The United States Senate fought a pitched battle with the Reagan Administration when the latter tried in the 1980s to argue that the ABM [anti-ballistic missile] Treaty no longer meant what the Senate was told it meant when it gave its consent in 1972. For the United Nations to step into Reagan's shoes and pursue the same argument would be to court political disaster. It would not sell in democratic assemblies where the rule is that you get what you vote for.

What, therefore, is to be done to make the Charter "relevant" with respect to the vexing question of intrastate genocide? Clearly, we face a dilemma: if States push to amend the Charter to permit counter-genocidal intervention, other States, perhaps powerful ones such as China and Russia, could choose to opt out rather than submit to the possibility of pretextual intervention for ulterior political or economic motives. Their history surely warrants caution in accepting lightly any regime that could force them to relive historical nightmares. And, as we saw after Versailles, a regime without key international players risks even greater irrelevance than one that forces States to breach it.

In the end, there may be no way out of this quandary; the international community may be forced to choose between the rule of law and the exigencies of justice, just as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had to do in Kosovo. Perhaps its choice will again be law over justice, so as to permit universality in membership. With the cold war over, however, the international community should be willing to sacrifice marginal stability to forestall internal genocide. This is the path laid out by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his ground-breaking remarks in Chicago on 22 April 1999.

The speech, one of the most remarkable and far-sighted given by a world leader in many years, makes the case that "[a]cts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter". The "Blair Doctrine", as it has been called, further recognizes the need for Security Council reform to reflect the propriety of intervention to stop genocide. Many possible improvements exist, beginning with rethinking the veto enjoyed by the Council's five permanent members. More important than any one reform, however, is the need for a new openness to it. As Blair put it, "we have to establish a new framework".

Ultimately, the route to greater relevance for the United Nations is a system that is both stable and just, not a system that excessively exalts stability at the price of basic human dignity.

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