Reform the UN Up to the Point of Exit and No Further

Reform the UN Up to the Point of Exit and No Further

TAN's position is plain: the Security Council should be reformed to include today's world - new permanent seats, restraint on the veto, real accountability to the General Assembly - but not so far that the great powers walk away. A more legitimate UN without its most powerful members would be a more representative room in which nothing gets decided.

The reasoning The UN's case rests on two assets.

One is its record: about 170 peace settlements, child deaths nearly halved between 1990 and 2011 through joint UNICEF and WHO campaigns, 35 million displaced people helped each year by UNHCR and the Montreal Protocol's success against ozone-depleting chemicals.

The other is something no other forum offers - a standing room where rivals still meet. The G20 can coordinate economies, but it cannot send a single peacekeeper. Both assets are eroding. The Security Council still mirrors 1945, leaving billions of people without a permanent voice.

The veto or the threat of it, shields aggressors and their friends. That loss of legitimacy pushes countries toward coalitions of the willing. Reform is therefore not an ornament; it is how the UN keeps its claim on the world's loyalty.

But the second asset depends on the great powers staying. Under Article 108, every permanent member must ratify any Charter amendment. A reform designed to strip them of power will not pass - and if it is forced, they can simply leave.

The United States' January 2026 withdrawal from 66 international organisations and its large arrears, show this is not hypothetical. Reform must therefore be strong enough to restore legitimacy and restrained enough to keep everyone at the table.

The strongest counter-argument The Uniting for Consensus group, led by Italy, offers a serious objection.

Adding permanent members, it argues, would multiply privilege rather than reduce it. New permanent members would entrench a few regional powers over their neighbours and if they gain vetoes, the Council would become even more paralysed.

The legitimate reform, on this view, is more elected, re-electable seats, which spread representation without creating new vetoes. If paralysis is the problem, why add more people who can cause it?

Why the

position still holds This objection is strongest against one specific design: new permanent seats with new vetoes. TAN agrees that adding vetoes would worsen paralysis, so our position does not require them. New permanent members without vetoes, combined with the veto-restraint norms already emerging - such as the 2022 rule requiring a General Assembly debate after every veto - answers the paralysis concern.

What elected seats alone cannot do is give continuity of responsibility to states whose cooperation the UN now depends on. Rotating members come and go; major contributors to peacekeeping, finance and climate action stay.

Uniting for Consensus is right about the risk of new vetoes, but wrong to treat permanence itself as the problem. The test is whether reform improves the UN without giving any major power a reason to leave. Expansion without new vetoes and veto restraint without abolition, passes that test.

Going further does not.