Pros and Cons - Debbie Newman, Ben Woolgar 2014

United Nations standing army
Section C. International relations

The United Nations, by Chapter 7 of its Charter, gives the Security Council the task of identifying all threats to and breaches of global peace and acting accordingly to end them, but it is still entirely dependent on the co-operation of states with its interventions and peacekeeping missions to do so. This debate instead proposes that the UN should recruit a permanent standing army, which would be able to respond quickly to potential atrocities and threats to peace. There are some practical problems with this idea, but what is even less clear is who would run such a body; the Proposition team must make a definitional choice as to whether the Security Council, General Assembly or the Secretary-General would ultimately command it.

Pros

[1] Many of the threats that the UN has to deal with require urgent responses. Genocides and invasions do. At the moment, the UN must recruit ad hoc forces for every mission, which means that they cannot respond straight away, so conflicts get more advanced and harder to solve before intervention. For instance, during the First Gulf War (1990/91), preventing Saddam Hussein from defeating the Kuwaiti military with an instant airborne response would have reduced bloodshed in the long run.

[2] Increasingly, a global consensus is developing around the need for humanitarian intervention, as reflected in the UN’s intervention to assist the Libyan rebels in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi. As such, there will be an international willingness to use such a force when needed.

[3] The types of intervention that the UN makes are highly specialised, as peacekeeping is a difficult and complex task. Normal military forces train for pitched battles, not for counter-terrorism operations, disarmament or aid delivery. By creating a permanent force for these tasks, we massively increase the UN’s operational effectiveness.

[4] The current system of funding for UN peacekeepers pays a flat fee of just over US$1,000 per month per peacekeeper to contributing states. This gives incentives to countries that run their military forces cheaply (in particular, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria). This means that UN forces are often poorly trained, and also a waste of money.

Cons

[1] Most of the UN’s work is, rightly, not intervention in ongoing conflicts, but peacekeeping after they have been resolved. If the UN becomes a permanent antagonist in global conflicts, its ability to negotiate peaceful settlements is hugely undermined.

[2] This force will not go anywhere. Assuming it is controlled by the UN Security Council, as it must be logically, Russia and China, not to mention the USA, will be highly reticent about sending it into battle. As such, it is a pointless gesture.

[3] The UN’s current work is indeed mainly in peacekeeping, but that is not what a standing army would do. Rather, intervention to prevent invasions is precisely the kind of work that conventional forces, trained for battle, do best. Moreover, most armies are increasingly being trained for precisely the kind of missions the Proposition team describe.

[4] Such a force would be riddled with practical difficulties. What language would it use? Where would it be based? Would it recruit directly? Who would fund it? Such co-ordination is very difficult; for that reason, it will be ineffectual.

Possible motions

This House would give the UN a standing army.

This House believes the UN needs a rapid reaction force.

Related topics

United Nations, failure of the

Non-UN-sanctioned military intervention National service, (re)introduction of Armaments, limitations on conventional Sanctions, use of