The Horseshoe Table: An Inside View of the Security Council

In his foreword, [Boutros Boutros-Ghali] notes that "aspirants for permanent membership of the Council will not contribute much to the democratization of international relations unless they are willing to take a risk, which I believe to be minimal [sic], of a temporary set back to their national interests for the sake of promoting and defending international morality" (ix). While it is difficult to disagree with Boutros-Ghali's premise (absent the caveat), I know with certainty, as I expect does he, that no aspirant to permanent membership would accept any significant risk to their national interests and would set aside such interests only in the most extreme circumstances. Indeed, Boutros-Ghali experienced more than a setback to his own interest in a second term as secretary general when he refused to kowtow to the interests of the UN's most powerful member. [Gharekhan] observes, "His was a very creative mind which did not always help him win too many friends" (230). Following an Austrian proposal that a series of "safe areas" be established throughout Bosnia to limit ethnic cleansing, rather reluctantly, in June of 1993, "[t]he secretary General submitted a report in which he pitched the requirement for additional troops at 34,000 if the pockets were to be made safe." But subsequently, under pressure from the British and Americans to come up with a cheaper option, "the secretary General allowed himself to put forward a 'light option' of 7,600." "With the benefit of hindsight," Gharekhan laconically notes, "offering the light option was perhaps not well advised" (128). However, "the additional troops were not made available...[but] as far as the Council was concerned [the members of the Council] had discharged their responsibility by authorizing the troops; they did not believe it was their duty to help obtain the troops." This is an excellent example of both the council's penchant for parsimony-in this case, with lethal consequences-and for self-delusion through the approval of "unrealistic mandates and inadequate resources" (168). Towards the end of the book, Gharekhan notes that "we the peoples" have "hardly anything to do with the manner in which 'their' United Nations functions or in which 'their' security Council discharges its mandate of preserving peace and security." And he resignedly concludes that "to expect anything more might be natural and legitimate but it is not realistic" (310). Yet despite all this, he remains "a firm believer in the rel