The United Nations was established in 1945 primarily as a collective security organisation, with an ancillary aspiration towards the security of individuals. This is reflected in the opening words of the Prologue to the Charter. In latter years, this broader aspiration towards human security has been reflected in the formal adoption by the General Assembly of the policy report ‘Responsibility to Protect’. This envisaged collective intervention in cases of oppression or genocide but the notion has always been in tension with the fundamental Charter principle of ‘non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states’.
The project of suppressing aggression has never worked well. Notwithstanding nearly seventy years of aggression, of one sort or another, there have been only two examples of UN action (Korea and Iraq) and both of these depended on an international fluke. In the first case, the Soviet Union was engaged in a boycott of the UN over the non-seating of mainland China and was thus unable to veto the Korean intervention. The 1990 decision to oppose the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait corresponded to the brief honeymoon which followed the collapse of communism. The present UN ‘RTP’ intervention in Libya is also very likely to prove to have been a one-off. Prominent members of the Security Council are either luke-warm, or passively antagonistic.
