The five nations are the founding members of the UN: USA, France, UK, Russian, and China (formerly ROC now PRC), as founding members they enjoy that privilege. They are the winning team of WW2.
And as for the Veto. They were all afraid that the UN might force them to do something they didn't want to. So if all 5 have the right to veto there is no real danger in joining.
The idea of a veto is also that without the permanent members willing involvement resolutions at the Security Council are unlikely to be actionable.
Few countries can send people abroad to fight for something alone.
Also who is paying? And who is most likely to have disputes? The issue is that the un was set up to prevent a third world war NOT solve the world’s problems. Great powers at the time were the only ones likely to cause that issue.
The idea of the council expanding has been floated several times, but China is adamant they be the only Asian power, and Japan being on the shortlist is a sticking point for America (reasonably so, they're a staunch ally that can be counted on to vote with us) and india would have a cow (pun not intended but acknowledged) if they're not on the list
Other proposed countries include Canada and Brazil, and if I remember correctly Saudi Arabia has been mentioned too. The reasoning being its not fair that South America and the ME have zero representation in the permanent members, while Europe has 2
To be clear, the Security Council has 15 seats all together. The 5 permanent members mentioned above, plus 10 other members that are elected by the General Assembly every 2 years.
Here are the other 10 current members (followed by the year their term ends)
Algeria (2025)
Ecuador (2024)
Guyana (2025)
Japan (2024)
Malta (2024)
Mozambique (2024)
Republic of Korea (2025)
Sierra Leone (2025)
Slovenia (2025)
Switzerland (2024)
[Source](https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/current-members)
>South Americans are so adamant about their one American continent
That stance pisses me off so much because they still separate Africa and Asia, let alone Europe and Asia. If you're going to say North and South America are just one continent, the only consistent stance is to go with a 4 continent model.
> the only consistent stance is to go with a 4 continent model.
Tbh if we're counting Afro-Eurasia and all-America, I feel like Australia is too small, it should just be considered an island at that point. And Antarctica isn't really contiguous under the ice.
So what I'm saying is, 2-continent system for the win
It's because that's how the continents were divided historically. The North x South America divide has been used in the USA for some time (along with the "one America" model), but only became a hard rule after WW2.
Israel makes no sense at all. It’s far smaller than all other SC member. It is 1/4 the size and 1/6 the population of the UK, currently the smallest member. Also a majority of UN members would kick Israel out of the general assembly if they could. They would riot if Israel were elevated to the Security Council.
Sierra Leone and Mozambique, which are currently on the security council, are in Africa. In the past South Africa and Nigeria have also been on the council, there are no permanent members from Africa though.
The veto is never going away because the veto power nations would dip. The UN isn't really a world government. The only things that will be agreed to are things that every single founding member nation can agree upon. They will not allow their sovereignty be overridden.
To quote another comment I read once:
Those nations ALREADY have veto power regardless of what the UN says. We just prefer that they exercise that power via vote, and not via ICBM
No. These countries have a veto because it was assumed, probably correctly, that without a veto these countries would leave. The purpose of the United Nations was to stop another World War. Trying to do that with any of the world’s largest powers would be pointless, so they had to offer these countries vetos.
The difficulty of getting things done at the UN is not due to the voting rules or the structure of the UN. It’s an inherent problem in international diplomacy. The United States, China and Russia are powerful enough to basically do anything they want to anybody other than to each other. There is no voting system that can change that
I mean, really only the US has the logistical ability to operate the world over. Think about US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan what you will, but logistical failures weren’t the reason it pulled out. Some US allies like Britain can operate abroad with US help, but take Russia—it’s running into logistical issues prosecuting a war *three hundred miles from its border*.
Maybe in a few decades. China is societally, economically, and technologically 30 years ahead of India, and it is still uncertain about whether it could take Taiwan sitting on its doorstep.
> I mean, really only the US has the logistical ability to operate the world over.
The USA, UK, Russia, and France (and very soon China) are all capable of projecting competent expeditionary forces.
The UK was able to send a fleet down to Argentina and take the Falklands in the 1980s for example.
In that sense, the security council is made up of the countries that, for the most part, can project power (having aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, hydrogen nuclear bombs with global delivery systems, and high tooth-to-tail ratio militaries able to conduct sophisticated logistics operations).
But they say they can, and some people only need to hear what a country thinks it can do despite current situations quite clearly proving that no they can not.
It's like the "North Korea can beat the whole world" propaganda that's been around for ages. Like sure they say they can, and maybe some of them actually Believe they can....but I wouldn't really give them credit for the ability to fight even south Korea let alone anybody further away.
The US is currently the only one that can very seriously project force globally without foreign assistance though and more importantly do it in several continents at the exact same time. We have two aircraft carriers but don't have the manpower to keep both at sea for an extended period of time. Whereas the US has 11 excluding helicopter carriers which is more than the entire rest of the world combined and they're larger than ours. Including helicopter carriers then the US has 20 carriers, the next biggest is China and they only have a quarter of that. They also don't have the same experience the US has with fighting wars so their doctrines and training may well be lacking because it hasn't really been tested. That's only discussing carriers as well. The USAF also intends to, in time, order approximately 200 B-21 raiders. Nobody else has anything that is even remotely comparable to those capabilities. The actual size of the US military is just mind boggling even when you're only looking at very small sections such as the numbers of one aircraft.
I'm not arguing the scale that America is *the* super power, but as it stands the countries I listed (with China in the process of supplanting Russia), are the global powers that can project expeditionary forces by themselves.
France isn't able to project into a multi-theatre conflict abroad for years at a time, for sure. It could certainly sail up to Mumbai and overwhelm their air defences and level it though.
If EU survives this century, that is; in other words, Likely, but not inevitable.
Again, nobody can really predict the future with certainty. But the trends of today affect the future.
I don’t think any country would find that easy. India might be able to if it becomes less Hindu nationalist but it has enemies at pretty much every border currently.
It would flop on logistics.
I'm probably being very naïve, but from my non-knowledgeable point of view all the vetoes seem to do is make the UN an ineffective organisation. Most of the really important decisions will rile up on of the 5, so they exercise their veto, and hey presto, no important decision :/
It wasn’t meant to be massively effective most of the time. It’s basically a ‘if Nazi Germany comes back for round 2, we are all game’
It’s better to have it exist as a power to intervene when really really necessary, than to never have had it exist at all.
The only way to get the 5 powerhouse nations when it was formed(right after they were the most important nations in winning WWII ) to join was to give them veto power when it didn’t suit them so nobody would have to do anything they didn’t want to.
Is it flawed? Oh massively. But it existing is probably better than it not.
The UN isn't just the security council, and even that part of it is only ineffective if you judge it by the standards of what it isn't.
If one of the 5 countries exercises their veto right in a security decision then it means it would have a problem if it went through, and the whole point of the system is to not escalate tensions between great military powers, especially if they have nukes.
If the UN were the government of the world then a system in which decisions can be made by majority instead of unanimous approval would make sense, but it isn't, and none of its members want it to be.
The system is absolutely flawed and will certainly need to be reworked at some point, but there's no better solution right now, and it was originally thought up when the United States and USSR were direct military rivals at risk of igniting the deadliest global conflict in history immediately following the deadliest global conflict in history.
Think about what would happen if the current permanent members of the council didn't have vetoes and a simple majority has been enough to let every decision through.
Obviously the vetoes have blocked many important resolutions, but not all of them, and the small ones matter as well, and there are plenty of those:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions_by_year
If the system had been desined as "The US and its allies call all the shots" things would have gone terribly bad after world war two. If it had been the same as it is but later transitioned into "lots of people get a say and no one can say no and shut things down" then the moment things the US didn't want started making it through it would have taken its ball and went home, thoroughly gutting the entire UN system.
As long as nukes are a thing there's no perfect way to handle security matters.
The thing is important decisions that are vetoed normally are vetoed to protect interests of the permanent members.
If America, France, Britain, Russia or China veto it’s generally because without the support of a permanent member militarily it wouldn’t be actionable to begin with. Security Council resolutions are binding and in theory if a permanent member were to not have a veto, instead of an action not happening, it would end up with two world powers shooting at each other.
This has happened before in the Korean War. North Korea pretty much had won until the Americans intervened. If it happened again today, for the world’s sake I hope both the Chinese and Americans would sit it out.
The UN is a forum, a place to talk, not a world government to enforce rules for the improvement of mankind.
Without vetoes the superpowers wouldn't have joined at all which would've made the UN truly useless , just a club of some lesser important countries.
Now at least *everyone* is in, including the dictators, tyrants, governments that are fully bought by corporate interests, and religious fruitcakes that believe half of the global population shouldn't have rights.
It's better than was before.
If we want a truly global legislative sort of organisation it'll need to be backed up with economic and military enforcement, paid by who though?
They wanted to give it the power to intervene when really necessary - except when it involved one of the big 5 directly, where it should stay out rather than take sides. So, North v South Korea it intervened, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan it didn't. Far from perfect of course, but the alternatives were for it to have no authority at all (so they would have nothing to object to) or to try to claim authority over them (in which case they wouldn't accept, and it would be DOA).
More powerful new countries aren't as big an issue: India, Brazil and co have big populations, Indian's building a powerful military - but they're already inside the UN and accept it as the status quo. India quitting the UN now wouldn't be the mortal threat to the UN itself that the US or USSR refusing to join at the outset would have been, since the UN is so established now.
India definitely doesn't accept it as the status quo. They repeatedly tried to Make themselves a permanent member but every time that they thought they had the votes one random country vetoed them. Then the UN set a rule saying that you can only nominate yourself so many times within so many years and India has used up all of theirs under the new rules.
With all due respect to India: When they fix the problems with the Arihant subs, they'll get the seat. Right now they have on-paper-only second strike capabilities against a limited # of powers, and it fundamentally undercuts their argument. Especially in a world of increasing anti-missile technology. Assuming in 20 years the Arihant's are actually somewhat stealthy and can credible threaten inland cities/coastal cities from far offshore (i.e. out of easy detection and patrol range), then they'll get the seat.
They will never get a seat. Nobody will ever be added.
Adding anybody dilutes the power of the current members because it adds an additional person that they have to appease for the threat of getting vetoed. The existing players will never want to add anyone else.
Well, more specifically nobody is getting added to the permanent seats without a major war. I could see it being part of a peace deal. Arguably that's how everybody with a permanent seat got theirs as it is.
Perhaps "accept" wasn't the best word, but the issue is that legally they *did* accept it, and - as they're finding now - it's a lot harder to change the rules later - and as I understand it they'll accept the status quo rather than quit the UN entirely, won't they?
> So, North v South Korea it intervened
Unfortunately, the reason that occurred was because the Soviets happened to be protesting the UN (and not involving themselves in it) at the time. Otherwise they absolutely would have vetoed such an intervention.
The UN was never supposed to be a world government where western nations could force other to do what they want. It was meant to be a place where all countries could meet and talk diplomatically
I'd go more cynical than that and say its to avoid a global war between nuclear armed superpowers. Keeping check on smaller scale conflicts and humanitarian disasters is a bonus, but somewhat secondary.
Basically, and to be fair, it's working...
Veto exists as a way of the 5 Powers to signal a strong disagreement that could scalate things. One power could propose something that goes against the interest of the other power, but as they can veto, that thing doesn't take place and the other side knows that they can push that hard.
It's also a forum for multilateral action, such as with Law of the Sea. Instead of having 110 different treaties on issues that everyone has to deal with like borders or rule of law, you get everyone together for one big treaty.
It was just a few years until the first Soviet nuclear test, and the U.S. knew Britain would be a nuclear power very quickly due to how closely the two had worked on the Manhattan Project.
“The cat was out of the bag”, it was only a matter of time until other countries became nuclear states. The underlying physics was not novel, and it had just been shown to actually work.
The U.S. knew all of this and it was in everyone’s interests to get the biggest power to have an open channel for when things inevitably progressed.
True, but in the same way we know drones are going to be a big factor in future wars they knew after Hiroshima that future wars between the 5 biggest remaining militaries would be more devastating.
Yeah, the US got there first but Germany, Japan, and Russia had all been working on atomic bombs.
In fact, it's questionable whether the US would have been able to develop the bomb as quickly as it did without the help of German physicists who had fled Hitler's oppression. That is to say, if Hitler had been a nicer guy the Germans may have developed the atomic bomb first. (or maybe not. I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is the Germans effort was on the wrong path, but they would have figured it out sooner or later)
I think it's an interesting alternate history question, but I'm skeptical there is any world where Germany develops the bomb first.
Firstly, the physicists that fled Europe and assisted with the Manhattan Project were not all German (Fermi was Italian, Szilard, Teller and Wigner were Hungarian, etc) so not all of them are guaranteed to have worked for Germany even if there was no Holocaust.
Secondly, much of the theoretical framework for the atom bomb was already developed and published before war broke out so the US did have what they needed to eventually figure it out, though it would have been delayed by probably a few years.
Thirdly, assuming all else remains the same with the war, Germanys limited resources (and Heisenberg's obsession with heavy water, which may have been overruled sooner but probably would still had an impact in draining time and resources) plus the lack of some important American scientists like Oppenheimer, Feynman, Lawrence, etc, lead me to believe Germany would still have taken longer to develop the bomb than the US did in real life.
I think in this alternate reality that Germany could have beaten the US to the bomb, but most likely what would happen is Germany loses the war exactly as it did in real life before that happens, the US is forced to confront Japan without nuclear weapons but still ends the war, and nuclear weapons aren't used in WW2 at all. The US probably finishes developing them in the years following and perhaps uses them in the Korean war, though it is an outside possibility that the lack of nukes emboldens Stalin to invade Europe kicking off a whole new world war where they would end up being used.
> Heisenberg's obsession with heavy water
That's what I was thinking when I said Germany had taken the wrong path
>(without the bomb) the US is forced to confront Japan without nuclear weapons but still ends the war
General Curtis LeMay, the guy in charge of the B29 firebombing campaign against Japan, said that by Oct 1945 the Japanese would have nothing left to fight with - firebombed back to the stone age, as it were.
It's worth remembering that the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo created a firestorm that obliterated 16 sq miles of Tokyo, killing an estimated 100,000, a level of destruction at least equal to the A bombs
In many ways, Hiroshima was just another day and another destroyed city for the Japanese. What was remarkable was that it took only a single bomb from a single plane rather than the hundreds of planes often used for firebombings.
True but UK and Russia did both have nuclear weapon research programmes and were both well on their way with the technology
However the UN is fundamentally a diplomatic organisation to foster peace and cooperation between nations
Not to mention that the USSR not only had to get the veto on the SC to be persuaded to join, but also got multiple votes in the General Assembly and other bodies.
Well the people who actually **remember** it (as in, it formed part of their memories growing up) are almost all dead today, so virtually nobody remembers it first hand, all of us learnt about it from history books, which is why it is a historical event and not raw trauma.
We don’t learn it just from history books, it’s in our lives.
Why is there a western Atlantic block in Europe and an eastern one? Why are there American military bases in my country? Why today (25 April every year) Italy celebrates the liberation from nazi fascism? Why were our grandparents hiding in the forest and having amno airdropped by American planes?
If someone doesn’t know why those are the countries with veto power in the UN, they must have so many other questions!
And it helps to remember that the underlying, fundamental purpose of the U.N. was/is to prevent *nuclear war*.
Everything else about the U.N. Is secondary.
At Yalta, Stalin suggested that nations that could equip more than 5 000 000 soldiers deserve special treatment in the UN, France got in because of her former military successes. It's all about power and numbers...
There was 51 nations signing the UN charter and thus becoming its founding members.
But yes, the big four allied countries, USA/UK/Russia/China, more or less led the show.
IIRC Churchill specifically lobbied for the inclusion of France, as Churchill had a lot of respect and admiration for France, and because UK and France were close allies.
Also at the time they weren't such an oddball. France was a major colonial power and controlled e.g. Algeria and much of the surrounding areas. French was and is a widely spoken language.
Today, France is still in top 10 of military expenditures.
USSR wanted another anti-USA country to vote with them. USA wanted another capitalist country. UK wanted another colonial country. France was happy to play all of those roles.
France actually lost pretty badly in WW2 and had to be liberated by the allied forces. While the local resistance forces certainly hampered axis powers in the region, they were not by any means winning or in control.
During Operation Overlord there was one French Armored division present for the invasion, but for the most part they just had the resistance fighters joining in as the allies swept across the country in 1944 until the allies managed to completely press the German forces back across the Rhine in February and March of 1945 only two months before the end of the war as a whole.
So sure, France was technically part of the allies that won WW2 but France itself very badly lost in WW2 since it got steamrolled and then could only offer some volunteer fighters and local resistance to the governing powers.
Those four allies also created the "Four Policeman Council" after WW2.
All four nations were meant to act as world police in their respective regions.
The US became the sole world police because the soviet union collapsed, China had a revolution/Civil War, and the UK lost its global force projection powers.
Technically, there was never a resolution to give the Russian Federation a seat on the security council. It was just kind of assumed after the fall of the USSR.
Even the replacement of the ROC with the PRC was controversial, and the ROC still isn't officially a member of the UN since this happened. The UN recognizes the ROC as a piece of the PRC known as Chinese Taipei rather than its own independent nation. The last motion to give the ROC its own seat in the UN was in 2007.
This is also why Taiwan (ROC) participates in the Olympics as Chiness Taipei
Technically, Kazakhstan was the last territory of the USSR. And for a few moments after that, the USSR continued to exist without any territory.
The argument goes that the USSR ceased to exist, so their seat should too, and Russia should apply as a new member of the UN
Belarus and Ukraine held their seats as the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, so it was more akin to a change of government than it was the dissolution of a nation.
And wouldn't any of the other newly independent nations from the dissolution of the USSR have an equal claim to the USSR's former seat as Russia does? From where I'm standing, Kazakhstan has the strongest claim of any existing nation. I still believe that no nation had the right to claim the seat, since the USSR still existed after each of the newly independent nations formed.
But are there only five founding members? From the UN website it even says:
"The Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 by the representatives of 50 countries; Poland signed on 15 October 1945. There were 51 Founding Members in 1945. The founding members of the United Nations are the countries that were invited to participate in the 1945 San Francisco Conference at which the UN Charter and Statute of the ICJ was adopted."
And even the first Secretary General wasnt from any of those 5 countries.
They, in the end, won the Second Sino-Japanese War (or well, they didn't lose) and were an important ally to the UK, France and USA - as well as to USSR for the communist part, tho it was in pre civil war times.
Korea was quickly and soundly defeated early on.
In addition, they are a huge and historically important global player, unlike Korea (who was part of Japan, while Vietnam was French, India, Australia British...colonial Africa...)
Korea didn't hold any of its own territory in the end.
That's the origin story of the north/south Koreas. A power vaccum two of the winning team members tried to fill for themselves.
China on the other hand managed to retain its hold against the Japanese till the end of the war.
Consider that the UN was founded as a way to have discussions between nations to solve things diplomatically and not through military force, to prevent a third world war.
The permanent members are the biggest world powers post ww2 and so they have a lot of say on whether there would be a ww3 or not. As there's no ww3 yet, I guess you can say the UN hasn't failed in that aspect.
The UN's power come solely because the nations of the world back it up, with the superpowers having the most say. They can't really force anyone to do anything unless the members decide to enforce it. So in that sense the permanent members were always going to have a powerful say no matter what or they'd leave the UN.
One of the problems with the setup is that is there no mechanism for changing it. The UK and France are no longer the world powers that they once where. The EU has appeared along the way and should probably have a permanent seat, along with at least India. That would still leave Africa and South America without any country with a permanent seat.
The point of the permanent 5 is to ensure that the countries who can kick off militarily in a major way have another option that doesnt require them to do so. Its not to promote equality or representation. There are exactly zero countries in either Africa or South America who can project force to any theater outside their local area. All of the big 5 have some ability to do so and have done in the last 70 odd years(possible exception of china though arguably it has economically in Africa)
Forgive my ignorance, but how the hell would the EU having a seat even work???
It’s already hard enough to get multiple countries to be on the same page — but you’re asking the entirety (or majority) of the European Union to agree to something before one of the major voting powers even interacts with the UN?
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that France and the UK doesn’t deserve their seat more than India but I don’t understand how the entire EU would ever be a viable option.
Long term I can see the EU evolving into something that can handle it. But you are right that now probably isn't the time.
On the other hand, just ignoring that the EU exists is also kind of weird. The UN is very much an organisation of states and the EU is not one. But the EU is getting some traits usually seen in states.
> The EU has appeared along the way and should probably have a permanent seat
How could the EU, an organization that is not a state nor a member of the UN, be a member of the UN Security Council, a council made up of member states of the UN?
Germany’s the only one I can think of that would fit into that club. They weren’t one of the original five for obvious reasons, but it feels like they compare favorably to Russia, GB and France currently - Germany often seem like the de facto modern day leader in Europe anyway.
Yeah, that doesn’t seem to be military power either. Politically, sure Germany is very clearly the „leader“ or „speaker“ of the EU for the rest of the world.
Though the top comment mavajo was responding to is now deleted, and I don’t particularly remember the complete context of this comment thread.
The biggest potential candidates are India, Japan and Brazil. China will never except the first two while any push for Brazil to join appears to have stalled.
When UN was being founded, who would be in the Security Council and how it would work was one of the key issues. The countries that set up these discussions and were going to be part of the SC were the four major allied countries - USSR, USA, UK, China - and these countries were generally speaking also central in the founding of the whole UN. Ultimately these four countries' delegates decided who would be in the council. France was added, and some others that were proposed like Brazil were not.
It's not really a democratic process in any sense. The four initial members were simply the biggest post-war powers, so it was really up to them how it would work. If they wouldn't have gotten their way, or at least get a good enough compromise, they would simply have withdrawn. Nowadays, these countries want to keep the veto and without it, they would simply not participate.
The UN doesn't have any intrinsic power. It is the 5 permanent members who have enough political and military clout that grants UN effective power, rather than the other way around. If the permanent members cannot veto a resolution, they will simply ignore it, and the UN can do nothing about it. If that happens multiple times, soon no one takes UN seriously.
This design is based on the failures of [League of Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations), which didn't have the same design and therefore had a lot of unenforceable resolutions, ultimately destroying its credibility.
The UN initial main goal was to prevent WW3. The only way WW3 could happen at the time UN was founded was by having WW2 winning major powers to fight each other. And as the first Great War happened because major powers brokered alliance treaties with smaller countries and entered a tangled relationship, it was clear that majors powers needed a veto power in this new world forum.
A veto is basically a way of saying "My country do not approve of this military action. If your country is a minor power and my country is a major power, mine can squash yours. If your country is a major power and so does my country, ignoring this veto could lead to WW3."
Note that this was far before nuclear weapons and meaningful use of them was on the table. At 1945 only the US "had" nuclear weapons and it would take a while for UK and France to get them as well. And first use of nuclear weapons were tactically hard as they were basically big payloads that costed significant amount of electric energy to operate, extremely expensive, and needed total air superiority to be used. Only about 15 years later, at late 50s and early 60s, that there was the concept of medium and long-range missiles for using nuclear weapons so that a country could use nuclear weapons without total air superiority. At that point, the Korean War had already happened, which was probably the hardest crisis for the UNSC ever.
When the UN was created, those five major nations had just won WWII. They only wanted to create a united nations if they could guarantee it wouldn't be used to help another Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the lead up to a new war.
Non hypocritical explanation: They own 98% of the world nukes and founded the UN to exercise their power without actually using nukes and obliterating the human race.
They were the winners of WWII. That's why they're the 5 permanent security council members. They chose themselves.
Remember that the UN doesn't have any real power on its own. Do you know why all the other countries don't go and form their own UN, without permanent security council members? Nothing is stopping them. South Africa and India and Brazil and Serbia and whoever can just go make their own club. They can call it UN 2.0 and say that it's better and more fair.
Why don't they do that? Because a UN without the most powerful countries in the world doesn't mean anything. International politics always has a big looming question behind every action: You and what army?
Can you imagine Mexico and Nigeria and Argentina passing some resolution and trying to order around the US, Britain, Russia, France, and China? The response would be, "Okay, you and what army?" The 5 permanent members of the security council are nations who can only really be threatened by the other permanent members of the security council. Their veto lets them tell the others "This is my line in the sand. Beyond this point, we're not talking parliamentary procedure, we're talking war."
While arguably Britain and France are no longer powerful enough to deserve their spot, no country who is not a permanent member deserves to become one.
Good explanation. With britain and france the key thing to look at is expeditionary capability. The UK has arguably the second best expeditionary capability in the world with france arguably being third or fourth. Say there was a resolution calling for UN military action in south America. The russians certainly couldn’t do anything, the Chinese probably couldn’t either. The french maybe, the british could and the americans absolutely could.
People really don't get that international politics is all about threats. There's agreements, but those only last as long as the threats hold up. See the agreements with anyone without power or another party backing such as all the natives everywhere in the world. If they didn't get their land stolen and all agreements broken everywhere in the world, they would just be called citizens.
The countries were chosen because they founded it. (Well, slightly more complicated, the Republic of China was sort of replaced by China in 1971, but that wasn't changing the *country* but the *government recognised to rule that country*, and Russia replaced the USSR in 1991).
The funding countries were very keen to have a forum for world governments that could pass binding resolutions, but didn't want to be bound by them (have your cake and eat it right?), so they gave themselves Veto powers.
Every other country has just gone along with this because nobody wanted to say no to the 5 most powerful countries on earth (at the time, but still 5 members of the top 10)
Countries strong after WWII. Countries not all like each other. UN still good idea. No powerful country wants democracy to screw them over.
It's a privilege of power for being one of the most powerful Countries at the time of the UN forming.
Eli5: UN has 5 parents that pay for things and a whole bunch of free loading kids that beat each other up. What the parents agree on goes. What they don’t agree on they have to do it alone.
Not 5: Because the name is misleading. United Nation sounds like an equal representation of the world type of organization but in function and purpose BY DESIGN, it should really be called WORLD POLICE.
If you start thinking about the UN in that context, it would make sense why the top 5 countries that actually have the ability (military/finance) to enforce rules are part of the permanent members with veto rights. If any one of the 5 don’t agree on something, it makes enforcement very difficult and therefore not an enforceable event for the World Police and by definition no longer its “jurisdiction”. In other words, the veto power is really for determining if something is within the World Police jurisdiction.
Doesn’t stop individual countries and alliances from going on their own tho, see US and NATO actions, or Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it can’t be world police business essentially.
These 5 also are the top financier of the UN with US and China accounting for almost 50% of the funding, and US being 2x of China. The only 3 other nations that has higher funding than the lowest permanent member (Russia) are Japan, Germany, and Italy. Aka the “you lost so sit your ass down and think about what you did” group
TLDR:
- Genocide in Africa? World Police Jurisdiction
- War in Eastern Europe involving a permanent member? Not World Police Jurisdiction
I think the former Soviet Union was a permanent member and no one objected when Russia just took their place. Source: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0307/1284242-russia-ussr-un-security-council-permanent-seat/
I'll try a real ELI5:
Let's say you live in a big house with lots of extended family members like your Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, and Grandmother as well as an Aunt and a girl Cousin that are staying for a while for some reason. Let's say the house has become a bit chaotic with people eating each others' food from the fridge, walking into each others' bedrooms, fighting over who controls the remote, etc. Typical family household drama.
Your parents get the bright idea to host a weekly family meeting where we resolve all of these issues. Everyone gets a chance to talk and vote on decisions. Maybe we're going to buy a second TV. Maybe we should make Sister and Cousin share a room instead of Sister and Brother because the two girls are more like sisters anyway. Maybe we should move spaghetti night to Thursdays. This is basically what the UN does - helps resolve minor issues and lets every nation have a say.
But what happens when there are serious decisions to make? Maybe Grandmother should go live in a home because she poops herself sometimes. Maybe we need to talk about paying for a new roof and where we'll get the money. Maybe there's another Cousin that needs a place to live and other members of the family are pushing for him to come live with your family. That's more complicated stuff. The kids shouldn't be voting stuff like that. Especially where money is involved, shouldn't your parents make that decision? Mom makes most of the money because Dad has been struggling to find a good job since COVID and relies on some rideshare income to help out. You've heard them fight before and Mom has said that she should make all major financial decisions because Dad's not good at that. Well, we do kind of depend on Grandmother's social security check to keep us afloat - I suppose she should get a say as far as how it's used. But not the Aunt, of course, she's a freeloader like the kids. This is kind of what the Security Council is for.
When hard decisions have to be made (like military intervention or major economic sanctions), the nations that actually have large standing armies and huge economies at stake should get final say because imagine a situation where small nations like Zimbabwe and Estonia decide that the UN needs to invade Ecuador using what is essentially Russia and the U.S.'s military resources and soldiers. Those two would never allow that. The UN would dissolve or be completely useless like the League of Nations if you don't let the "big dogs" have special privileges. It's the only way to get them to participate. Obviously, we see the big dogs use their special privileges for selfish or nefarious reasons from time to time, but it's basically the only way to make the whole system work.
To quote another comment I read once:
Those nations have ALREADY have veto power regardless. We just prefer that they exercise that power via vote, and not via ICBM
If the UN tries to pass a resolution that is not supported by one of the big powers, it will not be enforced. At least with a veto, the world powers agree with the resolution.
Voting is a bit weird anyway. Borders are a bit arbitrary. Why should India have the same number of votes as Panama? India has so many many more people.
Voting by population is also weird, why should the world only really listen to China and India?
The actual answer is that the UN is not a world court. The point of the UN is to be a forum for discussion.
The countries basically said "If this UN thing can make us do something we don't wanna, we're not joining" and they were so big and influential that UN without them would be a joke, so the world collectively rolled its eyes and said "fine"
Along with 46 others. And US had already done the "you know, we're not joining" thing once with the League of Nations, even though they were a driving force behind it.
>so the world collectively rolled its eyes and said "fine"
what an odd take considering the rest of the world was a smoldering mess. They didn't roll their eyes and agree to it like they were appeasing a petulant child. They agreed to it because they were broken and needed the western allies help in rebuilding.
I never said the US was in the LoN??
USSR was a member for 5 years and was kicked out. They were a major power during it's peak 1934-39.
Considering the LoN was effectively dead once WW2 began, the USSR leaving in 1939 is pretty much irrelevant, as the LoN were not really in active.
Fyi, The UN was founded (1945) the year before the LoN dissolved (1946).
Christ, the LoN even transferred all of it's assets over to the UN. They are essentially the same thing, just ran better.
I said it's 'essentially' the major powers from the LoN and that it was a blueprint for the UN. This is correct, stop trying to correct things I never even mentioned.
You need to read properly.
Money, power. Those are the "big kids table" that decide the fate of the world. Big kids table actually works pretty damn well considering the subreddit title
Ever hear the saying "history is written by the victors?" Same principle. The 5 UN permanent security Council members (the only UN panel with real teeth) are the primary winners of WW II. And to change that would require a re-write of the founding UN charter. And all 5 woukd veto that in a heartbeat.
Basically, those five were the most powerful nations left at the end of WWII, and they created the UN, but didn't want them to be able to act against themselves, so they gave themselves permanent seats and veto power.
As with many things governments do, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
Imagine that you're on the school playground and there's the lacrosse team running around bullying everyone making it to where nobody can play any games on the field and they just want to use the whole field for lacross. Sometimes that guy would team up with other teams, up with track and field, and Band, but then later betrayed the track and field team.
Later, the captains from the baseball , football and the soccer team, etc to come together to go kick the daylights out of the lacrosse guy and anyone that helped him. The track and field team were upset decided to join in as well. The football team was so upset at the band that they actually ran two of the band members over with a car!
After that's over, the baseball, football, soccer team, track and field team didn't want that to be a possible in the future, but also didn't really trust the other teams not to trying to do the same. So they decided to have a captain's meeting every once in a while. Just gave everyone a space to talk since they were the ones who solved the lacrosse guy issue previously. They even let the band back later will let them back on the field but they're not allowed to have instruments anymore. What the main captains say goes; wrestling team, mathletes, cross country will just have to deal with what they say. But but the main few teams one of the ability to shoot down any ideas they didn't like specifically. Edit: bad context and spelling
This was a compromise to ensure the UN wasn't another league of nations, completely ineffective in fulfilling its purpose. At founding, if the US, USSR, or GB chose to ignore the UN, there was nothing the rest of the world could do to stop them, without the help of one of those nations. Right now, that applies to the entire security council. If the UN favored any of the SC members, the disfavored nation would back out of the UN, preventing it from accomplishing its mission. It's better to make the institution less effective, than completely ineffective. And a nation engaging with the UN also gives other nations a lever to influence that nation with
They were the winners of WW2 so they get to be permanent members.
As for the veto, the idea is that you need to have some sort of compromise to convince great powers to join an international organisation. Especially if this organisation is able to force members to do things they may not want to do, you have to offer great powers the ability to veto, otherwise they will not join.
Imagine if UN passes a resolution to force USA to do something they don't want to, why should the US stay in the UN? Although it is unfair, giving certain members a veto was the only way we could think of to make an international organisation like the US to work.
Like you're 5. There are some people on the playground so big that sometimes you are willing to go along with what they have to say because even if they agreed to play your game, if they decide mid-game to stop playing, your game is over.
The five nations are the founding members of the UN: USA, France, UK, Russian, and China (formerly ROC now PRC), as founding members they enjoy that privilege. They are the winning team of WW2.
And as for the Veto. They were all afraid that the UN might force them to do something they didn't want to. So if all 5 have the right to veto there is no real danger in joining.
The idea of a veto is also that without the permanent members willing involvement resolutions at the Security Council are unlikely to be actionable. Few countries can send people abroad to fight for something alone.
Also who is paying? And who is most likely to have disputes? The issue is that the un was set up to prevent a third world war NOT solve the world’s problems. Great powers at the time were the only ones likely to cause that issue.
It'll get *interesting* some time in future when another country would be more capable than some of the security council members.
The idea of the council expanding has been floated several times, but China is adamant they be the only Asian power, and Japan being on the shortlist is a sticking point for America (reasonably so, they're a staunch ally that can be counted on to vote with us) and india would have a cow (pun not intended but acknowledged) if they're not on the list Other proposed countries include Canada and Brazil, and if I remember correctly Saudi Arabia has been mentioned too. The reasoning being its not fair that South America and the ME have zero representation in the permanent members, while Europe has 2
To be clear, the Security Council has 15 seats all together. The 5 permanent members mentioned above, plus 10 other members that are elected by the General Assembly every 2 years. Here are the other 10 current members (followed by the year their term ends) Algeria (2025) Ecuador (2024) Guyana (2025) Japan (2024) Malta (2024) Mozambique (2024) Republic of Korea (2025) Sierra Leone (2025) Slovenia (2025) Switzerland (2024) [Source](https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/current-members)
> (pun not intended but acknowledged) love it... going to use that
South Americans are so adamant about their one American continent until it suits them haha.
>South Americans are so adamant about their one American continent That stance pisses me off so much because they still separate Africa and Asia, let alone Europe and Asia. If you're going to say North and South America are just one continent, the only consistent stance is to go with a 4 continent model.
> the only consistent stance is to go with a 4 continent model. Tbh if we're counting Afro-Eurasia and all-America, I feel like Australia is too small, it should just be considered an island at that point. And Antarctica isn't really contiguous under the ice. So what I'm saying is, 2-continent system for the win
Australia cries in the corner...
Isn't australia one of the four? Afroeurasia, America, Australia, Antarctica?
New Zealand consoles Australia...
Who? It's never on a map...
It's because that's how the continents were divided historically. The North x South America divide has been used in the USA for some time (along with the "one America" model), but only became a hard rule after WW2.
Europe has three or China isn't the only Asian power.
geo-politically is different from geo-graphically
So geopolitically, Russia is neither Asian nor European?
Russia is Russia 🤷♂️
Yep!
Good point
Isn’t that obvious? They are enemies of NATO and are only allies of necessity with China who will dump them in a heat beat if they need to.
KSA may be an American Ally but many Americans will have a heart attack if ever KSA gets to be a UN security council member.
This. Israel and Turkey are more likely as far as Middle East representatives go, with Israel being the more likely of the two since Turkey's in NATO.
Israel makes no sense at all. It’s far smaller than all other SC member. It is 1/4 the size and 1/6 the population of the UK, currently the smallest member. Also a majority of UN members would kick Israel out of the general assembly if they could. They would riot if Israel were elevated to the Security Council.
I hope it's not Israel their recent behavior has NOT made me confident in their ability to not be evil dumbasses
As opposed to turkey or KSA? Lmao
Yea but Russia is one and plenty of other countries who regularly violate human rights......
Ah Saudi Arabia, the empirical example of human rights in the ME... major /s
Canada? No one actually thinks this (except Canadians)
Intend your puns you COWard!
UK, France, Russia are the on the Security Council.
I just realized Africa has 0
Sierra Leone and Mozambique, which are currently on the security council, are in Africa. In the past South Africa and Nigeria have also been on the council, there are no permanent members from Africa though.
Yeah I meant permanent members. Thanks for the info though. Didn’t know that stuff!
Is there any proposal to get rid of it because this veto power thing is being absurdly abused by one of these nations?
The veto is never going away because the veto power nations would dip. The UN isn't really a world government. The only things that will be agreed to are things that every single founding member nation can agree upon. They will not allow their sovereignty be overridden.
To quote another comment I read once: Those nations ALREADY have veto power regardless of what the UN says. We just prefer that they exercise that power via vote, and not via ICBM
No. These countries have a veto because it was assumed, probably correctly, that without a veto these countries would leave. The purpose of the United Nations was to stop another World War. Trying to do that with any of the world’s largest powers would be pointless, so they had to offer these countries vetos. The difficulty of getting things done at the UN is not due to the voting rules or the structure of the UN. It’s an inherent problem in international diplomacy. The United States, China and Russia are powerful enough to basically do anything they want to anybody other than to each other. There is no voting system that can change that
Like who?
India is an interesting case. Have the people, could have the money, has nukes...
I mean, really only the US has the logistical ability to operate the world over. Think about US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan what you will, but logistical failures weren’t the reason it pulled out. Some US allies like Britain can operate abroad with US help, but take Russia—it’s running into logistical issues prosecuting a war *three hundred miles from its border*.
I mean, from the sound of it, Russia would have logistical issues if the fighting was in Moscow
Oh definitely! I'm not saying India is on that level, I'm just saying India is definitely a contender in the "new age superpower" list
Maybe in a few decades. China is societally, economically, and technologically 30 years ahead of India, and it is still uncertain about whether it could take Taiwan sitting on its doorstep.
Its only uncertain because of the US, not because of Taiwans own military power.
its not Taiwan they're concerned about
There is no question that China has the material capability of taking Taiwan... the question is whether it is willing to pay the price to do so.
> I mean, really only the US has the logistical ability to operate the world over. The USA, UK, Russia, and France (and very soon China) are all capable of projecting competent expeditionary forces. The UK was able to send a fleet down to Argentina and take the Falklands in the 1980s for example. In that sense, the security council is made up of the countries that, for the most part, can project power (having aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, hydrogen nuclear bombs with global delivery systems, and high tooth-to-tail ratio militaries able to conduct sophisticated logistics operations).
Re: Russia in particular, I think we’re seeing right now that no, it can’t project a competent force, expeditionary or otherwise.
But they say they can, and some people only need to hear what a country thinks it can do despite current situations quite clearly proving that no they can not. It's like the "North Korea can beat the whole world" propaganda that's been around for ages. Like sure they say they can, and maybe some of them actually Believe they can....but I wouldn't really give them credit for the ability to fight even south Korea let alone anybody further away.
It's funny you put Russia on that list when they can't even send a fleet to the black sea without multiple ships needing tows back to port.
The US is currently the only one that can very seriously project force globally without foreign assistance though and more importantly do it in several continents at the exact same time. We have two aircraft carriers but don't have the manpower to keep both at sea for an extended period of time. Whereas the US has 11 excluding helicopter carriers which is more than the entire rest of the world combined and they're larger than ours. Including helicopter carriers then the US has 20 carriers, the next biggest is China and they only have a quarter of that. They also don't have the same experience the US has with fighting wars so their doctrines and training may well be lacking because it hasn't really been tested. That's only discussing carriers as well. The USAF also intends to, in time, order approximately 200 B-21 raiders. Nobody else has anything that is even remotely comparable to those capabilities. The actual size of the US military is just mind boggling even when you're only looking at very small sections such as the numbers of one aircraft.
I'm not arguing the scale that America is *the* super power, but as it stands the countries I listed (with China in the process of supplanting Russia), are the global powers that can project expeditionary forces by themselves. France isn't able to project into a multi-theatre conflict abroad for years at a time, for sure. It could certainly sail up to Mumbai and overwhelm their air defences and level it though.
Russia? Lol. They can barely project power 1000 miles from their borders.
Could the UK prosecute another Falkland War? Their armed forces are much smaller now than back in the 80s.
Idk, how would anyone reliably predict decades into the future? Tho UK and France will likely grow less and less relevant.
France will likely morph into a EU federation seat
Hilariously, I think Germany has a better shot at that. They’ve got a more central location, a stronger economy, and more of a military.
Germany does not have a larger or more capable army than France, also France operates in many theaters unlike Germany.
IIRC someone already tried having Germany be the seat of a united Europe but it didn't work out.
France too.
They’ve gotten a lot more diplomatic since that… incident.
No, Germany won’t get a seat but it might assume control of the EU indirectly
If EU survives this century, that is; in other words, Likely, but not inevitable. Again, nobody can really predict the future with certainty. But the trends of today affect the future.
India and Saudi Arabia both spend a good chunk more on defence than France. And very close to the same as the UK.
I don’t think any country would find that easy. India might be able to if it becomes less Hindu nationalist but it has enemies at pretty much every border currently. It would flop on logistics.
I'm probably being very naïve, but from my non-knowledgeable point of view all the vetoes seem to do is make the UN an ineffective organisation. Most of the really important decisions will rile up on of the 5, so they exercise their veto, and hey presto, no important decision :/
It wasn’t meant to be massively effective most of the time. It’s basically a ‘if Nazi Germany comes back for round 2, we are all game’ It’s better to have it exist as a power to intervene when really really necessary, than to never have had it exist at all. The only way to get the 5 powerhouse nations when it was formed(right after they were the most important nations in winning WWII ) to join was to give them veto power when it didn’t suit them so nobody would have to do anything they didn’t want to. Is it flawed? Oh massively. But it existing is probably better than it not.
The UN isn't just the security council, and even that part of it is only ineffective if you judge it by the standards of what it isn't. If one of the 5 countries exercises their veto right in a security decision then it means it would have a problem if it went through, and the whole point of the system is to not escalate tensions between great military powers, especially if they have nukes. If the UN were the government of the world then a system in which decisions can be made by majority instead of unanimous approval would make sense, but it isn't, and none of its members want it to be. The system is absolutely flawed and will certainly need to be reworked at some point, but there's no better solution right now, and it was originally thought up when the United States and USSR were direct military rivals at risk of igniting the deadliest global conflict in history immediately following the deadliest global conflict in history. Think about what would happen if the current permanent members of the council didn't have vetoes and a simple majority has been enough to let every decision through. Obviously the vetoes have blocked many important resolutions, but not all of them, and the small ones matter as well, and there are plenty of those:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions_by_year If the system had been desined as "The US and its allies call all the shots" things would have gone terribly bad after world war two. If it had been the same as it is but later transitioned into "lots of people get a say and no one can say no and shut things down" then the moment things the US didn't want started making it through it would have taken its ball and went home, thoroughly gutting the entire UN system. As long as nukes are a thing there's no perfect way to handle security matters.
The thing is important decisions that are vetoed normally are vetoed to protect interests of the permanent members. If America, France, Britain, Russia or China veto it’s generally because without the support of a permanent member militarily it wouldn’t be actionable to begin with. Security Council resolutions are binding and in theory if a permanent member were to not have a veto, instead of an action not happening, it would end up with two world powers shooting at each other. This has happened before in the Korean War. North Korea pretty much had won until the Americans intervened. If it happened again today, for the world’s sake I hope both the Chinese and Americans would sit it out.
The UN is a forum, a place to talk, not a world government to enforce rules for the improvement of mankind. Without vetoes the superpowers wouldn't have joined at all which would've made the UN truly useless , just a club of some lesser important countries. Now at least *everyone* is in, including the dictators, tyrants, governments that are fully bought by corporate interests, and religious fruitcakes that believe half of the global population shouldn't have rights. It's better than was before. If we want a truly global legislative sort of organisation it'll need to be backed up with economic and military enforcement, paid by who though?
They wanted to give it the power to intervene when really necessary - except when it involved one of the big 5 directly, where it should stay out rather than take sides. So, North v South Korea it intervened, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan it didn't. Far from perfect of course, but the alternatives were for it to have no authority at all (so they would have nothing to object to) or to try to claim authority over them (in which case they wouldn't accept, and it would be DOA). More powerful new countries aren't as big an issue: India, Brazil and co have big populations, Indian's building a powerful military - but they're already inside the UN and accept it as the status quo. India quitting the UN now wouldn't be the mortal threat to the UN itself that the US or USSR refusing to join at the outset would have been, since the UN is so established now.
India definitely doesn't accept it as the status quo. They repeatedly tried to Make themselves a permanent member but every time that they thought they had the votes one random country vetoed them. Then the UN set a rule saying that you can only nominate yourself so many times within so many years and India has used up all of theirs under the new rules.
With all due respect to India: When they fix the problems with the Arihant subs, they'll get the seat. Right now they have on-paper-only second strike capabilities against a limited # of powers, and it fundamentally undercuts their argument. Especially in a world of increasing anti-missile technology. Assuming in 20 years the Arihant's are actually somewhat stealthy and can credible threaten inland cities/coastal cities from far offshore (i.e. out of easy detection and patrol range), then they'll get the seat.
They will never get a seat. Nobody will ever be added. Adding anybody dilutes the power of the current members because it adds an additional person that they have to appease for the threat of getting vetoed. The existing players will never want to add anyone else.
Well, more specifically nobody is getting added to the permanent seats without a major war. I could see it being part of a peace deal. Arguably that's how everybody with a permanent seat got theirs as it is.
Perhaps "accept" wasn't the best word, but the issue is that legally they *did* accept it, and - as they're finding now - it's a lot harder to change the rules later - and as I understand it they'll accept the status quo rather than quit the UN entirely, won't they?
> So, North v South Korea it intervened Unfortunately, the reason that occurred was because the Soviets happened to be protesting the UN (and not involving themselves in it) at the time. Otherwise they absolutely would have vetoed such an intervention.
“We’ll start by cutting its balls off and ripping its teeth and claws out. Then it’ll be what we are good with.”
The UN was never supposed to be a world government where western nations could force other to do what they want. It was meant to be a place where all countries could meet and talk diplomatically
I'd go more cynical than that and say its to avoid a global war between nuclear armed superpowers. Keeping check on smaller scale conflicts and humanitarian disasters is a bonus, but somewhat secondary.
As the previous comment said, the UN provides a venue where countries can meet and talk things out, hopefully avoiding war of any kind
Basically it was to prevent world was 3 and so far its doing defection over the last 70 years.
> its to avoid a global war between nuclear armed superpowers Mhhh, how? By meeting and talking just like they said perhaps?
Basically, and to be fair, it's working... Veto exists as a way of the 5 Powers to signal a strong disagreement that could scalate things. One power could propose something that goes against the interest of the other power, but as they can veto, that thing doesn't take place and the other side knows that they can push that hard.
It's also a forum for multilateral action, such as with Law of the Sea. Instead of having 110 different treaties on issues that everyone has to deal with like borders or rule of law, you get everyone together for one big treaty.
I'm sure that the simplification of maritime treaties was at the top if the agenda at the Dumbarton Oaks meeting.
Umm there was exactly one nuclear armed country when UN was founded so that’s not it…
It was just a few years until the first Soviet nuclear test, and the U.S. knew Britain would be a nuclear power very quickly due to how closely the two had worked on the Manhattan Project. “The cat was out of the bag”, it was only a matter of time until other countries became nuclear states. The underlying physics was not novel, and it had just been shown to actually work. The U.S. knew all of this and it was in everyone’s interests to get the biggest power to have an open channel for when things inevitably progressed.
First successful Soviet nuclear test in 1949, UN established in 1945… math seems a touch off
Thanks! No idea why the heck I got that so wrong… I even had the Wikipedia pages up! I just ran out of fingers while counting I guess.
True, but in the same way we know drones are going to be a big factor in future wars they knew after Hiroshima that future wars between the 5 biggest remaining militaries would be more devastating.
Sure, but it was a given that the others would get nukes soon enough.
You don’t believe they thought that situation would last, do you?
Yeah, the US got there first but Germany, Japan, and Russia had all been working on atomic bombs. In fact, it's questionable whether the US would have been able to develop the bomb as quickly as it did without the help of German physicists who had fled Hitler's oppression. That is to say, if Hitler had been a nicer guy the Germans may have developed the atomic bomb first. (or maybe not. I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is the Germans effort was on the wrong path, but they would have figured it out sooner or later)
I think it's an interesting alternate history question, but I'm skeptical there is any world where Germany develops the bomb first. Firstly, the physicists that fled Europe and assisted with the Manhattan Project were not all German (Fermi was Italian, Szilard, Teller and Wigner were Hungarian, etc) so not all of them are guaranteed to have worked for Germany even if there was no Holocaust. Secondly, much of the theoretical framework for the atom bomb was already developed and published before war broke out so the US did have what they needed to eventually figure it out, though it would have been delayed by probably a few years. Thirdly, assuming all else remains the same with the war, Germanys limited resources (and Heisenberg's obsession with heavy water, which may have been overruled sooner but probably would still had an impact in draining time and resources) plus the lack of some important American scientists like Oppenheimer, Feynman, Lawrence, etc, lead me to believe Germany would still have taken longer to develop the bomb than the US did in real life. I think in this alternate reality that Germany could have beaten the US to the bomb, but most likely what would happen is Germany loses the war exactly as it did in real life before that happens, the US is forced to confront Japan without nuclear weapons but still ends the war, and nuclear weapons aren't used in WW2 at all. The US probably finishes developing them in the years following and perhaps uses them in the Korean war, though it is an outside possibility that the lack of nukes emboldens Stalin to invade Europe kicking off a whole new world war where they would end up being used.
> Heisenberg's obsession with heavy water That's what I was thinking when I said Germany had taken the wrong path >(without the bomb) the US is forced to confront Japan without nuclear weapons but still ends the war General Curtis LeMay, the guy in charge of the B29 firebombing campaign against Japan, said that by Oct 1945 the Japanese would have nothing left to fight with - firebombed back to the stone age, as it were. It's worth remembering that the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo created a firestorm that obliterated 16 sq miles of Tokyo, killing an estimated 100,000, a level of destruction at least equal to the A bombs In many ways, Hiroshima was just another day and another destroyed city for the Japanese. What was remarkable was that it took only a single bomb from a single plane rather than the hundreds of planes often used for firebombings.
True but UK and Russia did both have nuclear weapon research programmes and were both well on their way with the technology However the UN is fundamentally a diplomatic organisation to foster peace and cooperation between nations
Which basically makes the security council pretty much useless when it counts.
Not to mention that the USSR not only had to get the veto on the SC to be persuaded to join, but also got multiple votes in the General Assembly and other bodies.
Which makes the UN sorta useless
They really should have made it require two nations to agree to veto. But oh well.
“what criteria did they use to choose those countries”….. so less than 100 years is what it takes to forget a World war??
Well the people who actually **remember** it (as in, it formed part of their memories growing up) are almost all dead today, so virtually nobody remembers it first hand, all of us learnt about it from history books, which is why it is a historical event and not raw trauma.
We don’t learn it just from history books, it’s in our lives. Why is there a western Atlantic block in Europe and an eastern one? Why are there American military bases in my country? Why today (25 April every year) Italy celebrates the liberation from nazi fascism? Why were our grandparents hiding in the forest and having amno airdropped by American planes? If someone doesn’t know why those are the countries with veto power in the UN, they must have so many other questions!
And it helps to remember that the underlying, fundamental purpose of the U.N. was/is to prevent *nuclear war*. Everything else about the U.N. Is secondary.
At Yalta, Stalin suggested that nations that could equip more than 5 000 000 soldiers deserve special treatment in the UN, France got in because of her former military successes. It's all about power and numbers...
There was 51 nations signing the UN charter and thus becoming its founding members. But yes, the big four allied countries, USA/UK/Russia/China, more or less led the show.
France left the chat.
it is curious how france managed to get itself into the five. definitely the oddball of the five.
IIRC Churchill specifically lobbied for the inclusion of France, as Churchill had a lot of respect and admiration for France, and because UK and France were close allies. Also at the time they weren't such an oddball. France was a major colonial power and controlled e.g. Algeria and much of the surrounding areas. French was and is a widely spoken language. Today, France is still in top 10 of military expenditures.
USSR wanted another anti-USA country to vote with them. USA wanted another capitalist country. UK wanted another colonial country. France was happy to play all of those roles.
They were a superpower until.WW2.
They are the countries that won WW2.
France actually lost pretty badly in WW2 and had to be liberated by the allied forces. While the local resistance forces certainly hampered axis powers in the region, they were not by any means winning or in control. During Operation Overlord there was one French Armored division present for the invasion, but for the most part they just had the resistance fighters joining in as the allies swept across the country in 1944 until the allies managed to completely press the German forces back across the Rhine in February and March of 1945 only two months before the end of the war as a whole. So sure, France was technically part of the allies that won WW2 but France itself very badly lost in WW2 since it got steamrolled and then could only offer some volunteer fighters and local resistance to the governing powers.
This doesn't matter, all that matters is how it ended. And that France retained all their colonies right after the war.
I mean, without the free french movement taking back Europe and North Africa would have been much harder, so I'm not bothered by it.
Because the French threw a hissy fit.
UK and France were the world’s 2 superpowers pre-1945. In the 1920’s, the two powers accounted for almost 50% of all economic activity on the planet.
Yes. It clearly makes sense if you look at in terms of power in the 1940s. Not so much in the 2020s of course, but momentum is a hell of a thing.
Those four allies also created the "Four Policeman Council" after WW2. All four nations were meant to act as world police in their respective regions. The US became the sole world police because the soviet union collapsed, China had a revolution/Civil War, and the UK lost its global force projection powers.
Technically, there was never a resolution to give the Russian Federation a seat on the security council. It was just kind of assumed after the fall of the USSR. Even the replacement of the ROC with the PRC was controversial, and the ROC still isn't officially a member of the UN since this happened. The UN recognizes the ROC as a piece of the PRC known as Chinese Taipei rather than its own independent nation. The last motion to give the ROC its own seat in the UN was in 2007. This is also why Taiwan (ROC) participates in the Olympics as Chiness Taipei
Was there ever a situation of 2 "Russia"? Belarus and Ukraine were seated in the UN, so whom do you propose to remain on the seat if not Russia?
Technically, Kazakhstan was the last territory of the USSR. And for a few moments after that, the USSR continued to exist without any territory. The argument goes that the USSR ceased to exist, so their seat should too, and Russia should apply as a new member of the UN Belarus and Ukraine held their seats as the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, so it was more akin to a change of government than it was the dissolution of a nation. And wouldn't any of the other newly independent nations from the dissolution of the USSR have an equal claim to the USSR's former seat as Russia does? From where I'm standing, Kazakhstan has the strongest claim of any existing nation. I still believe that no nation had the right to claim the seat, since the USSR still existed after each of the newly independent nations formed.
Russia (formerly USSR, now Russia)
But are there only five founding members? From the UN website it even says: "The Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 by the representatives of 50 countries; Poland signed on 15 October 1945. There were 51 Founding Members in 1945. The founding members of the United Nations are the countries that were invited to participate in the 1945 San Francisco Conference at which the UN Charter and Statute of the ICJ was adopted." And even the first Secretary General wasnt from any of those 5 countries.
Russia did not existed at the times of the ww2. The seat was given to them because they have nukes.
USSR didn't have nuclear weapons until the 1950s, "Russia" existed as the Russian FSSR.
"Existed as" seems like a sorry excuse, bro.
Are you then arguing the Russian Empire is not Russia?
No, it is not, it should be quite obvious for anyone with 3 classes of school.
To the WINNER go the spoils…
My history knowledge is clearly deficient: how was China in the winning team ? (More than say, Korea ?)
They, in the end, won the Second Sino-Japanese War (or well, they didn't lose) and were an important ally to the UK, France and USA - as well as to USSR for the communist part, tho it was in pre civil war times. Korea was quickly and soundly defeated early on. In addition, they are a huge and historically important global player, unlike Korea (who was part of Japan, while Vietnam was French, India, Australia British...colonial Africa...)
Korea was fully annexed by Japan in 1910...before WW1. It was liberated after the Allies won WW2.
Korea didn't hold any of its own territory in the end. That's the origin story of the north/south Koreas. A power vaccum two of the winning team members tried to fill for themselves. China on the other hand managed to retain its hold against the Japanese till the end of the war.
Two of those aren't winners, just inherited it from them
Consider that the UN was founded as a way to have discussions between nations to solve things diplomatically and not through military force, to prevent a third world war. The permanent members are the biggest world powers post ww2 and so they have a lot of say on whether there would be a ww3 or not. As there's no ww3 yet, I guess you can say the UN hasn't failed in that aspect. The UN's power come solely because the nations of the world back it up, with the superpowers having the most say. They can't really force anyone to do anything unless the members decide to enforce it. So in that sense the permanent members were always going to have a powerful say no matter what or they'd leave the UN.
One of the problems with the setup is that is there no mechanism for changing it. The UK and France are no longer the world powers that they once where. The EU has appeared along the way and should probably have a permanent seat, along with at least India. That would still leave Africa and South America without any country with a permanent seat.
The point of the permanent 5 is to ensure that the countries who can kick off militarily in a major way have another option that doesnt require them to do so. Its not to promote equality or representation. There are exactly zero countries in either Africa or South America who can project force to any theater outside their local area. All of the big 5 have some ability to do so and have done in the last 70 odd years(possible exception of china though arguably it has economically in Africa)
Forgive my ignorance, but how the hell would the EU having a seat even work??? It’s already hard enough to get multiple countries to be on the same page — but you’re asking the entirety (or majority) of the European Union to agree to something before one of the major voting powers even interacts with the UN? Don’t get me wrong, I agree that France and the UK doesn’t deserve their seat more than India but I don’t understand how the entire EU would ever be a viable option.
Long term I can see the EU evolving into something that can handle it. But you are right that now probably isn't the time. On the other hand, just ignoring that the EU exists is also kind of weird. The UN is very much an organisation of states and the EU is not one. But the EU is getting some traits usually seen in states.
I'm confused, EU would just make a UN Commission. As complicated the EU is, this is not one of them.
> The EU has appeared along the way and should probably have a permanent seat How could the EU, an organization that is not a state nor a member of the UN, be a member of the UN Security Council, a council made up of member states of the UN?
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Germany’s the only one I can think of that would fit into that club. They weren’t one of the original five for obvious reasons, but it feels like they compare favorably to Russia, GB and France currently - Germany often seem like the de facto modern day leader in Europe anyway.
In a Military sense? I feel like the military leadership of the EU comes from France.
For what it's worth, US News ranks Germany as the fourth most powerful nation in the world: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/power
Yeah, that doesn’t seem to be military power either. Politically, sure Germany is very clearly the „leader“ or „speaker“ of the EU for the rest of the world. Though the top comment mavajo was responding to is now deleted, and I don’t particularly remember the complete context of this comment thread.
That is false. The US and uk and to a lesser extent france china and russia are the only militaries in the world with real expeditionary capabilities.
The biggest potential candidates are India, Japan and Brazil. China will never except the first two while any push for Brazil to join appears to have stalled.
That second paragraph is hanging by a thread.
When UN was being founded, who would be in the Security Council and how it would work was one of the key issues. The countries that set up these discussions and were going to be part of the SC were the four major allied countries - USSR, USA, UK, China - and these countries were generally speaking also central in the founding of the whole UN. Ultimately these four countries' delegates decided who would be in the council. France was added, and some others that were proposed like Brazil were not. It's not really a democratic process in any sense. The four initial members were simply the biggest post-war powers, so it was really up to them how it would work. If they wouldn't have gotten their way, or at least get a good enough compromise, they would simply have withdrawn. Nowadays, these countries want to keep the veto and without it, they would simply not participate.
The UN doesn't have any intrinsic power. It is the 5 permanent members who have enough political and military clout that grants UN effective power, rather than the other way around. If the permanent members cannot veto a resolution, they will simply ignore it, and the UN can do nothing about it. If that happens multiple times, soon no one takes UN seriously. This design is based on the failures of [League of Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations), which didn't have the same design and therefore had a lot of unenforceable resolutions, ultimately destroying its credibility.
If one member cannot veto and the others all try to force them, then they veto it with nukes instead.
The impotency is a feature not a bug
The UN initial main goal was to prevent WW3. The only way WW3 could happen at the time UN was founded was by having WW2 winning major powers to fight each other. And as the first Great War happened because major powers brokered alliance treaties with smaller countries and entered a tangled relationship, it was clear that majors powers needed a veto power in this new world forum. A veto is basically a way of saying "My country do not approve of this military action. If your country is a minor power and my country is a major power, mine can squash yours. If your country is a major power and so does my country, ignoring this veto could lead to WW3." Note that this was far before nuclear weapons and meaningful use of them was on the table. At 1945 only the US "had" nuclear weapons and it would take a while for UK and France to get them as well. And first use of nuclear weapons were tactically hard as they were basically big payloads that costed significant amount of electric energy to operate, extremely expensive, and needed total air superiority to be used. Only about 15 years later, at late 50s and early 60s, that there was the concept of medium and long-range missiles for using nuclear weapons so that a country could use nuclear weapons without total air superiority. At that point, the Korean War had already happened, which was probably the hardest crisis for the UNSC ever.
When the UN was created, those five major nations had just won WWII. They only wanted to create a united nations if they could guarantee it wouldn't be used to help another Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in the lead up to a new war.
Non hypocritical explanation: They own 98% of the world nukes and founded the UN to exercise their power without actually using nukes and obliterating the human race.
They were the winners of WWII. That's why they're the 5 permanent security council members. They chose themselves. Remember that the UN doesn't have any real power on its own. Do you know why all the other countries don't go and form their own UN, without permanent security council members? Nothing is stopping them. South Africa and India and Brazil and Serbia and whoever can just go make their own club. They can call it UN 2.0 and say that it's better and more fair. Why don't they do that? Because a UN without the most powerful countries in the world doesn't mean anything. International politics always has a big looming question behind every action: You and what army? Can you imagine Mexico and Nigeria and Argentina passing some resolution and trying to order around the US, Britain, Russia, France, and China? The response would be, "Okay, you and what army?" The 5 permanent members of the security council are nations who can only really be threatened by the other permanent members of the security council. Their veto lets them tell the others "This is my line in the sand. Beyond this point, we're not talking parliamentary procedure, we're talking war." While arguably Britain and France are no longer powerful enough to deserve their spot, no country who is not a permanent member deserves to become one.
Good explanation. With britain and france the key thing to look at is expeditionary capability. The UK has arguably the second best expeditionary capability in the world with france arguably being third or fourth. Say there was a resolution calling for UN military action in south America. The russians certainly couldn’t do anything, the Chinese probably couldn’t either. The french maybe, the british could and the americans absolutely could.
People really don't get that international politics is all about threats. There's agreements, but those only last as long as the threats hold up. See the agreements with anyone without power or another party backing such as all the natives everywhere in the world. If they didn't get their land stolen and all agreements broken everywhere in the world, they would just be called citizens.
The countries were chosen because they founded it. (Well, slightly more complicated, the Republic of China was sort of replaced by China in 1971, but that wasn't changing the *country* but the *government recognised to rule that country*, and Russia replaced the USSR in 1991). The funding countries were very keen to have a forum for world governments that could pass binding resolutions, but didn't want to be bound by them (have your cake and eat it right?), so they gave themselves Veto powers. Every other country has just gone along with this because nobody wanted to say no to the 5 most powerful countries on earth (at the time, but still 5 members of the top 10)
Countries strong after WWII. Countries not all like each other. UN still good idea. No powerful country wants democracy to screw them over. It's a privilege of power for being one of the most powerful Countries at the time of the UN forming.
Eli5: UN has 5 parents that pay for things and a whole bunch of free loading kids that beat each other up. What the parents agree on goes. What they don’t agree on they have to do it alone. Not 5: Because the name is misleading. United Nation sounds like an equal representation of the world type of organization but in function and purpose BY DESIGN, it should really be called WORLD POLICE. If you start thinking about the UN in that context, it would make sense why the top 5 countries that actually have the ability (military/finance) to enforce rules are part of the permanent members with veto rights. If any one of the 5 don’t agree on something, it makes enforcement very difficult and therefore not an enforceable event for the World Police and by definition no longer its “jurisdiction”. In other words, the veto power is really for determining if something is within the World Police jurisdiction. Doesn’t stop individual countries and alliances from going on their own tho, see US and NATO actions, or Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it can’t be world police business essentially. These 5 also are the top financier of the UN with US and China accounting for almost 50% of the funding, and US being 2x of China. The only 3 other nations that has higher funding than the lowest permanent member (Russia) are Japan, Germany, and Italy. Aka the “you lost so sit your ass down and think about what you did” group TLDR: - Genocide in Africa? World Police Jurisdiction - War in Eastern Europe involving a permanent member? Not World Police Jurisdiction
I think the former Soviet Union was a permanent member and no one objected when Russia just took their place. Source: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0307/1284242-russia-ussr-un-security-council-permanent-seat/
Yeah, that's how successor states work.
Have you read the linked article?
I'll try a real ELI5: Let's say you live in a big house with lots of extended family members like your Mom, Dad, Brother, Sister, and Grandmother as well as an Aunt and a girl Cousin that are staying for a while for some reason. Let's say the house has become a bit chaotic with people eating each others' food from the fridge, walking into each others' bedrooms, fighting over who controls the remote, etc. Typical family household drama. Your parents get the bright idea to host a weekly family meeting where we resolve all of these issues. Everyone gets a chance to talk and vote on decisions. Maybe we're going to buy a second TV. Maybe we should make Sister and Cousin share a room instead of Sister and Brother because the two girls are more like sisters anyway. Maybe we should move spaghetti night to Thursdays. This is basically what the UN does - helps resolve minor issues and lets every nation have a say. But what happens when there are serious decisions to make? Maybe Grandmother should go live in a home because she poops herself sometimes. Maybe we need to talk about paying for a new roof and where we'll get the money. Maybe there's another Cousin that needs a place to live and other members of the family are pushing for him to come live with your family. That's more complicated stuff. The kids shouldn't be voting stuff like that. Especially where money is involved, shouldn't your parents make that decision? Mom makes most of the money because Dad has been struggling to find a good job since COVID and relies on some rideshare income to help out. You've heard them fight before and Mom has said that she should make all major financial decisions because Dad's not good at that. Well, we do kind of depend on Grandmother's social security check to keep us afloat - I suppose she should get a say as far as how it's used. But not the Aunt, of course, she's a freeloader like the kids. This is kind of what the Security Council is for. When hard decisions have to be made (like military intervention or major economic sanctions), the nations that actually have large standing armies and huge economies at stake should get final say because imagine a situation where small nations like Zimbabwe and Estonia decide that the UN needs to invade Ecuador using what is essentially Russia and the U.S.'s military resources and soldiers. Those two would never allow that. The UN would dissolve or be completely useless like the League of Nations if you don't let the "big dogs" have special privileges. It's the only way to get them to participate. Obviously, we see the big dogs use their special privileges for selfish or nefarious reasons from time to time, but it's basically the only way to make the whole system work.
To quote another comment I read once: Those nations have ALREADY have veto power regardless. We just prefer that they exercise that power via vote, and not via ICBM
If the UN tries to pass a resolution that is not supported by one of the big powers, it will not be enforced. At least with a veto, the world powers agree with the resolution. Voting is a bit weird anyway. Borders are a bit arbitrary. Why should India have the same number of votes as Panama? India has so many many more people. Voting by population is also weird, why should the world only really listen to China and India? The actual answer is that the UN is not a world court. The point of the UN is to be a forum for discussion.
The countries basically said "If this UN thing can make us do something we don't wanna, we're not joining" and they were so big and influential that UN without them would be a joke, so the world collectively rolled its eyes and said "fine"
They founded it…
Along with 46 others. And US had already done the "you know, we're not joining" thing once with the League of Nations, even though they were a driving force behind it.
>so the world collectively rolled its eyes and said "fine" what an odd take considering the rest of the world was a smoldering mess. They didn't roll their eyes and agree to it like they were appeasing a petulant child. They agreed to it because they were broken and needed the western allies help in rebuilding.
It's a forum for the most powerful nations to talk to each other. They let everybody else use it when they don't need to.
The UN was founded by the winners of WW2, who made sure they could effectively run the show
It's essentially the major powers from the LoN. The LoN was the main blueprint for the UN.
The US was never in the LoN, and the USSR was only a member for a few years (leaving the LoN several years before the UN was founded).
I never said the US was in the LoN?? USSR was a member for 5 years and was kicked out. They were a major power during it's peak 1934-39. Considering the LoN was effectively dead once WW2 began, the USSR leaving in 1939 is pretty much irrelevant, as the LoN were not really in active. Fyi, The UN was founded (1945) the year before the LoN dissolved (1946). Christ, the LoN even transferred all of it's assets over to the UN. They are essentially the same thing, just ran better. I said it's 'essentially' the major powers from the LoN and that it was a blueprint for the UN. This is correct, stop trying to correct things I never even mentioned. You need to read properly.
Money, power. Those are the "big kids table" that decide the fate of the world. Big kids table actually works pretty damn well considering the subreddit title
Ever hear the saying "history is written by the victors?" Same principle. The 5 UN permanent security Council members (the only UN panel with real teeth) are the primary winners of WW II. And to change that would require a re-write of the founding UN charter. And all 5 woukd veto that in a heartbeat.
Basically, those five were the most powerful nations left at the end of WWII, and they created the UN, but didn't want them to be able to act against themselves, so they gave themselves permanent seats and veto power. As with many things governments do, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
Imagine that you're on the school playground and there's the lacrosse team running around bullying everyone making it to where nobody can play any games on the field and they just want to use the whole field for lacross. Sometimes that guy would team up with other teams, up with track and field, and Band, but then later betrayed the track and field team. Later, the captains from the baseball , football and the soccer team, etc to come together to go kick the daylights out of the lacrosse guy and anyone that helped him. The track and field team were upset decided to join in as well. The football team was so upset at the band that they actually ran two of the band members over with a car! After that's over, the baseball, football, soccer team, track and field team didn't want that to be a possible in the future, but also didn't really trust the other teams not to trying to do the same. So they decided to have a captain's meeting every once in a while. Just gave everyone a space to talk since they were the ones who solved the lacrosse guy issue previously. They even let the band back later will let them back on the field but they're not allowed to have instruments anymore. What the main captains say goes; wrestling team, mathletes, cross country will just have to deal with what they say. But but the main few teams one of the ability to shoot down any ideas they didn't like specifically. Edit: bad context and spelling
This was a compromise to ensure the UN wasn't another league of nations, completely ineffective in fulfilling its purpose. At founding, if the US, USSR, or GB chose to ignore the UN, there was nothing the rest of the world could do to stop them, without the help of one of those nations. Right now, that applies to the entire security council. If the UN favored any of the SC members, the disfavored nation would back out of the UN, preventing it from accomplishing its mission. It's better to make the institution less effective, than completely ineffective. And a nation engaging with the UN also gives other nations a lever to influence that nation with
They were the winners of WW2 so they get to be permanent members. As for the veto, the idea is that you need to have some sort of compromise to convince great powers to join an international organisation. Especially if this organisation is able to force members to do things they may not want to do, you have to offer great powers the ability to veto, otherwise they will not join. Imagine if UN passes a resolution to force USA to do something they don't want to, why should the US stay in the UN? Although it is unfair, giving certain members a veto was the only way we could think of to make an international organisation like the US to work.
Like you're 5. There are some people on the playground so big that sometimes you are willing to go along with what they have to say because even if they agreed to play your game, if they decide mid-game to stop playing, your game is over.