Singapore, 2003

I would like to

congratulate Mr. Julian Hunte, the Foreign Minister of

Saint Lucia, on his election as the new President of the

General Assembly. Singapore is delighted that a fellow

small island State and member of the Forum of Small

States holds that office.

I also join others in paying a tribute to United

Nations personnel who have fallen victim to violence

or attacks, including a special tribute to the late

Sergio Vieira de Mello. The terrorist attack that caused

his death has outraged the entire civilized world.

Sergio dedicated his life, and ultimately gave his life,

in the service of the United Nations. He is mourned and

missed by his many friends around the world. We can

best honour his memory by reaffirming our

commitment to the ideals that he served.

The run-up to the war in Iraq saw a heated debate

about the role of the United Nations. The United

Nations is, of course, no stranger to controversy, but

that debate was notable for being framed in particularly

stark terms. The rhetoric was inflamed and inflated. It

has been variously asserted, with glee or gloom, that

the United Nations was irrelevant or irreplaceable, a

threat to national sovereignty, the sole source of

international legitimacy, merely a tool of the remaining

super-Power, or the only way to restrain that super-

Power. There are indeed serious issues that require

debate, but the simplistic manner in which that debate

was framed — in particular the portrayal of a struggle

between unilateralism and multilateralism — is, in my

view, unhelpful. Unfortunately, that rhetoric has

obscured, rather than clarified, the issue. It has

oversimplified the debate and glossed over the more

complex reality. The danger is that we may believe in

the rhetoric and arrive at wrong conclusions about the

relevance, or irrelevance, of the United Nations. I am

therefore joining that debate with some trepidation, and

I do so only to highlight some of the complexities, in

the hope that it will contribute to a more balanced

appraisal of the United Nations. I shall start by

restating some basics.

In the 58 years since its formation, the influence

and role of the United Nations in world affairs has

always flowed and ebbed in accordance with shifting

geopolitical tides. The role of the United Nations has

been indispensable on some crucial international

issues; on other occasions the United Nations has had

no role, or only a marginal role. If that meant that the

United Nations was irrelevant, then it was irrelevant

long before the recent war in Iraq. The ability of the

United Nations to act and the kinds of actions it took

have always been contingent on how States, and in

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particular the permanent members of the Security

Council, perceived whether the United Nations served

their interests. But the United Nations and the United

Nations system have always endured.

Neither the variable fortunes nor the survival of

the United Nations should surprise anyone. The United

Nations functions in an international system consisting

of sovereign States. Multilateralism and unilateralism

were never mutually exclusive alternatives; they are

different options in every State’s menu of policy

choices. Few States, large or small, would agree to

entrust their security or other vital national interests

entirely to a multilateral institution. On the other hand,

no State, however powerful, can always succeed in

achieving its objectives without the help of others.

Every State will choose the option that serves its

interest best.

Furthermore, the United Nations as a total system

is bigger than the General Assembly and the Security

Council. As we debate the future of international

organizations we should not forget that the world has

never been more interdependent, and therefore more in

need of global governance. The United Nations now

has more than 190 Members and has never been closer

to the ideal of universal participation. There has never

been a period in world history when there have been

more international legal regimes and norms regulating

State behaviour. The Secretariat is the depository for

over 500 international treaties covering the entire

spectrum of global activities.

International legal regimes and norms are

imperfect in their efficiency and observance. Some

international norms are hotly contested. Still, the

conduct of international relations today does not take

place in a vacuum, but within that framework of laws,

rules, standards and norms. Nevertheless, there is no

escaping the fact that the maintenance of international

peace and security is first among the purposes of the

United Nations, and the most contested and

controversial of its roles. It is also the focus of the

current debate over Iraq. It is here that the rhetorical

exaggerations I mentioned earlier stand most in the

way of clear and rational thinking about the strengths

and limitations of the United Nations.

Traditional international law recognizes only two

grounds for the use of force: self-defence under

Article 51 of the Charter and authorization by the

Security Council. That seeming clarity is deceptive.

Even before the latest Iraq war, traditional

interpretations of the Charter had been questioned. The

doctrine of self-defence has long been the subject of

learned debate. The current controversy over the right

to pre-emption is only the latest manifestation. The

doctrine of humanitarian intervention — or

“responsibility to protect” — so boldly brought to the

fore by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, has for several

decades challenged the conventional concepts of non-

intervention and the sovereign equality of States.

Another challenge to traditional approaches has

been the threat posed by non-State actors, especially

the contemporary menace posed by perpetrators of

international terrorism. The problem posed by rebel

groups in civil conflicts is another example.

In its efforts to respond to egregious violations of

human rights, starvation, anarchy and chaos, the

Security Council had already stretched both the

authority of the United Nations to intervene and the

definition of “threats to the peace” and “aggression”.

The war in Iraq was not the first time, and will not be

the last time, that the Security Council was unable to

act. The hope of the late 1980s and early 1990s that the

end of the cold war would at last enable the Security

Council to discharge its primary responsibility for the

maintenance of international peace and security has

long been shattered.

In retrospect, Iraq’s invasion and annexation of

Kuwait in 1990 represented an unusually clear-cut

violation of fundamental Charter principles. That

greatly eased the task of securing Security Council

authorization for military action.

But the consensus on Iraq was short-lived. By

1994, France and Russia began to call for a road map

for the lifting of sanctions. By 1998, the withdrawal of

the United Nations Special Commission and Operation

Desert Fox marked the end of the Security Council’s

consensus on Iraq. Thereafter the Security Council

acted in accordance with a complex balance of

principles and national interests, resulting in

inconsistent and incoherent decisions. In the oil-for-

food debates humanitarian concerns about the

consequences of sanctions were mixed with the

commercial and business interests of some of the

permanent members.

That did not, however, make the Security Council

irrelevant. It merely meant that the Council served as a

forum for managing competing interests, an important

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role that it has played for all its history. After all, while

Security Council resolutions have the force of law, they

are, at the end of the day, first and foremost political

documents indicating the degree of consensus that can

be achieved among its most powerful members at any

one time.

I do not think that it is self-evident that the 2002-

2003 clash of interests over Iraq was qualitatively

different from the differences between the permanent

members during the previous decade. I do not think

that the disagreement over Iraq has permanently

damaged the United Nations.

The 2002-2003 crisis over Iraq in the Security

Council only underscored what we have known all

along, namely, that the Security Council can authorize

intervention only when the permanent members are in

agreement, and that all States, big and small, will do

what they must to protect their vital national interests.

This is not the occasion to revisit old debates over

whether the war in Iraq was authorized on the basis of

a continuity of authority from 1990 to 2003. Certainly,

as resolution 1441 (2002) recognized, Iraq had been in

material breach of several resolutions. My point is that,

whatever its eventual outcome, the intense diplomatic

effort to secure another explicit resolution for the use

of force was itself testimony to the importance attached

by all to the Security Council’s legitimizing role. In

May, only weeks after a formal end to major combat

operations was declared, resolution 1483 (2003) was

adopted without any dissenting vote, recognizing that

the United Nations had a significant role in post-war

Iraq.

More balanced views are now beginning to

emerge, albeit still tainted by the bitterness of the

debates in the run-up to the war. It will be some time

before consensus can be reached on the role of the

United Nations in post-war Iraq. Some are loath to

grant ex post facto legitimization of military action. At

the same time, there is reluctance to cede power won

with blood. But the legitimacy that the United Nations

brings is unique.

The debate on the role of the United Nations will

continue. It can, and should, go on. But that does not

mean that the United Nations should be in paralysis.

We must at the same time press on with our

commitment to fulfil the fundamental purposes of the

United Nations, which, as stated in the Charter, are “To

maintain international peace and security”, “To develop

friendly relations among nations” and “To achieve

international cooperation”.

The starting point for that effort must be

acceptance of the fact that, while the United Nations

stands for ideals that we must never relinquish, the

reality is that the United Nations both reflects and

shapes geopolitics. Underlying the debates in the run-

up to the war, and still infusing the controversies, is

acute uneasiness over the distribution of power in the

post-cold war international system. But can the United

Nations escape that reality? The fact is that the United

Nations can operate only on the basis of a hard-headed

appreciation of the realities of power. If we allow

exaggerated rhetoric about the role of the United

Nations to obscure that fact, then we do the United

Nations a disservice.

The Charter of the United Nations has remained

essentially unchanged since 1945. But it has been

continuously interpreted and re-interpreted to meet

changing geopolitical circumstances and new

challenges, many of which were unforeseen by the

founders of the United Nations.

Today we are again faced with radically new

threats, not least of which are the global terrorist

networks that respect neither national boundaries nor

traditional international law. Clearly, the United

Nations needs to fashion new and more flexible rules to

deal with these new threats. Yet, at the same time, we

must continue to ensure that there are adequate

safeguards to prevent abuse or a return to the law of the

jungle.

Finding the right balance between those equally

urgent imperatives will not be easy. But it is not

impossible, if we can find the discipline to debate the

issues openly and realistically, with a clear

appreciation of both the limitations and potential of the

United Nations.

Recent events in Iraq have shown that the United

States needs the United Nations. It is also a fact that

the United Nations needs the United States. Since there

is a convergence of interests for the two to cooperate in

order to achieve our shared interests and objectives, it

is surely not impossible for us to negotiate and agree

upon a new paradigm of cooperation between the

world’s sole super-Power and the world’s only, and

indispensable, United Nations.

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The United Nations is not a panacea for all the

world’s ills. Neither is the United Nations a global

villain. The United Nations is a political institution.

Politics, as is often said, is the art of the possible.

There is no need, therefore, to succumb to despair or

cynicism. We should turn the page and move on.