Abstract:

The United Nations collective security system has been inefficient vis-à-vis many international security crises during and after the Cold War. The conventional wisdom suggests that this is mainly because the permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) have often applied to the veto with regard to problems concerning their interests. Therefore reform suggestions for the system focus on the UNSC’s structure and decision-making process. However, realism does not agree that international organizations are autonomous actors that could preserve peace and security. International organizations are shaped by the most powerful nations who utilize them to pursue their interests. International organizations are just a reflection of the distribution of power which is the main factor leading to war and peace. This paper examines the efficiency problem of the UN collective security system from a realist perspective. It argues that national interests and regional balance of power are the main factors affecting decisions for military intervention in a given international crisis. The UNSC authorization plays a role only in facilitating such a decision as it provides international support and legitimacy for the intervention. In order to show how those factors function in practice, the paper turns to the significant cases from the post-Cold-War era: The First Gulf War, the Kosovo crisis, and the Syrian civil war. The Syria crisis is analyzed comparatively with the Libya crisis which emerged on the basis of similar causes but led to an intervention authorized by the UNSC.

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