United Nations: Response to SG Guterres

My comment to @providetriggersforevolutio3748 at 4:30 AM on Rule of Law:

Awesome comment! I totally agree with you that SG Guterres dropped the ball in this speech by not directly addressing Trump's new Board of Peace. SG Guterres, who has nothing to lose in the final year of his term, sounds like a comfortable careerist, not a competitive Trump counterweight. I don't see how Trump's Board of Peace can be valid under international law or US law. It's an abuse of UN Security Council resolution 2803 that should trigger a Security Council debate, as well as a request from the UN General Assembly for an ICJ advisory opinion. But then, we probably should have had a UN Security Council meeting over Trump's co-occurring breach of the peace in relation to Denmark and Greenland. SG Guterres should be saying as much directly to the Council. He should also be chiding it for not referring Iran to the ICC.

Africa is already on the UN Security Council! My question is why were DRC, Somalia, and Liberia elected? If Africa really wants a permanent seat, why not start alternating between Egypt and South Africa or Nigeria for one of the current African seats? Also, assuming that a reformed Security Council will have 25 seats, including 9 seats for all of the current nuclear powers, how many of the remaining seats should North Africa and/or the Arab world have, how many should sub-Saharan Africa have, how long should their terms be, and should any of them have a veto power?

Regarding your last point, I am a 10th Generation American of European descent. That makes me a global northerner. Let me assure you, I am not financing wars in the global south with impunity, and that is definitely not anything that the vast majority of my fellow American citizens want to be doing, under President Trump's leadership now or under our next president's leadership in the future. If we here in the global north are inadvertently financing war and impunity in the global south, or if a minority of us are doing it intentionally, that is certainly an error we want to rein in. At the same time, we really don't want to be blamed by Africans or by anyone else in the global south for violence and poverty that only the African people themselves can resolve. Africans have to take responsibility for their own peace and security. No one else can do it for them. Northern reparations for that share of our global environmental crisis caused by African overpopulation and African ecological economic mismanagement are not going to work up here politically, and we are unlikely to agree to reparations for the colonialism and two-sided slave trade of our ancestors. We are much too deep into decolonial multiethnic political reality for that. All we want is to prosper in a realistic sustainable development context while paying our fair share for good local and global governance. Should we in the global north be investing more in Africa or more in defense? Well, I for one would like to see us start investing more in the African Union's green economy, and less on defense, but it looks like we need P5 consensus on a serious UNSC reform plan if we want to make that course correction.

Cf. "Expert Q&A on the Charter of the Board of Peace and the Role of Congress" by Michael Mattler at Just Security and "International Law and the Trump Board of Peace Charter" by Brian Brivati at Britain Palestine Project.