Until What? Enforcement Action or Collective Self-Defense?

Abstract

Should the Persian Gulf war of 1990-1991 be characterized as an “international enforcement action” of the United Nations Security Council or as a campaign of collective self-defense approved, encouraged, and blessed by the Security Council?This is not simply a nice and rather metaphysical legal issue, but an extremely practical one. The question it presents is whether the control and direction of hostilities in the gulf, their termination, and the substance of the settlement they produce were handled by the Council as the Korean War was handled, that is, as a campaign of collective self-defense, or as the United Nations’ first “international enforcement action.” According to some international lawyers, characterizing the gulf war as a Security Council “enforcement action” under the untried procedures of Articles 42-50 of the Charter would in effect eviscerate Article 51, make the exercise of each state’s “inherent” right of self-defense subject to the permission of the Security Council, threaten the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council, and thus lead to extremely grave and perhaps insoluble political difficulty. It could even destroy the United Nations.