September 5, 2016
The need to reform the United Nations and especially the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where the veto power of the five permanent members holds the key to crucial global decisions, is imperative. This is an opinion that has been expressed on numerous occasions in recent times and Hardeep Singh Puri’s book is another important voice in this direction.
The book makes a powerful case of why reform of the UNSC is so crucial and to illustrate this argument, Puri uses the examples of Syria, Libya, and Yemen, among others. Closer home, the author points to India’s intervention in Sri Lanka and why it was such a resounding failure. While the argument in itself is nothing new, what makes the book interesting is that much of the insights come from an insider.
Puri served as Permanent Representative of India in New York from 2009-12. Interestingly, that was the period when India was a non-permanent member of the Security Council and Puri served as president of the Council in August 2011 and November 2012. The workings of the UNSC, which have always been conducted in a veil of secrecy, are revealed in parts in this book and that is important for any student of diplomacy or politics. Or for anyone who wonders how the world and its global institutions function.
The author makes an interesting addition to the existing vocabulary of international relations with ‘perilous intervention,’ which he defines as ‘is about whimsical and reflexive decision making, and about making decisions with far-reaching consequences, without thinking through their consequences.’ The author elaborates that it is about ‘the urge to intervene, which is often to ‘achieve a regime change,’ even when that is not the stated objective.
The author refers to ‘the full folly of the 2003 Iraq misadventure’ and how that resulted in the rise of the Islamic State. The book and the author can take credit for doing some straight talk, which many in the world of diplomacy eschew. ‘It may still be politically incorrect to say that life under Saddam Hussein was better, or that Gaddafi embodied the Libyan state, which has unraveled without hope in the absence of his iron-fisted rule. The objective reality is that al-Qaeda and ISIS could not have come into existence without powerful state sponsors, among them the countries that sought and worked for Saddam’s and Gaddafi’s ousters’.
The weak point in the book is the chapter on Sri Lanka. The author served in Sri Lanka in the run-up to the July 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord and one expected the chapter to spill the beans on some issues, which is not yet out in the public domain. However, the author sticks to the known narrative and that for the reader is a sore point.
The author makes a strong case for reform of the Security Council and for expansion in both permanent and non-permanent categories. It is an argument that is now being made by most countries of the world, especially non-western ones, for, as the author writes, ‘The urge to disregard notions of Westphalian state sovereignty, to a lesser or greater extent — and to intervene — is invariably more pronounced among the representatives of those countries, which were once colonial powers. Their desire to be presumptive, to set norms for everybody that reflect the views only of the West, has always been evident.’ Gladly, this time the observation comes from an insider and that gives the book an extra edge.