Show me a country that does not think itself on the right side of history, and I will show you a country hardly worth its salt.

Against the backdrop of a potential major conflict in the Koreas, there persists a dangerous line of thinking among well-intentioned people in well-intentioned capitals to the effect that certain vetoes at the United Nations Security Council are capricious, illegitimate or otherwise “on the wrong side of history.”

This thinking holds that because a veto at the Security Council may, under international law, frustrate the legal prosecution of military action in a certain part of the world in the service of what may by some or many be deemed a legitimate or even noble cause, then any veto — real or anticipated — should be considered ignoble and therefore discounted or ignored.

The United Nations is threatened with financial penalties, while those espousing war proclaim themselves to be “on the right side of history,” doing “the right thing,” or working assiduously in the name of the people of another country.

After all, who could disagree with, say, stopping a genocide (actual or apprehended), ousting an oppressive government, or removing a perceived threat that may materialize in the foreseeable future? Answer: hopefully, no one.

However, if such disagreement should issue from one or more of the permanent five, veto-wielding members of the Security Council, then the disagreement of that country or those countries, whether the United States, China or Russia, matters not only at international law, but because it bespeaks an international logic that has managed to keep the world from a generalized chaos for many decades.

We must always remember that the United Nations, for all its inefficiency and inelegance, is intended to deliver not de maximis but rather de minimis outcomes in global affairs: not global peace or love, but instead the absence of direct armed conflict between the great (nuclear) powers — full stop. To date, the UN has, surprisingly but spectacularly, delivered on this de minimis goal, even if it has not been successful in eliminating genocides, second-tier conflicts and countless humanitarian disasters and human tragedies.

Why has the UN been so successful? Because the genetic logic of the Security Council precludes the possibility that any of the great powers among the permanent five should go to war against one or more of the other great powers with international legal sanction.

Veto oblige, the U.S. and China could never, in principle, go to war against each other legally. The same is true of Russia vis-à-vis China or the U.S. The extension of this genetic logic at the Security Council requires nuclear powers like China and the U.S. to veto pretensions to international strategic action by any other grouping of countries in theatres that Beijing and Washington hold strategically dear.

Such uses of the veto are nary capricious, and even if they will on occasion be opportunistic or cynical, they provide an essential signal to all aspirants about which interventions could potentially result in the general conflagration that the Security Council in particular, and the UN in general, is designed to preclude.

In the case of North Korea, all interested parties, staring with the new Trump administration, ignore this basic scaffolding of the modern global peace at their great peril.

A Chinese veto or anticipated veto against any potential American plan to strike Pyongyang should not be interpreted as illegitimate protection by Beijing of a distasteful regime, but more intelligently as a cue that ignoring the veto could, in certain scenarios, lead to a clash of swords between China and the U.S. (and perhaps also Russia).

Such a clash could quickly assume a nuclear character, and whereas North Korea may be several years removed from being able to militarily touch continental North America, including Canadian cities, China could in principle do so tomorrow.

The minimalist understanding of the UN also helps us see why, as the United Kingdom presses toward Brexit and France emerges from a very divisive election, the European Union remains critical to international peace in our time.

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This European Union, for all its clumsiness, is no social or economic project. It is, fundamentally, an astoundingly successful peace project, the simple purpose of which was and remains to bind Germany, which also once saw itself on the “right side of history,” into an indefinitely peaceable logic. No more, no less.

Irvin Studin is editor-in-Chief and publisher of Global Brief magazine, and president of the Institute for 21st Century Questions.

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