Aletho News

Treatment of Russia at UN shows need of its urgent reform or even replacement

By Drago Bosnic – April 25, 2023

The importance of global cooperation and international law has never been more pronounced in the post-WWII era than it is today. The world’s most important organization in this regard is certainly the United Nations, with one of its main tasks being to uphold international law and maintain its impartiality, regardless of which country or entity it is engaged with. Unfortunately, the UN has failed on both counts, but its role as an international forum of sorts that serves as the last frontier of dialogue between states is still evident. And yet, it seems that even this largely ceremonial role is too much for the political West, as it undermines its desire for total dominance through the so-called “rules-based world order“.

Perhaps the best example (although “the worst” would probably be a more suitable word) of this is the atrocious treatment of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the UN. The latest UN Security Council meeting (chaired by FM Lavrov) should serve as a textbook example of how not to conduct diplomacy, probably for decades to come. The tensions have been quite high at the UNSC due to the political West’s frustrations after Russia took over the council in April, a rule based on the regular monthly rotation. Lavrov warned against this and stated that the world has become a more dangerous place, possibly more so than at the height of the Cold War.

“As was the case in the Cold War, we have reached the dangerous, possibly even more dangerous, threshold,” Lavrov said.

The meeting, titled the “Maintenance of international peace and security”, came under fire as Western diplomats repeatedly grumbled about Russia taking over chairing of the UNSC on April 1 and that it allegedly “must be an April Fool’s joke”. Lavrov himself slammed the United States and its vassals and satellite states for abandoning diplomacy and called for the clarification of relations on the battlefield. However, Western “diplomats” went about with their hostility, including Olaf Skoog, the official representative of the European Union to the UN. Skoog openly called Russia “cynical” for allegedly “trying to portray itself as a defender of the UN charter and multilateralism”.

“We all know that while Russia is destroying, we are building. While they violate, we protect,” he said.

This statement alone shows the immeasurable level of EU/NATO’s self-delusion, as the political West’s truly unprovoked and brutal aggression against the world stands as a stark reminder of just how opposite of truth this is. However, it wasn’t just Western officials that took aim at Russia. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also stated that “Russia’s invasion is causing massive suffering and devastation to the country and its people” and then (rather inexplicably) added that “it’s fueling global economic dislocation triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic”. Neither of these statements makes much sense, as he has said virtually nothing about the suffering of the people of Donbass in the six years since taking office.

“Tensions between major powers are at an historic high. So are the risks of conflict, through misadventure or miscalculation,” Guterres also warned.

Apparently, he stated this to “even out” his previous one-sided statement, but he failed in this too, as he never mentioned which side was responsible for stoking the tensions to a boiling point. Still, perhaps the most laughable example of endless hypocrisy came from the US, when its UN representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield called Lavrov himself “hypocritical” and criticized Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression.

“Our hypocritical convener today, Russia, invaded its neighbor, Ukraine, and struck at the heart of the UN Charter. This illegal, unprovoked and unnecessary war runs directly counter to our most shared principles – that a war of aggression and territorial conquest is never, ever acceptable,” she said.

Again, such statements are beyond laughable or even enraging to dozens of countries that have been invaded or targeted by Washington DC. However, what’s truly disturbing is how the US is abusing its status as the UN’s permanent host country. There have been countless examples of Russian, Belarussian, Syrian, North Korean and many other officials, diplomats, journalists, etc. that have been denied entry into the US, preventing access to what is supposed to be an impartial organization.

These incessant Western-induced tensions serve as a testament to the notion that the UN should be reformed significantly. Liz Truss, one of the UK’s recent fast-track prime ministers, floated the idea last year, one of the very few things she was right about. Of course, her reasoning for the move was quite the opposite, but the point still stands. The actual world should start creating truly international institutions that are completely divorced from the malign influence of the US-led political West. This includes either relocating or even completely replacing the UN itself.

The very idea that increasingly irrelevant countries such as France or the UK have permanent seats at the UNSC, unlike actual giants such as Brazil or India, is geopolitically ludicrous. If the political West aims to control so-called “international institutions”, then it can do so within its own geopolitical boundaries. But the issue is that it aims to control quite literally everyone, which has been preventing the emergence of a truly independent multipolar world for decades. To say nothing of how the political West has been (ab)using the UN to promote or even impose its so-called “values” on the rest of the world, something that the vast majority of civilizations find repugnant.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

April 25, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Progressive Hypocrite | France, Russia, UK, United Nations, United States