Built For Intertia

Belmont Club says it's no accident the U.N. is gridlock personified. It was meant to work that way.

The Security Council's structural defect is part of its design. It was meant to freeze international action, not promote it. Paralysis is a Security Council feature not a bug. While international multilateral action from recorded history has always been carried out by nations whose interests momentarily coincide, the Security Council was carefully constructed to consist of rivals whose interests clash, each with a veto over the other. The proposals put forward to limit international military action to the Security Council are tantamount to preventing alliance action because all "legitimate" international action is made the province of the parties in conflict. This recipe for enhanced stasis, as Gourevitch points out, has ironically been advanced under the “the Rwanda never again clause” -- when in fact it amounts to a 'Rwanda ever always' clause, as the Congolese and Sudanese know to their cost.