Talk of Expelling Russia from the Security Council Is a Useless Distraction

Pretending that there is a practical option for expelling Russia when there isn’t one isn’t helping anyone, and it’s a waste of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere.

Marc Thiessen is the latest to trot out an impossible and unwise proposal:

Not only should Russia be kicked off the Security Council, its seat should be given to Ukraine. Indeed, there is precedent for doing just that.

Thiessen doesn’t understand the precedent he cites, and he doesn’t understand the relevant procedures at the United Nations. Even if it could be done, there would be some good reasons not to do it anyway. The switch to recognizing the People’s Republic of China as the only Chinese government instead of the Republic of China was quite different from what is being proposed here. In that case, one of two competing claimants to the same role—the government of China—was replaced by the other. What Thiessen proposes is that the U.N. should take the seat of a state that has been universally recognized as the Soviet Union’s continuing state and hand it over to an entirely different state that has never been recognized in that role and has never previously claimed it. The implication is that Ukraine should be handed Russia’s current position as one of the five permanent members, which is a far more strained interpretation of the Charter than accepting Russia’s control of the seat.