The United Nations (UN) has become gridlocked and ineffective on the biggest issues of the day, said Foreign Minister S Jaishankar on Monday, arguing that the world needs the body and should reform it rather than work around it.
“It’s obvious to everybody by now that the UN is gridlocked,” Jaishankar said at the concluding session of the fifth Kautilya Economic Conclave in New Delhi.
He cited conflicts in the Gulf and Ukraine, issues in Africa and even the Covid-19 pandemic, where, he said, the UN had been “largely irrelevant to the decision-making”. Jaishankar later said “ineffectiveness” was the better word.
Blaming the UN Security Council’s (UNSC’s) structure, he said it no longer represents the entirety of the global interest.
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“The UN started with 51 members. It’s got almost four times that number today. So, if you have grown four times and you want to keep the old board of management, it’s not going to work. It’s common sense.”
Jaishankar, who recently addressed the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, said the world needs the UN. “The UN has done a big service to the international community. Our job must be to fix the UN, not to work around the UN.”
The other panellist at the session, former Singapore foreign minister George Yong Boon Yeo, argued that the US had undermined the institutions it once built, and that Asia should build regional structures. He said India and China held near-identical positions on Ukraine and global institutions, and that, if they stood together, “many structures will hold”.
“The WTO can continue without the US. The WHO is continuing without the US… India, Asean and China can work together,” said Yeo.
Jaishankar rejected the premise, saying “we can’t seriously look at a global trading system without the United States”.
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“The US is such a major trading power and is the biggest economy. So the idea that a few countries come together and then try to fix the problem because the US is a problem… I don’t think that’s a viable option,” he said.
He said the US wasn’t to blame for all the trade problems. “A lot of the market distortions which have come into the trading system have not come from the US.”
On the Ukraine conflict, Jaishankar said India had long held that the war is unlikely to be resolved on the battlefield. “And, therefore, it was important to have negotiations between the parties. Dialogue and diplomacy were probably the best pathway.”
He criticised peace gatherings held without Moscow. “We always felt, what is the point of having a gathering dealing with the Ukraine conflict where Russia is not there?”
He said India’s involvement deepened after an attack on a ship which killed Indian sailors. Those talks widened to cover grain shipments from the Black Sea and then energy. “We still keep in touch with both sides,” Jaishankar said.
Asked how India looks at its ties with the US, China, Russia and Europe, Jaishankar said that we are moving towards a multipolar world, whose architecture and geometry are very different from the way they used to be before.
“Given India’s perspective, I would argue that actually every relationship, net-net, is a plus.”
On India’s role for developing nations, he said: “The Global South does expect a country like India to go up on that stage and articulate [its concerns]. Somebody has to do it. And that somebody, in the eyes of many countries, is a country like India.”
“We may be, in many ways, unique, but we are not distant from the world. We are very connected, and we feel that obligation to build that into our foreign policy.”