On Tuesday, President Obama officially endorsed India’s potential bid to join the P5 with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. While realists may view the UNSC as the only arguably substantive body within the United Nations, an article this week in Time Magazine provides excellent commentary as to precisely why India should not hold its breath:
It’s plain to see, though, that the makeup of the permanent five no longer accurately reflects the global balance of power, and the 21st century distribution of responsibility for keeping the peace — which, after all, is the primary function of the U.N. Countries such as India, Brazil and Turkey are emerging as major economic powerhouses with the capacity to play a far larger strategic role in their regions than some of those currently in the P5, while Germany and Japan have long claimed the same status.
President Obama’s nomination of India underscores precisely why Security Council reform may be years away. Washington is making no secret of the fact that it is promoting a greater strategic role for India, a democratic ally, in response to China’s growing regional ambitions. China may beg to differ — it is the only permanent member that has not publicly backed India’s claim — and it will certainly be encouraged to do so by its long-standing ally, Pakistan, which cites what it says are India’s continued violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions over Kashmir as grounds for exclusion. China has also opposed any move to elevate its old enemy, Japan, into permanent membership. Although Brazil’s efforts to join the permanent five were thought to have suffered in the U.S. and France as a result of its opposition, along with Turkey’s, to sanctions against Iran, Britain on Tuesday reiterated its support for Brazilian membership, expressly talking of strengthening its own ties with Latin America. And France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, for similar reasons, is pressing for an African seat.
Those powers currently holding permanent seats certainly want help in policing the world, but each will be looking to safeguard their own strategic interests in the course of any expansion of the P5. And in a world where geopolitical rivalry is intensifying, that’s a recipe for deadlock. Everybody supports reforming the Security Council to expand the P5, but agreeing on a list of new veto wielders will take many years — and a lot of big-ticket horse-trading.
Read the full article here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2030504,00.html?xid=rss-mostpopular
