In an article scheduled for publication next week, former Deputy UN Secretary General Pino Arlacchi proposed the following reform for the United Nations: The Security Council is abolished in favor of an “Executive” body, elected by the General Assembly. The Military Committee, established as per Art. 47, but never activated, comprising the general staff chiefs of Executive members, has the power and the authority for Peace Enforcement.
In such a framework, the Palestinian State would be recognized as a full member and could ask for a UN intervention if attacked by Israel.
“In a re-founded UN, without veto powers, the political price for the U.S. to actively oppose a peace force sent by the Assembly at the request of a member state under attack, with a mandate supported by 81% of its members, would simply be untenable.
“Israel, on its own, without the certainty of the American military, diplomatic, and financial umbrella, does not have the capacity to withstand a prolonged confrontation with a legitimate multilateral force of that size. Its regional military superiority is real, but it depends entirely on the aforementioned umbrella.”
Arlacchi insists that his proposal “calls for applying what is already written, amending only a few articles of the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945 by men and women who had lived through two world wars and understood that international law without enforcement mechanisms is an illusion.
“The end of the Cold War could have thawed the implementation of the Charter, but the American unipolar moment of the 1990s preferred a weak UN, functional to Washington’s projection of power rather than to true global governance. That unipolar moment is over. And it is precisely in this context—when the old order no longer works—that the regeneration of the UN becomes not only desirable but indispensable.”