Trust in multilateralism, and in the United Nations (UN), is the half-breath between a state’s decision to send in the armored divisions and its call to the Secretary-General or the Security Council. It is also the possibility that, once fighting has begun, adversaries will turn to the UN to help them step back, silence their guns, and find a peaceful settlement. In both circumstances, states that have little trust in one another must have sufficient confidence in the UN’s judgment, mediating instruments, and capabilities to accept its intervention. Upon that confidence rests much of the hope of preventing, managing, and ending the scourge of war.
Preserving and earning that confidence is the work of the next Secretary-General, who will inherit no shortage of reform proposals. Yet doctrine must arise from a deep appreciation and diagnosis of the moment. The UN was created to prevent and manage war by enabling states that distrust one another to place sufficient trust in a common institution to pursue peaceful solutions.
We are now in an interregnum between the fading ambitions of convergence and a possible order of lawful coexistence, in which states that share neither political systems nor a common destination still accept the Charter’s limits on force and settle their disputes through agreed rules and trusted intermediaries. These intervening years are marked by uncertainty, sudden shifts in power and allegiance, and the willingness of important states, regional powers and permanent members of the Security Council among them, to cast aside the constraints of the Charter in pursuit of wars of choice. The United States, the organization’s largest contributor, has withdrawn from several UN bodies and reduced its funding to others, and the Secretariat is cutting its budget and staff to remain solvent. The next Secretary-General will take office while some of the states that founded and fund the institution openly question its purpose.
The office will have a part in determining whether this turbulence gives way to an order in which states can coexist peacefully despite enduring differences in their interests and political systems. Yet the resulting paradox is that declining trust between states increases their need for the UN’s independent political judgment, even as member states have progressively constrained the Secretariat’s capacity to exercise it. This paper traces the political settlements through which the UN has helped states manage their differences, examines the three relationships of trust on which its effectiveness depends, and derives an operating doctrine for the next Secretary-General from the task of rebuilding that confidence and helping bring about a lawful coexistence.
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