A Gloomy Future for U.N. as “Ethical Standard Bearer” for Global Affairs
- IAN WILLIAMS
- REGIONS
- NORTH AMERICA
- POSTED ON
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2026, pp. 14-16
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE on the Security Council, the Palestinians’ only hope is that their enemies, like Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, implode under the pressure of their own amoral incompetence. It is not only the tortured people of Gaza and the West who pay the price for the perfidy and invertebracy of the U.N. Security Council members, but the people of the world.
As we said when Security Council Resolution 2803 was “passed” like a groaning bowel movement, the Gaza “ceasefire” agreement was more of an instrument of unconditional surrender to Trump and Netanyahu than it was a viable peace plan. The continuing death toll in the Strip, not to mention in the West Bank, totally vindicates our suspicions, which follow decades in which the U.S. condoned an Israeli opt out from international law and the hindrances of the U.N. Charter.
Most U.N. watchers consider the Security Council veto to be a major impediment to the effectiveness of the organization, and one solution popular for some diplomats was a large increase in the number of permanent members with veto power. British diplomats, for their own self-evident motives, had maneuvered the title of the agenda item from the “reform” of the Security Council to its “enlargement,” but then argued, on now eminently reasonable grounds, against all suggested changes.
Enlargement was, as we have often pointed out, a self-serving obtuse answer to the wrong question, which is not how to make the Security Council into a more “representative” job creation scheme for diplomats, but rather how to make it more effective. Doubling the number of veto holders is manifestly a way to put rocks in the cogs.
REWRITING INTERNATIONAL LAW
Trump’s “Board of Peace,” the revived corpse of George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing,” goes to the opposite extreme. The president doubles as Secretary General by deciding who can be on the board and what goes on the agenda—and then has a veto on any decisions.
A foretaste of foreseeable futures is that hitherto even the most contrived and expedient Security Council resolutions are preambled invoking a litany of dubiously applicable Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and international law. In the case of the Gaza hodgepodge this is missing, because in every sense its contents were unprecedented and flew in the face of the U.N. Charter.
Whether because they thought they were irrelevant or because they knew that the resolution defied every principle of international law and reversed all previous U.N. decisions, the Trump foreign policy team did not cite any such background—and the council members went along with their self-emasculation. They voted for the global equivalent of the Reichstag’s “enabling” act, whose essence was that the Führer is always right. In effect, those who voted for the resolution effectively abdicated their responsibilities as the Security Council to a marginally sane U.S. president.
Sadly, “eternal” principles are all too often actually ephemeral. Which brings us in a tortuous way to another consequence of the Israeli exception from international law. While it is true U.S. indulgence and European silence has enabled Israel in practice to rewrite international law, Israeli policy presents a contradictory combination of being reckless about the consequences of their deeds but acutely aware of the future prospects created by them.
In the last column we mentioned the trial balloons being floated at the other end of the Sahara about enlisting Morocco to provide a home in Western Sahara for the displaced Palestinians from Gaza They raised puzzling questions about self-determination and boundaries not least since Morocco would thus house Palestinian expellees in a territory from which the Moroccan Kingdom has previously expelled the native Sahrawis, thus emulating and anticipating how the Gazans might be cast out into the wilderness by an unprincipled Security Council. The combined power of Israel, France, the U.S. and Morocco, with the lickspittle support of the UK, persuaded many African countries to overlook their own principles of self-determination in Western Sahara.
THE SHIPWRECK OF SOMALIA
Which brings us by easy stages to Somaliland. The International Court of Justice and successive United Nations resolutions have sanctified the principle of national self-determination, but this can fly in the face of the African Union avowal of the sanctity of the colonial boundaries. This is the pragmatic position rather than a principled one, because it would be difficult to justify the lines in the sand or in the jungles drawn by European imperial powers that determined so many boundaries in Africa and elsewhere, with no regard for local self-determination. However, in practice, if those arbitrary markings were questioned, the resulting maelstrom of border conflicts would lead to even more mayhem in the beleaguered continent.
Ironically Somalia is one of the few states that meets Western definitions of a nation-state. Its people speak one language, they share one religion and they live contiguously in one tract of territory.
Incidentally Somalia is a member of the Arab League despite not being culturally or linguistically Arab. It has been an exemplar of a failed state for decades as Great Power rivalries tore the strategically located territory apart. As it happens because of the regional rotation system Somalia is on the Security Council despite its diminished capacity to rule itself. But “Somaliland,” roughly coterminous with the former British Somaliland, has contrived a separate, relatively successful, existence, with independent elections and administration in contrast to the banditry and anarchy of the Somali “motherland.”
However, it has not secured the talismanic international recognition. Pragmatically, there should be no compulsion for the people of Somaliland to “rejoin” a Somalia with which they only had brief and unrewarding unity. The international community does not call on Austria to reunite with Germany because of a shared language and culture. By all means one should encourage unification, but it should be on a basis of a popular demand, which appears to be lacking here.
I should perhaps acknowledge an interest. In my youth I was a member of the Somali Seaman’s social club in Liverpool and close friends with some of the local community leaders, who, as well as being fond of a pint, were intensely proud when Somali became the official written language in 1972. We even had a premier of the first Somali language feature film—with celebratory drinks afterwards. Of course, subsequent events were disappointing, in downward parallel with developing repression followed by anarchy in Somalia, but as far as I can glean, the attachment to Somaliland that developed was more the affection that shipwreck survivors show to a lifeboat than any deep regional or ethnic nationalism.
So, enter Israel, which like a stopped clock, stepped into the breach with an offer of recognition when no one else would. The Israelis had played the same game with Kosovo and Serbia, trading recognition for an embassy in Jerusalem. Serbia, on firmer ground, reneged on the Trump-brokered deal, helped because the expedient Palestinian Authority had welcomed Slobodan Milošević and scorned their alleged Muslim brothers in Pristina, which, of course paralleled Palestine’s fruitless wooing of Morocco over Polisario. But then Israel picks its enemies carefully and does not care to antagonize Beijing, by recognizing Taiwan, although that apparently did not inhibit it from cooperation with Kuomintang Taiwan and Apartheid South Africa in a joint nuclear weapon development project.
Readers might notice a common thread here—of cynical expedient opportunism eroding principles.
All states look to their self-interest. Robin Cook, who was the British Labour Party foreign secretary back in the day when his country and his party had some vestiges of an independent and principled foreign policy, was often misquoted as espousing an ethical foreign policy. On the contrary, he recognized that the concept was almost an oxymoron and stressed that foreign policy should have an “ethical dimension,” which nowadays seems to have sunk into a Trumpian black hole.
NEXT U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL
Which brings us back to how the Gaza decision has so thoroughly corroded one of the U.N.’s unspectacular but essential roles—as an ethical standard bearer for global affairs. At the core of that is the role of the “secular Pope,” the U.N. Secretary General. It has to be said that António Guterres has been in a self-administered pre-retirement program for that ethical function almost since he took office. His vacuous pronouncements are reminiscent of what was said about his predecessor, Pérez de Cuéllar: “if he fell in the lake, there wouldn’t be a splash.”
In these parlous times for the U.N.’s future, and for the people that depend on its attenuated lifeline, the selection of a new Secretary General has even more than usual significance. Note: “selection” not election. This year, candidates must be nominated by their governments, and by several customary constraints, they will not be from one of the permanent five countries but probably be from Latin America or the Caribbean, and in recent years popular pressure has been building up for a female candidate. However, Donald Trump has a veto and is likely to regard that as a forbidden diversity hire!
Among the putative candidates, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Mariano Grossi from Argentina is indeed Latin
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A Gloomy Future for U.N. as “Ethical Standard Bearer” for Global Affairs
IAN WILLIAMS REGIONS NORTH AMERICA POSTED ON FEBRUARY 8, 2026
People stage a protest in Mogadishu to express support for the country’s territorial integrity following Israel's recognition of Somaliland, on Jan. 7, 2026. Demonstrators carrying Somali flags chanted slogans against Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israel. (ABUUKAR MOHAMED MUHIDIN/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2026, pp. 14-16
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE on the Security Council, the Palestinians’ only hope is that their enemies, like Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, implode under the pressure of their own amoral incompetence. It is not only the tortured people of Gaza and the West who pay the price for the perfidy and invertebracy of the U.N. Security Council members, but the people of the world.
As we said when Security Council Resolution 2803 was “passed” like a groaning bowel movement, the Gaza “ceasefire” agreement was more of an instrument of unconditional surrender to Trump and Netanyahu than it was a viable peace plan. The continuing death toll in the Strip, not to mention in the West Bank, totally vindicates our suspicions, which follow decades in which the U.S. condoned an Israeli opt out from international law and the hindrances of the U.N. Charter.
Most U.N. watchers consider the Security Council veto to be a major impediment to the effectiveness of the organization, and one solution popular for some diplomats was a large increase in the number of permanent members with veto power. British diplomats, for their own self-evident motives, had maneuvered the title of the agenda item from the “reform” of the Security Council to its “enlargement,” but then argued, on now eminently reasonable grounds, against all suggested changes.
Enlargement was, as we have often pointed out, a self-serving obtuse answer to the wrong question, which is not how to make the Security Council into a more “representative” job creation scheme for diplomats, but rather how to make it more effective. Doubling the number of veto holders is manifestly a way to put rocks in the cogs.
REWRITING INTERNATIONAL LAW
Trump’s “Board of Peace,” the revived corpse of George W. Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing,” goes to the opposite extreme. The president doubles as Secretary General by deciding who can be on the board and what goes on the agenda—and then has a veto on any decisions.
A foretaste of foreseeable futures is that hitherto even the most contrived and expedient Security Council resolutions are preambled invoking a litany of dubiously applicable Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and international law. In the case of the Gaza hodgepodge this is missing, because in every sense its contents were unprecedented and flew in the face of the U.N. Charter.
Whether because they thought they were irrelevant or because they knew that the resolution defied every principle of international law and reversed all previous U.N. decisions, the Trump foreign policy team did not cite any such background—and the council members went along with their self-emasculation. They voted for the global equivalent of the Reichstag’s “enabling” act, whose essence was that the Führer is always right. In effect, those who voted for the resolution effectively abdicated their responsibilities as the Security Council to a marginally sane U.S. president.
Sadly, “eternal” principles are all too often actually ephemeral. Which brings us in a tortuous way to another consequence of the Israeli exception from international law. While it is true U.S. indulgence and European silence has enabled Israel in practice to rewrite international law, Israeli policy presents a contradictory combination of being reckless about the consequences of their deeds but acutely aware of the future prospects created by them.
In the last column we mentioned the trial balloons being floated at the other end of the Sahara about enlisting Morocco to provide a home in Western Sahara for the displaced Palestinians from Gaza They raised puzzling questions about self-determination and boundaries not least since Morocco would thus house Palestinian expellees in a territory from which the Moroccan Kingdom has previously expelled the native Sahrawis, thus emulating and anticipating how the Gazans might be cast out into the wilderness by an unprincipled Security Council. The combined power of Israel, France, the U.S. and Morocco, with the lickspittle support of the UK, persuaded many African countries to overlook their own principles of self-determination in Western Sahara.
THE SHIPWRECK OF SOMALIA
Which brings us by easy stages to Somaliland. The International Court of Justice and successive United Nations resolutions have sanctified the principle of national self-determination, but this can fly in the face of the African Union avowal of the sanctity of the colonial boundaries. This is the pragmatic position rather than a principled one, because it would be difficult to justify the lines in the sand or in the jungles drawn by European imperial powers that determined so many boundaries in Africa and elsewhere, with no regard for local self-determination. However, in practice, if those arbitrary markings were questioned, the resulting maelstrom of border conflicts would lead to even more mayhem in the beleaguered continent.
Ironically Somalia is one of the few states that meets Western definitions of a nation-state. Its people speak one language, they share one religion and they live contiguously in one tract of territory.
Incidentally Somalia is a member of the Arab League despite not being culturally or linguistically Arab. It has been an exemplar of a failed state for decades as Great Power rivalries tore the strategically located territory apart. As it happens because of the regional rotation system Somalia is on the Security Council despite its diminished capacity to rule itself. But “Somaliland,” roughly coterminous with the former British Somaliland, has contrived a separate, relatively successful, existence, with independent elections and administration in contrast to the banditry and anarchy of the Somali “motherland.”
However, it has not secured the talismanic international recognition. Pragmatically, there should be no compulsion for the people of Somaliland to “rejoin” a Somalia with which they only had brief and unrewarding unity. The international community does not call on Austria to reunite with Germany because of a shared language and culture. By all means one should encourage unification, but it should be on a basis of a popular demand, which appears to be lacking here.
I should perhaps acknowledge an interest. In my youth I was a member of the Somali Seaman’s social club in Liverpool and close friends with some of the local community leaders, who, as well as being fond of a pint, were intensely proud when Somali became the official written language in 1972. We even had a premier of the first Somali language feature film—with celebratory drinks afterwards. Of course, subsequent events were disappointing, in downward parallel with developing repression followed by anarchy in Somalia, but as far as I can glean, the attachment to Somaliland that developed was more the affection that shipwreck survivors show to a lifeboat than any deep regional or ethnic nationalism.
So, enter Israel, which like a stopped clock, stepped into the breach with an offer of recognition when no one else would. The Israelis had played the same game with Kosovo and Serbia, trading recognition for an embassy in Jerusalem. Serbia, on firmer ground, reneged on the Trump-brokered deal, helped because the expedient Palestinian Authority had welcomed Slobodan Milošević and scorned their alleged Muslim brothers in Pristina, which, of course paralleled Palestine’s fruitless wooing of Morocco over Polisario. But then Israel picks its enemies carefully and does not care to antagonize Beijing, by recognizing Taiwan, although that apparently did not inhibit it from cooperation with Kuomintang Taiwan and Apartheid South Africa in a joint nuclear weapon development project.
Readers might notice a common thread here—of cynical expedient opportunism eroding principles.
All states look to their self-interest. Robin Cook, who was the British Labour Party foreign secretary back in the day when his country and his party had some vestiges of an independent and principled foreign policy, was often misquoted as espousing an ethical foreign policy. On the contrary, he recognized that the concept was almost an oxymoron and stressed that foreign policy should have an “ethical dimension,” which nowadays seems to have sunk into a Trumpian black hole.
NEXT U.N. SECRETARY GENERAL
Which brings us back to how the Gaza decision has so thoroughly corroded one of the U.N.’s unspectacular but essential roles—as an ethical standard bearer for global affairs. At the core of that is the role of the “secular Pope,” the U.N. Secretary General. It has to be said that António Guterres has been in a self-administered pre-retirement program for that ethical function almost since he took office. His vacuous pronouncements are reminiscent of what was said about his predecessor, Pérez de Cuéllar: “if he fell in the lake, there wouldn’t be a splash.”
In these parlous times for the U.N.’s future, and for the people that depend on its attenuated lifeline, the selection of a new Secretary General has even more than usual significance. Note: “selection” not election. This year, candidates must be nominated by their governments, and by several customary constraints, they will not be from one of the permanent five countries but probably be from Latin America or the Caribbean, and in recent years popular pressure has been building up for a female candidate. However, Donald Trump has a veto and is likely to regard that as a forbidden diversity hire!
Among the putative candidates, International Atomic Energy Agency Director Rafael Mariano Grossi from Argentina is indeed Latin American but not female, yet his selling point with Trump could be his ability to provide a tenuous nuclear casus belli against (for example) Iran. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is suspected by people in her agency of having unacknowledged Israeli citizenship, which in these confusing days could be a plus (with Trump) and a resounding negative for others. Her age, at 70, would have told against her once, but in the Trump/Biden gerontocratic era might be a selling point. Trump’s role is crucial, and so unless the General Assembly members find the vertebrae that the Security Council members have mislaid—or if, like Roman Emperor Caligula, he nominates his horse for the position—we cannot expect much kickback from other members.
In short the future of the U.N. looks gloomy.
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