United Nations Security Council

The United Nations Security Council is presented as a central instrument of collective security: the institution through which states can call for compliance with international law and, when necessary, authorize a response to threats to international peace. In Noam Chomsky’s account, however, its promise is compromised by the ability of a powerful state to reject its judgments. The Nicaragua case makes that contradiction concrete, while the debate after the September 11 attacks turns the Council into a test of whether counterterrorism will proceed through evidence and law or through unilateral force.

Collective Security and the Limits on Force

Chomsky situates the Council within the postwar legal order designed to prevent states from answering violence with retaliation. After centuries of conflict had brought Europe close to self-destruction, the nations of the world adopted a different principle at the end of the Second World War: force was excluded except in self-defense against an armed attack, pending action by the Council to protect international peace and security. On this account, the Council is not simply another forum for state preferences; it is part of a framework meant to restrain escalating reprisals.

That framework, Chomsky argues, has to apply consistently. He disputes the claim that the United States could invoke self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter when it was not under armed attack in the relevant legal sense. His challenge is directed at selective application: fundamental rules of international law cannot bind only states that the United States dislikes. The Council’s role in collective security therefore carries a standard that reaches the most powerful states as well as their opponents.

Nicaragua and the Veto

The account of Nicaragua supplies the clearest example of the gap between legal process and political power. Chomsky says that in the 1980s the United States attacked Nicaragua, causing tens of thousands of deaths and devastation compounded by economic warfare. Nicaragua did not answer with bombs on Washington. It went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favor, ordered the United States to stop its actions, and required substantial reparations.

The United States rejected the judgment and intensified its attacks. Nicaragua then brought its case before the United Nations Security Council, which proposed a resolution calling on states to respect international law. The United States alone vetoed it. Nicaragua subsequently appealed to the United Nations General Assembly, where a similar resolution passed by a majority; the United States and Israel voted against it two years in a row, joined once by El Salvador. In Chomsky’s telling, the sequence exposes both the availability of institutional remedies and their vulnerability when a powerful state refuses to accept an adverse decision.

He also recalls that the United States had been condemned by the International Court of Justice in 1986 for unlawful use of force, which he characterizes as international terrorism, and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states, including the United States, to respect international law. The Council’s place in this episode is consequential but limited: it can formulate a collective appeal, yet it cannot make a permanent member comply when that state uses its veto.

Evidence, Arrest, and Judgment after September 11

In the post-September 11 debate, Chomsky presents the Council and the wider United Nations system as possible routes for pursuing those responsible. He argues that international legal institutions would likely endorse efforts to arrest and try Osama bin Laden and his associates, including the use of force, if their guilt could be demonstrated. He says that almost the entire world was asking the United States for evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement and that proof would make it possible to assemble support for a major international operation under United Nations auspices to arrest and try him and his collaborators.

The proposed alternative is not inaction. Chomsky describes it as an evidence-based, international process of arrest and trial, potentially pursued through diplomacy and, if justified, force. He notes that the Taliban had indicated in various ways that diplomatic means might be available, but that these proposals were rejected and force was chosen instead. The contrast makes the Council’s function part of a broader legal argument: collective action should follow a demonstration of responsibility rather than substitute military retaliation for proof and adjudication.

Law, Power, and the Council’s Significance

Chomsky also places the Council’s authority against the politics of counterterrorism. In his account, the United States’ rejection of the Nicaragua judgment and its veto of the subsequent resolution illustrate why demands for international law cannot be separated from the question of whether powerful states accept the same constraints they invoke against others. The Council’s procedures matter precisely because they offer a collective alternative to unilateral action; the veto, in turn, reveals how easily that alternative can be blocked.

The tension persists in Chomsky’s discussion of the post-September 11 order. He describes governments using the attacks to intensify repressive policies and the United States treating the new phase of the War on Terror as an opportunity to consolidate military superiority and global dominance. Against that background, a United Nations–led response based on evidence and legal process represents more than a procedural preference: it is a proposed check on retaliation and on the conversion of a security crisis into expanded state power. The Council’s significance lies both in that promise and in the record of its limits.