What the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission in CAR Reveals About Security Council Gridlock

What does a small spat in the Security Council over the Central African Republic, or CAR, tell us about the state of major power relations?

Last week, the council was unable to agree on the terms of a six-month extension to the 13,000-strong United Nations stabilization mission in CAR, known by its French acronym MINUSCA. The diplomats gave themselves a month to fix their differences over the operation’s mandate. There seem to be three main points of contention.

One is Moscow’s insistence that the council endorse a Sudanese-Russian effort to mediate the fragmented country’s conflicts. France, the former colonial power, and its allies see this as an ill-concealed ploy by Khartoum to boost its regional influence. They also worry that Russia, which has sent military advisers and mercenaries to help train the Central African army, wants to regain the influence it lost in Africa after the Cold War—or at least get access to CAR’s rich mineral deposits.

But if the Western powers share this skepticism about Moscow’s intentions, they are divided over other parts of the U.N.’s role. Paris wants MINUSCA to give logistical support for national forces to deploy across the country. The U.S., which pays more than a quarter of all U.N. peacekeeping costs, has demanded that the mission’s budget should not be expanded to cover this additional task.

The U.S. also apparently objected to a proposed reference to the International Criminal Court, or ICC, in the resolution reauthorizing the mission. The ICC has a potentially significant role in removing unsavory characters from Central African Republic; Bangui extradited one former militia leader, with the revealing nickname of Rambo, to The Hague this weekend. But the Trump administration, and especially National Security Adviser John Bolton, is hostile to the ICC on principle.

This American quibbling over mentioning the ICC is, however, probably the least significant of the three issues under debate in the council. To most observers, all three might seem to be pretty minor diplomatic hiccups. But two much broader strategic contests appear to be converging in the case of CAR.

The first and better known of these is Russia and China’s general pushback against Western dominance over decision-making in the Security Council. Beijing, which would also like to see the council acknowledge Sudan’s peacemaking role in CAR, and Moscow have aimed to stop the U.S. and its allies from dictating U.N. actions in cases such as Syria and Myanmar. They have also opposed Western positions in the Security Council over African crises, such as the Darfur conflict.

It is nonetheless unusual to see the Russians and Chinese act so assertively in a case like CAR, which they might once have written off as a French sphere of interest. Until quite recently, U.N. analysts were confident that the Security Council’s permanent members could “compartmentalize” their differences over first-order crises like Syria to keep them from disrupting more obscure cases such as CAR. Moscow may now be motivated by the country’s minerals and the chance to build political capital with Sudan, which could open the way to wider influence in East Africa. The fact that Russia has chosen to pick a fight with France over an obscure conflict is still symptomatic of the decline in East-West relations at the U.N.

It is even more striking that these frictions are overlapping with a Franco-American dispute over the costs of stabilizing a former French colony. While geopolitical commentators have devoted quite a lot of ink to the West’s antagonism with Russia at the U.N., they have tended to overlook a worsening stand-off between Paris and Washington over peacekeeping in Francophone Africa.

France has long looked to blue-helmet missions to help it handle violence in former colonies such as Cote d’Ivoire and Chad. In 2013 and 2014, it called on the U.N. to deploy missions to back up its interventions in Mali and CAR. Today, nearly half of all U.N. peacekeepers are deployed in former French possessions, including not only former colonies in Africa, but also Lebanon. To boot, these are some of the U.N.’s hardest missions. Over 100 peacekeepers have died in guerrilla attacks in Mali. A Tanzanian serving with MINUSCA died in an attack on a church in CAR on Friday.

Paris has increasingly questioned whether U.N.-commanded forces alone can deliver security in such cases. It has encouraged the Security Council to direct the U.N. to support alternative security presences, including a regional counterterrorism force—the G5 Sahel—in Mali and its neighborhood, and now national forces in CAR. The U.S. has always harbored doubts about the financial and political wisdom of backing such local forces, fearing that they will blunder into committing atrocities and human rights abuses of their own. The Trump administration is also especially concerned that it will get dragged into paying an outsize share of the cost for these new operations.

The U.S. has threatened to veto French resolutions concerning the G5 Sahel in the past as part of this dispute. Last week, one day before MINUSCA’s mandate came due, U.N. and African officials lined up in the Security Council to complain about the regional mission’s funding shortfalls. These diplomatic battles are never likely to get as much attention as those pitting Washington against Moscow and Beijing. But they are badly complicating the overall international response to crises in Africa.

The convergence of these two types of Security Council dispute—Western powers versus non-Western powers, and France versus the U.S.—in the debate over CAR is especially disturbing. It is likely that the council will sort out its immediate differences over CAR in the coming month. Nonetheless, this episode suggests that the U.N.’s various divisions could start to blur into one another in future. It is possible to imagine scenarios in which Russia lines up with France to fight the U.S. over mission costs. Conversely, the U.S. and China, which is paying an increasingly large share of U.N. costs in line with its economic growth, may one day line up to quash proposals from Paris for costly operations.

Under almost any circumstances, it looks like African wars will be at the center of more big-power games at the U.N. in the future. And that is unlikely to be good news for the victims of those wars.