No more veto power? No way!

Malaysia’s foreign minister Mohamad Hasan has raised one of the oldest and most uncomfortable questions surrounding the United Nations: why should five countries possess the power to prevent the UN Security Council from acting?

His argument that the veto should be challenged and ultimately abolished deserves serious attention. Expanding the Security Council alone cannot resolve its structural weaknesses.

More countries sitting around the table will mean little if five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — continue to hold powers unavailable to everyone else.

Yet there is an enormous difference between recognising the problem and solving it.

Abolishing the veto is practical as an aspiration but almost impossible under the present international system.

The reason is straightforward.

The veto was not accidentally inserted into the UN Charter.

It was part of the political bargain underpinning the creation of the United Nations after the Second World War.

The major powers would participate in the new organisation so long as they could prevent decisions on substantive Security Council matters that fundamentally contradicted their interests.

That arrangement remains deeply entrenched.

Indeed, changing the UN Charter requires ratification by two-thirds of UN members, including all five permanent Security Council members.

The paradox could hardly be clearer: the countries that possess the veto effectively possess a veto over abolishing their own veto.

Why would they voluntarily surrender it?

Washington regards permanent membership and the veto as important instruments of American influence. Beijing and Moscow view theirs similarly.

London and Paris are unlikely to surrender one of the principal institutional privileges maintaining their status as permanent Security Council powers.

Great powers rarely relinquish entrenched advantages merely because others regard them as unfair.

Nevertheless, Mohamad is correct to challenge the principle.

The world of 2026 bears little resemblance to that of 1945.

India is among the world’s most important powers. Africa, despite having more than 50 UN members, lacks permanent representation.

Neither Latin America nor Southeast Asia possesses a permanent seat.

The Security Council therefore continues to carry the institutional DNA of the immediate postwar order.

Expanding its membership would improve representation.

But expansion without addressing the veto could merely create a larger council while preserving its fundamental inequality.

This is where Malaysia and other middle powers should concentrate their diplomatic efforts.

If immediate abolition is virtually impossible, constraining the political use of the veto is not.

The UN General Assembly has already established a mechanism requiring scrutiny when a permanent Security Council member exercises its veto.

Such mechanisms should be strengthened, particularly when the council is considering genocide, crimes against humanity or other grave violations of international humanitarian law.

Every veto should carry a political cost.

The permanent member using it should have to explain publicly why preventing collective action serves international peace and security.

The General Assembly should become increasingly assertive whenever the Security Council becomes paralysed.

For Asean, there is an important lesson here.

Southeast Asian countries cannot compete militarily with the major powers.

Asean’s influence has instead depended on consultation, institutional persistence, consensus and moral suasion.

Small and middle powers survive in an unequal international system not by pretending that power does not exist, but by creating rules and expectations that constrain how power is exercised.

The same principle should apply to the United Nations.

There is also a warning for the permanent five themselves.

The veto protects their national interests, but excessive reliance on it can progressively weaken the institution from which their privileged status derives.

If the Security Council repeatedly becomes incapable of acting precisely when international peace is most endangered, countries will increasingly seek other coalitions, institutions and arrangements.

The veto can therefore protect power while simultaneously eroding legitimacy.

Malaysia should consequently continue challenging it, even while recognising that formal abolition remains extraordinarily difficult.

International norms rarely disappear overnight. They weaken when practices once considered unquestionable become progressively harder to justify.

The veto emerged from the geopolitical realities of 1945. Eight decades later, the international community has every right to question whether those privileges should remain permanent.

Removing them presently may be close to impossible.

But allowing entrenched privilege to remain permanently beyond challenge would be worse.

It would leave the United Nations not merely constrained by great-power politics but increasingly imprisoned by it.

Asean has to keep expressing its opposition to a permanent system of great power privilege without end though.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.