Forum on Canada and the United Nations: Why Canada should marginalize the UN

Abstract

The history and current workings of the United Nations suggest it is not an effective vehicle for the promotion of Canadian interests and values. As it has generally been, the Security Council is paralyzed by great power vetoes, while the General Assembly has an overwhelming majority that reliably votes against the West, and against Canada. The creation of the postwar liberal international order owed more to other multilateral organizations and groupings with which Canada is associated than the UN. In its core function of underwriting global security and stability, the UN has generally failed and often been irrelevant, with the crucial understandings reached between the great powers directly. In an age of increased international polarization, the UN will remain of only modest utility and Canada would be better advised to forward its values and interests primarily through other multilateral vehicles, working with like-minded states.

One of the more amusing news stories of early 2024 was Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis's petition to the House of Commons, calling for Canada's withdrawal from the UN and its subsidiary organizations on the grounds that membership compromised Canadian sovereignty and constitutional rights. Lewis seems to have been motivated by her dislike of the World Health Organization's (WHO) work on pandemic preparedness, and the position was rightly dismissed as a frivolous gesture by a political eccentric. “What is it about the UN that Conservatives don’t like?” was the rhetorical question asked by Mohammad Hussain, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's press secretary. ¹ But it seems not to have occurred to Hussain that there might be a great deal about the UN for Canadians to dislike. And while it is silly to see the UN as a threat to Canadian sovereignty à la Leslyn Lewis, it does not necessarily follow that it should be central to Canadian foreign policy, as recommended in a recent study from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, excerpted in this issue of International Journal. ²

Any appraisal of the UN's place in Canadian foreign policy should begin by recognizing that the UN does not embody some amorphous entity called “world opinion.” It is a political construct, merely a gathering of states, and it should be judged in terms of its usefulness for advancing Canada's interests and values. As a relatively modest power, Canada has little choice but to work through multilateral structures to exert influence in international affairs. Indeed, Canada was involved in the formation of all the multilateral institutions central to the creation and preservation of the liberal world order under which we have prospered. But the UN itself was peripheral to the creation of that order. The central institutions were NATO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and later the Group of Seven (G7) and World Trade Organization (WTO)—not UN constructions, but Western ones (the West as defined culturally, not geographically, to include Westernized elites elsewhere). As such, they were rooted in common values and interests and underpinned by the benign hegemony of the US. ³ Conversely, the UN has always lacked the foundation of shared values and interests that might have made it an effective international actor. What its defenders see as its source of legitimacy—its (near) universality of membership—in fact ensures its impotence, since member states fundamentally differ in their values and interests.

For most of its existence, the veto power of the Security Council's permanent members has prevented the UN from functioning as a vehicle for collective security, since the council is where the UN Charter vests responsibility for international peace and security. The rare exceptions reflected unique circumstances and provide little guidance for what we might expect in the future. In 1950, Security Council approval for the US-led effort to repel North Korea's invasion of South Korea was possible only because the Soviet Union was temporarily boycotting the UN to protest the exclusion of Red China, a mistake it never repeated. Moreover, the states who joined the effort in Korea—Canada included—did so less out of devotion to the UN as an institution than from a desire to acquire influence over US actions, as they knew that the decisions that dictated the course of events would be made in Washington, not the corridors of the UN. ⁴

It briefly seemed that the UN might acquire new relevance after the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union voted with the US in the Security Council to authorize action against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and President George H.W. Bush mused about a “New World Order” to which the UN would be central. But the moment proved evanescent, and Moscow's desire for cooperation with the West gave way to resurgent nationalism, with collaboration at the UN a consequent casualty. ⁵

So, we have largely returned to the Cold War context of great power vetoes preventing action by the UN, at least through the Security Council. Lester B. Pearson's diplomacy at the UN during the Suez Crisis is sometimes seen as a paradigmatic moment of Canadian multilateralism, successful even at the height of the Cold War in giving Canada a new prominence internationally and making UN peacekeeping a factor in world politics. ⁶ But that much-mythologized triumph was partial and impermanent. While the creation and deployment of the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) ended the immediate crisis, the settlement of the Israeli-Egyptian conflict that was equally important to Pearson never materialized, and even the peace along the border between Egypt and Israel was fragile. In 1967, when Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that UNEF leave Egyptian soil, the UN secretary-general, the egregiously spineless U Thant, complied with an alacrity that may even have surprised Nasser, and precipitated the Six-Day War. ⁷

Some have argued that Thant's refusal to try to halt the movement toward war was to preserve the UN's credibility with the Third World and not be seen as a tool of Western imperialism. ⁸ But that these amorphous considerations would trump something as concrete as the chance to prevent a war is itself a damning illustration of the UN's limitations. As for peacekeeping, Pearson's achievement in putting it at the center of Canadian diplomacy at the UN now looks like an equivocal triumph at best. Classical peacekeeping of the Cold War era interposed UN forces between belligerents to monitor how the latter complied with agreements that generally had been negotiated between the major powers. It could not and was not intended to resolve underlying conflicts; rather, it could only “keep hostilities simmering, often prolonging conflicts that could’ve been ended with swift and decisive military operations.” ⁹ It is no coincidence, perhaps, that Canada's participation in UN peacekeeping missions dropped precipitously after 1995. ¹⁰

No feature of the Cold War aroused greater concern among policymakers and publics alike than the ongoing risk of nuclear conflict. The agreements that produced arms control and then a measure of nuclear disarmament were, however, negotiated between the superpowers themselves, with no involvement by the UN. The UN was not central to addressing the major crises of the Cold War, such as those over Berlin and Cuba. Crisis management took place primarily through bilateral channels between the superpowers, and once direct communications were improved with the creation of the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin, the UN mattered still less. Agreements to halt the further proliferation of nuclear capabilities took the form of treaties tabled at the UN, such as the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. But they were negotiated among the nuclear powers, with the UN playing only a pro forma role in their ratification. ¹¹

The UN has since passed many General Assembly resolutions on nuclear non-proliferation, but none has ever prevented a state that sought nuclear weapons from trying to develop them, and now the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea proceed in utter indifference to the UN. All the UN resolutions combined have done less to halt proliferation than the 1981 Israeli raid on the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak. ¹²

The UN's role in dealing with post–Cold War conflicts has been, at best, spotty. It failed abysmally to prevent genocide in Rwanda, and vetoes threatened by the Russians and Chinese rendered it marginal in the 1999 Kosovo War, where intervention took place through NATO, with the UN providing cosmetic approval post factum. While the UN gave its imprimatur to intervention in Afghanistan after 9/11, it was the NATO coalition that organized and conducted operations. And while Vladimir Putin approved Russian votes for Security Council resolutions condemning Syrian war crimes, he later turned his back on them after concluding that it was in his interest to assist the military operations of Bashar al-Assad's regime. ¹³ And the UN has been similarly unable to mitigate events in Ukraine; instead, NATO has organized support to resist Russian aggression.

After Kosovo demonstrated how marginal the UN actually was, Canada tried to revive it as a venue for humanitarian intervention by creating the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose report limited the claims of sovereignty by asserting a “Responsibility to Protect.” ¹⁴ The report was accepted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, but after the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya reminded despots that humanitarian intervention could lead to their ouster, support evaporated and the R2P principle became a dead letter. ¹⁵

The UN is sometimes defended as a channel for communication between states that have little direct contact. Here, too, the record is meagre. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger initiated the opening of the US to China, they did so through discreet channels that did not involve the UN. ¹⁶ During the heightened East-West tensions of the early 1980s, mediation was not via the UN but the West German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. ¹⁷

Where nations truly wish to communicate with each other, they find useful channels, often bilateral, sometimes using third parties, but rarely the UN. Seeing the UN as the venue for Canada to act as mediator plays into a familiar Canadian conceit. It is a truism that when your sole tool is a hammer, all problems resemble nails. When the principal item in your diplomatic toolbox is the self-appointed role of mediator, you tend to see every international conflict as rooted in misunderstanding and miscommunication, which sufficient mediation will clarify and resolve. Yet national interests and values sometimes clash, and there are conflicts that cannot be talked out of existence but arise where states understand each other all too well. And here mediation through the UN is of little help.

While the UN was created by the great powers who saw it largely as a tool for protecting their interests, it changed with the accession of newly independent states in the 1950s and 1960s, following the dissolution of the European empires. While their interests sometimes clashed, the post-colonial states found common cause in blaming the sins of colonialism, real and imagined, for their misfortunes, and formed an increasingly cohesive anti-Western bloc. ¹⁸

Contrary to popular myth, since its creation, Canadian policy toward the UN had been generally cautious, often focused on preventing splits within the Western bloc. ¹⁹ Policymakers entertained modest hopes of what the UN could accomplish, though sometimes they abandoned restrained efforts to advance the national interest in favor of hollow attempts to derive national or partisan prestige from Canadian visibility. ²⁰

Following the accession of the former colonies, some Canadians hoped to mediate between them and the Western bloc, an approach enthusiastically pursued by John Diefenbaker's government in the early 1960s. But the intransigence of Afro-Asian attacks on the West, perceived as playing into Communist hands, convinced Ottawa that there was no common ground, and Canada's unshakable membership in the West meant that dialogue could never be productive. ²¹ Canadian officials found it objectionable that Third World delegates were keen to criticize lingering Western imperialism but remained quiet when it came to repression in Communist states.

Into the 1970s, the Third World Bloc became increasingly aggressive in its attacks on the West, with beleaguered Western representatives either vainly resisting ever more stridently anti-Western General Assembly resolutions, or feebly acquiescing, in the belief that the resolutions would have little practical effect. ²² A particular target was the open world economy that had, for all its failings, generated widespread prosperity since 1945. ²³ Since the 1964 creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the open world economy was the target of calls for global redistribution and autarchy, culminating in the 1974 declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). ²⁴ This was a charter for large-scale nationalization, high tariff barriers, and inflated commodity prices, which would have turned global economic management over to Third World autocrats and international bureaucracies. ²⁵

While Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had taken office determined to refocus Canadian foreign policy away from support of international institutions and towards a hard-headed pursuit of the national interest, by the mid-1970s he had become infatuated with the cause of reducing poverty in the underdeveloped world. Initially supportive of the NIEO, he abandoned the initiative out of frustration at proponents’ unwillingness to compromise on their most unrealistic demands. ²⁶ In the face of this effort to seize control of the global economy, the US redirected international economic management to the World Bank and the IMF, with the hubris of the NIEO's advocates ensuring that the UN was once again pushed to the sidelines, a development Canadian offices could not prevent. ²⁷

Equally malign was the 1980 proposal for a New World Information Order, recommended in a report sponsored by UNESCO. The report was authored by a commission chaired by former Irish foreign minister Seán MacBride, but dominated by representatives of Third World dictatorships. Consequently, the report proposed a regime of governmental supervision of telecommunications that would have been utterly inimical to a free press, defended on the grounds that the free flow of information violated national sovereignty. ²⁸ It was never fully implemented, and eventually overtaken by developments in contemporary information technology, but provoked the temporary withdrawal of the US and UK from UNESCO, rendering that organization less consequential. ²⁹

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has continued as a source of reports and resolutions, some of them merely symbolic, and others with destructive implications. For example, the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ³⁰ could, in the view of some critics, confine Indigenous peoples to cultural-linguistic ghettos, and certainly will discourage their integration into mainstream society as it affirms their right to self-determination. In Canada, where it was unwisely incorporated into domestic law by the Justin Trudeau government in 2023, it creates constitutional chaos by creating a new order of government and set of legal rights that challenge federal authority and efforts at assimilation. ³¹

Perhaps more problematic still is the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ³² Since the states that have nuclear weapons or are trying to acquire them have ignored this treaty, it is therefore tempting to dismiss it as empty virtue-signaling. But even as a symbolic declaration, it stigmatizes the weapons that have underpinned global security since 1945 ³³ and undermines the credibility of the US nuclear security guarantees that have forestalled other states that otherwise may have obtained nuclear weapons of their own. Moreover, it risks generating public opposition to nuclear weapons in NATO states, all of whom, including Canada, rely upon the nuclear-armed alliance for their security.

The UN, through UNESCO, also sponsored the 2001 and 2009 World Conferences Against Racism, both of which were anti-Western and anti-Zionist—even anti-Semitic—in orientation. In 2001, Canada took part and managed successfully to remove some of the most offensive formulations from the final document. ³⁴ In 2009, Canada boycotted the proceedings, wisely choosing not to legitimize the gathering, which produced an even more obnoxious document. ³⁵

UNESCO's record is perhaps particularly egregious, and some of the UN's other subsidiary bodies and specialized agencies do valuable work. But others clearly do not. First, the Human Rights Council, like the Human Rights Commission it replaced following a 2006 reorganization, is perennially dominated by states that routinely violate human rights, and thus its findings have no legitimacy. ³⁶

Next, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was created in 1949 to resettle the Arab refugees created in the Israeli War of Independence. But rather than contribute to a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict by resettling the refugees in Arab states, it has perpetuated it by consigning them and their descendants to refugee camps and nurturing their irredentist ambitions of retaking what was once Mandatory Palestine. ³⁷ In 2010, the Stephen Harper government ended Canadian funding to UNRWA, which the Trudeau government foolishly restored in 2016; this funding was briefly paused in 2023–2024 following charges of UNRWA collaboration with terrorists. ³⁸

Finally, the International Court of Justice was established by the UN Charter in 1945 and is required to “represent…the main legal systems of the world.” ³⁹ Elected by the Security Council and General Assembly, the judges routinely include jurists from the legal systems of authoritarian states, and one of the current judges represents the dictatorship in Beijing. ⁴⁰ The ICJ has no means of enforcing its judgements, which are uniformly disregarded. Yet while liberal democracies deem ICJ judgments questionable, they still can have political consequences. In 2024, Justin Trudeau responded to South Africa's charge of genocide against Israel with the equivocation that “our wholehearted support of the ICJ and its processes does not mean we support the premise of the case.” ⁴¹ No doubt this statement reflected Trudeau's desire to avoid clarity on the divisive issue of the war in Gaza. But it also marks a growing problem for Canadian foreign policy: the contradiction between solidarity with fellow democracies and uncritical fealty to the UN.

The defining feature of the current geopolitical moment is growing polarization between the liberal democracies and an increasingly cohesive bloc of aggressive revisionist states revolving around Russia and China, with regional proxies like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Renewed great power rivalry has evolved into military clashes, in Ukraine and the Middle East, and soon, perhaps, between China and Taiwan. As a result, the members of each bloc are becoming increasingly interdependent, forming secure economic supply chains, developing and deploying weapon systems, and coordinating foreign policies. Caught in between, much of the Global South will remain uncommitted, opportunistically playing the two sides against each other as it did in the Cold War.

Canada's deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland recognized this new reality in 2022, when she spoke to the Brookings Institution and called for “a world where democracies depend on democracies, rather than despots.” She also urged abandonment of “the pretense, or the self-delusion, that most of our relationships with authoritarian regimes can have a win-win outcome,” a self-delusion that underpins much of what goes on at the UN. The post–Cold War assumption “that we were all converging towards global peace and prosperity” enabled the belief that shared values and interests among its members would make the UN more useful. ⁴² It is increasingly clear that this move has not happened, and that the UN holds little promise as a venue for advancing Canadian interests and values. Canadian multilateralism has historically been most effective when expressed through cooperation with states whose values and interests were broadly congruent with our own, a finding that remains the case. NATO is likely to loom larger in our foreign policy, but so too may the G7, the WTO, and perhaps the promising idea of a League of Democracies, which would ideally supersede the UN in many areas. ⁴³

To be sure, there remains a need for some degree of cooperation with states who are not part of any coalition of the like-minded, where there is agreement on both means and ends, as with, for example, mitigating climate change and responding to future pandemics. Here, the UN retains some value as a vehicle, though it is not the only forum for discussion and action. But where Canadians have invested great hopes in the UN, they have rarely amounted to much, and there is little basis for optimism that further efforts would be any different. To ignore both the historical record and current realities, and make the UN central to our foreign policy, would be to double down on failure. And even rhetorical obeisance to the UN confers on it a moral stature it does not deserve.