Instrument of order

Does the Security Council matter in an era of geopolitical tension?

The inability of the Security Council to affect the major military dimensions of the Ukraine and Israel-Gaza crises is unsurprising to any realist scholar of international politics, but has generated renewed questions about the effectiveness of the U.N. writ large. A case for reform should flow logically from this critique: With changed membership and changed rules, the Security Council might be able to take decisions where currently it is blocked. In fact, a key element of the reform conversation is about expansion of the category of U.N. permanent members. Yet, even some of its proponents acknowledge this is likely to decrease, not increase the ability of the council to reach consensus and drive action. 

Would-be reformers among the rising powers argue that membership expansion is simply a matter of right, and of legitimacy. In the absence of membership reform, they assert, the council cannot hope to serve as an anchor institution of a treaty-based order. With permanent membership that reflects the distribution of power at the end of World War II (with the exception of the inclusion of China), the reformers argue that the Security Council cannot represent the current international order or act in its interest. They therefore seek a new membership arrangement that more accurately reflects the distribution of gross domestic product and diplomatic influence as of the early 21st century. “The realities of 1945, when the council was established, have long been superseded by the geopolitical realities of the modern era and a new century; with the need for change being felt across the board,” argued India’s permanent representative to the U.N. in March 2024. 

Neither argument does much to address what should be the more fundamental question: What is the potential role of the Security Council in confronting new dynamics of geopolitical tension and risk? This is, after all, the foundational instrument of contemporary international law, and the primary treaty mechanism designed to restrain the major powers—at least in theory. How such a body works or doesn’t in an era of great power contest is directly germane to the question of whether such contest remains limited or escalates.  

During the post-Cold War era, the Security Council evolved into the primary instrument at the disposal of the West for dealing with civil wars and humanitarian crises in Africa and Latin America (and episodically in Asia and Europe as well). And in New York, consensus among the permanent members of the council became the norm, not the exception. All this mattered: though the U.S. narrative about international order neglects the point, the fact is that of the 80-plus wars that have been waged in the post-Cold War period, very few have ended peacefully without the deployment of third-party stabilizing forces, and the U.N. either deployed or authorized the large majority of those. 

These roles will be hard to square with current geopolitical realities and sustained distrust between several of the permanent members of the council. Indeed, the council has been more stymied of late, even in dealing with conflicts in Africa, let alone in grappling with crises that involve the major military powers.  

There is, however, another angle to consider: which is to look back to the role played by the Security Council during the Cold War. In that fraught period, the body served less as an instrument for internal crisis management and more as a guardrail against great power escalation. During the first four decades of its existence, Washington and Moscow repeatedly used the Security Council as an instrument through which to de-escalate crises that threatened to spiral into outright superpower hostilities. From the Berlin blockade through the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Yom Kippur War, the Security Council was an important instrument in the toolkit of Cold War crisis management. This largely overlooked mechanism took two forms: direct U.S.-Soviet negotiations at the U.N. building, and indirect U.S.-Soviet negotiations through the U.N. Secretaries-General. In both cases, U.N. action was often facilitated by the middle powers of the day. When successful, this led to two sets of outcomes: changes in U.S. or Soviet military movements to bring a spiraling conflict back under control; or the deployment of some form of U.N.-sponsored monitoring or confidence-building arrangement designed to stop a conflict between other parties escalating to the point where it risked bringing in the nuclear powers. 

As India, Brazil, and others continue to push for U.N. expansion, this older history of the council, more than the post-Cold War experience, should be the framework through which we examine the question of the possible utility of the council and the question of what membership reform would accomplish. To that end, this essay mines the history of great power negotiations and crisis management at and through the U.N. during the Cold War, to highlight its latent de-escalation or guardrail function.  

The essay also briefly scans a subset of post-Cold War crises—not the civil wars in Africa and Latin America that became the mainstay of U.N. action, but a handful of crises that rose up the agenda of the major powers and threatened wider regional conflict. The purpose of this second part of the essay is to amplify awareness of the menu of diplomatic and operational arrangements—tools like preventive deployments, multinational command arrangements, and border certification missions—available through the U.N., should the United States, China, Russia, or other major powers find themselves in search of diplomatic instruments for de-escalation.

Backdrop: The U.N.’s evolving role, and changing international conditions

In the first 25 years of the post-Cold War era—roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the start of the Trump administration—Western governments came to rely on the U.N. as an instrument in the management of transnational threats and internal conflicts, especially in Latin America (in the 1990s) and Africa (in the 1990s and 2000-2010s). The United States, of course, looked more to its own power and to NATO; but even Washington frequently made recourse to the Security Council, and encouraged or supported expansive efforts by the U.N. to mitigate, mediate, or manage internal and regional crises. To give one measure of the expansion of U.N. roles, by the mid-2000s, the U.N. had more than 120,000 troops and police deployed into crises worldwide, as well as tens of thousands of humanitarian workers. Only the United States had more armed personnel deployed to crises overseas, and some of those were deployed within U.N. arrangements.   

The international conditions under which this occurred was American unipolarity—or to use the evocative French phrase, “hyper-puissance.” What’s more, in the pre-9/11 period, American policy was oriented toward extending the multilateral order, both in the economic and security space. It was a benign environment for Washington: outside of the United States, only the major European states had substantial diplomatic weight in world affairs, and their military power was embedded in U.S.-dominated NATO. While Russia retained its nuclear stockpile, it was profoundly degraded in its economic and diplomatic capacity, and China was yet to rise. There were occasional flare-ups in relations between the permanent members of the Security Council—in Bosnia; in Kosovo; over the E-3 incident; and over the implementation of the Iraq no-fly arrangements that followed the Gulf War. But in the main, the United States and the Western powers could shape international conflict and crisis management without sustained interference from non-Western powers. Even in their own backyard: for example, when the US pushed to create U.N. missions in Tajikistan and Nepal, Moscow and Beijing complained but did not veto U.N. action. The period also saw substantial evolution in U.N. arrangements and tools: the frequent deployment of peacekeeping forces to internal conflict, versus on the borders of conflict (which was rare during the Cold War); the use of Chapter VII to authorize coercive measures; the development of a post-conflict peacebuilding machinery and doctrine; and extensive humanitarian operations inside the borders of countries facing conflict (which was unheard of during the Cold War.) 

As relations between the world’s top military powers have reverted to greater tensions and a more militarized posture, the question arises as to whether the Security Council will be sidelined. Recently, Crisis Group’s Richard Gowan, a noted observer of the U.N., highlighted that while to date the powers have not entirely stymied U.N. peace operations in Africa, they have been reluctant to bring the U.N. into the management of major new crises outside that continent.  That was evident in the Syria crisis, where early agreements by the Security Council’s Permanent Five (P5) members (China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the United States) on U.N.-facilitated conflict management arrangements faltered shortly after they were agreed; and it’s been true in spades in Ukraine. In the Israel-Gaza crisis, the Security Council failed to reach a consensus on action until late March 2024, when a tepid resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire and a release of hostages passed with a U.S. abstention—a resolution made even more tepid by the (spurious) American claim that the resolution was “non-binding.” 

So, as threats to international security mount and evolve, and tensions between the top powers rise, can the U.N. play a broader role in maintaining international peace and security, by helping to mitigate great power tensions? Can it recover the role it played during the Cold War, as a guardrail against escalation?

Current conditions

The basic conditions within which we should assess the potential for the U.N. to contribute to international security are these:

• major tensions between the United States and China and “persistent competition” between them;
• the risk of outright conflict between the United States and China in the Western Pacific, especially (but not only) in the Taiwan Strait and surrounding waters;
• ongoing friction between the United States/Europe and Russia; persistent strain and occasional (and increasingly dangerous) flare-ups between India and China along the Himalayan border

Beyond the immediate issues touching the permanent members, there is also sustained antipathy between the military powers of the Middle East, growing tensions in Latin America, and resurgent civil wars and crises in Africa. If U.S.-China-Russia-Europe antagonism continues to mount, we might expect this will block innovation at the UN. 

This moment of mounting geopolitical tensions is increasingly referred to as a “new Cold War.” Elsewhere I have argued that this framing is at best incomplete; the nature of economic ties between the West and China, and the shared exposure to global public goods/bads, mean that we are operating in a system that bears only partial resemblance to that which held during the period of U.S.-Soviet rivalry. What’s more, the United States faces not one but two nuclear rivals. Wordsmithing aside, it is a period of mounting and increasingly militarized frictions, which risk spilling into outright conflict. Managing that increasingly tense competition and avoiding outright conflict will be a central policy challenge in the coming decades. The question for this essay is whether the U.N. will be relevant to that challenge, or how.

Looking back: How the United States used the Security Council during the Cold War

One person who saw the U.N. as a relevant instrument for managing great power crisis was President John Kennedy.  

The Cuban Missile Crisis was, by most accounts, the most acute crisis of the Cold War, the closest we’ve yet come to a full-scale nuclear exchange, and thus the most dangerous moment yet faced by humanity. In American lore, it’s commonly depicted as a moment of American resolve, and a case study in the vital importance of a willingness to risk the use of large-scale force as a means to ultimately deter war. American resolve was essential. Less commonly recalled in the recounting of the episode is that the Soviet turnaround and eventual withdrawal was accomplished not just through resolve, but also through diplomacy. And that the mechanism for diplomacy was U.S.-Soviet communications through the United Nations. Just as much as a case study in resolve, the crisis is also a case study in the vital importance of diplomatic instruments for crisis de-escalation.  

This essay is not the place for a full recounting of U.N. Secretary-General U Thant’s role, but some essential elements are germane. His initial foray into the crisis came at the urging of a grouping of so-called “neutral nations”—analogous in some respects to the role played by today’s middle powers. His initial moves were resisted by both the Soviets and the Americans. Recently released records from the period show that following a debate involving Dean Rusk, Adlai Stevenson, and others, it was Kennedy himself who settled on the approach of working with the Secretary-General rather than trying to keep him out of the process. Kennedy subsequently worked closely with Thant to shape his messages to the Soviets, the second of which helped to orchestrate the Soviet naval turnaround. Kennedy’s insight was that he could give Khrushchev a face-saving exit from the crisis by working through Thant. Kennedy would later acknowledge Thant’s role, saying that “U Thant has put the world deeply in his debt.”  

In the literature on conflict management and war termination, this issue of the role of third parties is essential. When opposing (especially warring) parties distrust each other, proposals for de-escalation that emanate from one of the parties themselves are bound to be greeted with suspicion by the other. Opposing parties, too, lack trust in the other side’s willingness to implement any agreement. Third parties can ease both difficulties, by generating or communicating ideas for de-escalation and agreeing to observe and report on implementation or violations, giving both sides an impartial reference point for action. And they can provide face-saving off-ramps when one party to a conflict realizes it needs to step back but is reluctant to be seen to give up or give ground. Third-party roles like this have frequently been played by diplomats of neutral nations, middle-power diplomats, and representatives of international institutions—notably the United Nations.  

Kennedy’s collaboration with the U.N. Secretary-General to handle this deep crisis with the Soviets was part of a pattern set early in the Cold War. Indeed, for the first three decades of the Cold War, the United States or other permanent members turned to the U.N. to deal with several of the most dangerous crises of the period. They are briefly recounted in what follows.

In short, from its founding in the late 1940s and through its first three decades, the Security Council was frequently used by the Soviets and the Americans as an instrument of de-escalation—a guardrail of sorts. And not in peripheral crises, but in the most important crises that confronted the two superpowers and risked entangling them.  

The 1980s, though, saw little of this kind of U.S.-Soviet crisis management at the United Nations. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s appointment of Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick to the position of U.N. Ambassador kickstarted a new U.S. approach to the Soviet problem, and thus also to the United Nations. She withdrew the United States from UNESCO (not for the last time); highlighted in front of Congress the issue of the budget and costs of the organization; and focused on the imbalance against the United States in U.N. bodies like the U.N. General Assembly and the Human Rights Council. In his first term, Reagan also employed the kind of anti-U.N. rhetoric that we have come to expect from Republican presidents. That being said, as some of his Republican successors have also done, Reagan adopted a more pro-U.N. stance in his second term and ended up choosing the U.N. General Assembly as the stage from which he first signaled to the Soviets that he was prepared to begin engaging in diplomatic overtures—moves that eventually resulted in the Reykjavik Summit. And as the Cold War was dying down, the Reagan administration supported the deployment of U.N. mediators to help quell a mounting crisis between Turkey and Bulgaria—a regional conflict by one account, but also a potential conflict between a NATO and a Warsaw Pact member just as efforts were underway to bury the Cold War.  

As the Cold War wound down, and international politics entered a new phase, four operations at the U.N. set the stage for what was to follow—a much wider involvement in internal wars and humanitarian crises, largely at the urging and direction of Western powers. First was the Gulf War, or Operation Desert Storm, which took place under the aegis of the Security Council, following intense diplomacy by President George Bush Sr. to secure international support for the action. The Gulf War was not only the second major U.N. act to reverse aggression (after the Korean War), it was also the second larger-scale operation wherein the United States deployed substantial military power through the United Nations. It also left a crucial legacy in the form of U.N. Security Council Resolution 688, drafted in response to Iraqi fighting against the Kurds, following the withdrawal of U.S. forces. That resolution, for the first time, acknowledged that internal crises could constitute a “threat to international peace and security.” It laid the legal and conceptual basis for the expansive role the U.N. would subsequently play in helping to reduce the surge in civil wars that accompanied the end of the Cold War. Second, the U.N. was authorized to mount an election observation mission—the first of its kind—during the South African elections that followed the Mandela-De Klerk agreements, and then supported the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed. These roles both helped to bring an end to apartheid and set the stage for much of what the U.N. would do beyond narrowly described peacekeeping, in its civil war management roles in the post-Cold War period. Third, after the completion of the Paris Accords in 1991, the Security Council agreed to the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping presence and transitional sovereignty arrangement to quell the Cambodian civil war. Similar in model to the U.N. operation in the Congo in the 1960s, the U.N. presence helped to stabilize Cambodia after the end of Cold War era hostilities. (And, as in Congo, it also left in place a government whose human rights record was highly questionable.) And then, fourth, famously, the Bush Sr. administration pushed for a major U.N. role in response to the civil war and humanitarian crisis in Somalia and deployed substantial U.S. forces alongside the U.N. mission. The eventual disaster and attacks on U.S. and U.N. forces in Somalia would trigger the deep aversion to U.N. operations that came to characterize U.S. attitudes to the U.N. for much of the subsequent period.

Lessons from strategic crises in the post-Cold War era: Experimentation and innovation

In the post-Cold War era, the United States faced no opposing great or even major powers. Therefore, the role of the Security Council in creating mechanisms for de-escalation in conflicts involving such powers became largely irrelevant (with a partial exception during Kosovo.) The role of the U.N. changed from helping the great powers de-escalate, to helping the Western powers manage second-tier conflicts and humanitarian crises. Although the United States entered the post-Cold War era with an aversion to the U.N. born in Somalia, it quickly changed course and either pushed the U.N. or acceded to others (notably the British and the activist European middle powers) pushing the U.N. to take on a wide range of roles. The Security Council would go on to authorize peacekeeping, peacebuilding, and humanitarian operations in dozens of internal conflicts in the post-Cold War era. Most of these operations were in weak states, or states with no diplomatic influence, where the risk of regional contagion was slight, and where the interests of the leading powers were largely humanitarian.  

There were, however, a small subset of these conflicts in which the United States or other nuclear or nuclear-aspiring countries had direct stakes. Containing these conflicts, or preventing them from escalation, was an episodic but important function of the Security Council during the post-Cold War period.   

A brief mining of several episodes of Security Council-backed crisis management in strategic or semi-strategic crises in the post-Cold War period may be germane to present debates about the search for guardrails in great power competition, for this reason. What is ahead of us, likely, is a sustained period of great power tension, and with it is likely to come a renewed dynamic of proxy conflict and tension. Containing these crises from escalation is an important part of preventing direct great power war. Thus, to have a richer menu of experiences and options from which to draw, it’s worth a brief review of the handful of more strategic crises of the post-Cold War era.  

That menu of options includes:  

• the preventive deployment of border forces, to forestall a brewing crisis  
• the use of transitional administration of disputed or newly liberated territory  
• deployment of inspection missions to disarm chemical or other munitions 
• diplomatic arrangements combined with sanctions designed to prevent an actor from acquiring nuclear or other strategic weapons 
• observer roles that can monitor withdrawal from disputed or recently occupied territory
• the deployment of multinational forces with U.N. authorization to stabilize newly independent or disputed territory. 

Various elements of this menu might, for example, be relevant should Moscow eventually reach the conclusion that it cannot achieve its objectives in Ukraine, and Kyiv decides that it is willing to live with some form of interim arrangements in some parts of Crimea or parts of the other territories occupied by Russia, as a way to halt the devastation that has accompanied Russia’s invasion.

Having shifted from superpower de-escalation to the management of secondary crises required innovation.

Thus, throughout the post-Cold War era, while engaging widely in weak states and humanitarian crises, the major powers also used the U.N. Security Council to play intermittent but significant roles in strategically relevant crises. And throughout these cases, there have been useful innovations in U.N. instruments that could be germane in the face of new geopolitical crises.   

The question ahead of us is: if the Security Council is expanded to bring in new permanent members, primarily from the Global South, how will this affect the roles played by the U.N. and the likelihood of useful innovation in crises?

Looking forward

This review of cases, especially during the Cold War, points to some themes relevant to today’s international security landscape.  

1. It is worth noting that in several of the most important examples, it was the United States itself that initiated the use of the Security Council as a framework or instrument for conflict management. This is important to emphasize. In the post-Cold War era, with the U.N.’s expansive roles in conflicts and crises that are secondary or tertiary to U.S. interests, the U.N. Secretariat has taken on a correspondingly larger role in initiation, policy-setting, and managing its operations. This has been good for civil war mitigation, but arguably it has been bad for U.N. relations with what is still the world’s most important security power. Of course, at no point has the United States been anything other than a highly influential actor within the U.N. framework. But Washington exerting influence on U.N. operations and policies is still quite a different thing from the United States—or another major power—using the U.N. as an instrument of its own diplomacy with peer competitors or rivals.
2. Notwithstanding the first point, it is also notable that some of the most important Security Council-led contributions during the Cold War were opposed at first by both the United States and the Soviets. When that opposition was sustained, the Security Council’s role inevitably faded—for example, initial efforts to resolve the Falklands crisis faded, as have repeated U.N. efforts to insert themselves into India-Pakistan diplomacy. But when faced with a Secretary-General with the guts to risk pushback, the United States sometimes accepted the U.N.’s role, and eventually recognized the value of the role.
3. Superpower diplomacy at the Security Council was often buttressed and prodded towards an active crisis management role by the “neutral” powers (during the Cold War) or the “middle” powers (in the post-Cold War period.) The logic for this is obvious—working semi-collectively through the U.N., second-tier powers could both add to their collective weight and shield themselves to some degree from the risk of being at the receiving end of Washington or Moscow’s ire.
4. Vitally: With the sole and accidental exception of the Korean War arrangements (during the Soviet Union’s brief and instantly regretted withdrawal from the U.N.), the Security Council cannot act in major crises without the explicit and direct backing of the top powers. This is obvious from a realist perspective but needs to be stressed against the backdrop of commentary that sometimes misplaces the agency in international crisis management. The U.N. is a framework, an instrument, a tool; by itself, it is not an agent of action. Only at the urging or insistence of the major powers, or with their acquiescence, can the Security Council play roles, sometimes (in limited ways) by the direct diplomacy of U.N. diplomats, more often by creating a framework through which other states can cooperate or coordinate. When assessing potential roles in strategic crises, the essential point is this: the Security Council will only be relevant if the major powers want it to be, and if they want to de-escalate the crisis that confronts them. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the question of whether the Security Council can be or could have been used hinges not on the U.N., but on Moscow’s willingness to see an end to the crisis—of which there is no evidence. If the major military powers are looking to engender or escalate crises, there is little or nothing that the U.N.—or any other body, tool, or actor—can do about it. But if they are looking to de-escalate crises or manage tensions, then we may see a renewed recourse to the Security Council.

If so, and against the backdrop of a changing international order and distribution of power, does membership reform matter?  

The argument that it does is usually framed in terms of the synchronicity, or not, of the membership of the Security Council and the distribution of power on the world stage. During the Cold War, it is argued, the structure of the Security Council matched the structure of power in world affairs; the presence of the United States and the Soviet Union as veto-wielding powers meant that the two actors that were generating instability were also present in the mechanism they could use to generate diplomacy and de-escalation. Now that the balance of power has changed, the membership needs to change as well, or so it is argued.  

The case is not cut and dry. First, the three countries most likely to be directly involved in a geopolitical crisis—the United States, Russia, and China—are already present in the Security Council as veto-wielding members. (This is an accident of history: the permanent member category was initially to be restricted to the ‘four policemen’ – the United States, U.K., France, and the Soviet Union; it was a late-game decision to extend a fifth seat to China.) Europe, which remains economically and diplomatically powerful, and has the potential to be militarily powerful, is represented by the two countries with Europe’s most capable military and intelligence arms: the U.K. and France. Germany’s absence means that the fourth largest economy in the world, and an increasingly important diplomatic actor, is absent; but informal arrangements like the P5+1 framework for negotiations with Iran create an easy workaround there. The real case for change lies in the absence of India and Japan—the third and fifth largest economies in the world, and two countries quite likely to be ensnared in geopolitical tensions and crises.  

The case is harder to make for South Africa and Brazil—somewhat ironically, for Brazil is the sole actor among the leading economies to retain a deep political commitment to international law. South Africa’s presence on the Security Council, it is argued, would increase the legitimacy of the body’s actions vis-à-vis crisis management in Africa. This is a valid argument and concern to be sure, though limited in terms of the Security Council’s potential roles in managing strategic tensions. Brazil’s presence on the Security Council would do little to ease any mismatch between crisis players and Security Council members; there are few if any major power crises on Brazil’s horizon. Brazil has often made its case in terms of regional representation and legitimacy. The more compelling argument is that having on the Security Council a permanent member with diplomatic and economic clout and with a deep commitment to multilateralism could bolster U.N. diplomacy during a period when the natural tendency of the competing powers will be toward tension and escalation, not diplomatic solutions.  

Moreover, it could just as easily be argued that to adequately reflect the contemporary geopolitical reality, the Security Council should also have permanent members from among the leading powers of the Middle East—Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. But no one is making this argument and it would be a dubious argument on its face; leaving aside the fact that any effort to make one of these countries a permanent member of the Security Council would significantly escalate tensions in an already volatile region.²

It’s hard to assess whether membership reform of the Security Council will happen, even if the major players of the Global South keep up the pressure. It’s only happened once before, and not in the category of permanent seats. There are grounds for serious skepticism, especially because China is dead set on opposing a permanent seat for either Japan or India; though whether they would visibly and explicitly block them, if a reform package advanced that far, remains to be tested.  

But whether with a wider membership or without, the deeper question is about the role of the Security Council in a period of geopolitical tension. As the space for consensus constricts, some U.N. roles will fall by the wayside – at a serious cost to human security. The question is: Will other, older, roles come back to the fore? And will the Security Council be able to serve—alongside informal arrangements—as a guardrail against escalation, during a period of danger in international politics?  

It will not be easy to restore this sensibility of the Security Council as an instrument for creating guardrails in strategic crises. It is striking to look back, for example, at exchanges between the U.S. president and the State Department during the Berlin crisis: one reason that Secretary Marshall decided to adopt the U.N. strategy was his fear that Congress “will not understand” if State did not make recourse to the highest international diplomatic body in the search for solutions. It’s hard to imagine any version of today’s American Congress having this view! The United States has also now long neglected the early practice of presidents appointing a U.N. ambassador from the opposing political party, to help generate bipartisan support for its diplomacy—a practice that led to Dean Rusk’s influential tenure at the United Nations. Nor does the United States any longer live up to Truman’s initial commitment to the U.N. to provide it with strategic airlift, gratis, a practice it maintained until the 1960s, then discontinued (with one recent exception, during the emergency operation in the Central African Republic in 2013, at the urging of then U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power).  

Still, given that China and Russia maintain a strong focus on the U.N. and its role in international order, and given the paucity of regional security and conflict management mechanisms in Asia, we may find that as the United States and its core allies up the ante on deterrence in Asia, they also find an increasing need for diplomatic instruments. Neither the Association of Southeast Asian Nations nor the Shanghai Cooperation Organization nor the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperations nor the Asian Regional Forum will provide them. In Europe: If the political dynamics surrounding the Ukraine war change, we may find ourselves in need of mechanisms through which to negotiate war termination, or interim arrangements on the ground.  

The challenge will be to reinvent the older sensibility of using the Security Council as an instrument for crisis management, in new theaters, with a new rival, in rapidly changing times. Whether Washington comes to this conclusion, or Beijing does, or Moscow does, remains to be seen. In the meantime, activist middle powers and the U.N. itself would do well to recall this older role, and to remind the top powers, via their own quiet diplomacy, of the quite substantial menu of arrangements for de-escalation that the Security Council can provide.