or clear out. The day of the way things were is done.