The US is in favour of creating two permanent seats for Africa on the UN Security Council, although without a veto power. It also backs a rotating seat for small island developing states.
This is according to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the United Nations.
She told Reuters in an interview that the US hopes that “we can achieve Security Council reform at some point in the future”.
The US has long been in support of permanent seats for India, Japan and Germany.
For their part, developing countries have argued for decades that an expanded Security Council would recognise the realities of the world as it exists today, rather than as it was when the UN was formed in the 1940s.
Thomas-Greenfield obliquely agreed with this, noting that the current practice, which gave non-permanent seats to different blocs, was unsatisfactory: “The problem is, these non-permanent seats don’t enable African countries to deliver the full benefit of their knowledge and voices to the work of the council … to consistently lead on the challenges that affect all of us – and disproportionately affect Africans.”
Changing the Security Council’s composition would demand a change to the UN Charter, which would need a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly.
Part of the US’s position should be understood in relation to geopolitics, and the way that African countries have taken different stances from that of the US over issues like Ukraine and Gaza, and Chinese influence in the Pacific.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/unsom/49101495167]