Opinion by Gary Mauser, Alan J. Chwick, & Joanne D. Eisen
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Failed Disarmament: 105 years of disarmament efforts have failed to bring peace as nations can’t trust international agreements for security.
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Arms Trade Treaty Failure: The UN’s ATT has been ineffective due to poor cooperation, trust, and funding issues.
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Civilian Disarmament Concern: The UN’s focus on disarming civilians is misguided, risking greater insecurity, specifically for America!
The year 2024 marks the 105th year of attempts to create global peace through “collective security” via disarmament and, consequentially, the 105th year of the failure of unilateral disarmament. Recognition of this failure is widespread. Collective security requires disarming countries so that international disputes can be resolved through negotiation and arbitration.
Disarmament has been difficult to achieve for many reasons, primarily because few countries feel they can solely rely upon international agreements for protection. There is a near-universal belief that the mere possession of weapons confers safety on a state. The universal concern is that weakness will invite attack. Few countries (or individuals for that matter) are willing to abandon their own arms in exchange for promises that might not be kept.
After the First World War in 1919, the League of Nations was established by the Treaty of Versailles, with disarmament, according to Jari Eloranta, as “its most fundamental goal.” It failed because the League of Nations was not “able to guarantee that peace would last.” The United Nations was established in 1945, just as the League ceased to exist. The First Committee of the UN General Assembly continues to tout collective security and to perpetuate the UN doctrine of seeking world peace through disarmament.
Responsible citizens must examine and accept the painful fact that arms control and disarmament attempts, promised to lead to peace, have foundered. The refusal of the ostensibly well-meaning weapons-control advocates to consider other paths to global stability and peace is not acceptable. Unilateral disarmament is not the only alternative to constant war and habitual violence.
Hints abound that disarmament may not be the best way to motivate peaceful behavior internationally, but the intense and unwavering dogmas of unelected global leaders who seem to worship disarmament blocks significant examination of other and possibly better peace-making behaviors. Arms control is not the only path toward peace.
We believe that mankind can find paths to peace that maximize human freedoms while dealing with human frailties without resorting to disarmament. Mankind must seek and find these alternate paths if we care about the success and survival of our progeny and our planet. The threat of global war shouts to us that the dream of disarmament for peace is just too dangerous to cling to. A century of propaganda pushing disarmament has resulted in a century of failure. The first step towards finding an alternative path to peace is to understand why the UN’s disarmament efforts have failed.
ARMS TRADE TREATY FAILURE
All citizens should be concerned about the failure of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT or Treaty), which originally was intended to limit larger weapons systems possessed by countries, but the UN also turns its gaze on popular firearms owned by individuals. Continued arms control failures and successes should concern us because the UN is demonizing common weapons owned by civilians. For the UN, it appears to be a matter of going after the weapons that seem easiest to control.
Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms, and intimately connected to UN Weapons control policies, states in the UN Chronicle magazine, “Disarming civilian populations is more difficult than disarming governments…it is arguably more necessary.” More recently, in New York City, on June 18, 2024, Under Secretary General Izumi Nakamitsu told diplomats at a conference related to small arms, “A peaceful and sustainable future depends on addressing the threat of small arms and light weapons.” All civilian-owned weapons are in their sights. This view conflates terrorists, criminals, and responsible citizens.
The tenth anniversary of the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a good time to evaluate its success since the ATT first entered into force on December 24, 2014. Recent events show that the Treaty is not able to keep its promises of limiting arms, nor of world peace. It is also obvious that some in the United Nations recognize the painful truth that the ATT is a grand failure, but the UN is loath to admit it. And the failure of the ATT is just another example of the greater failure of the UN at which we should take a long and hard look. Weapons control through the ATT, on the way to weapons bans, on the search for global peace, just is not happening.
Here are the latest developments that led to that conclusion.
The President of the Tenth Conference of States Parties (a.k.a. CSP10) of the ATT, H. E. Razvan Rusu, the Romanian Ambassador to the UN, admitted to the failure. He said the Treaty process was no longer able to function as promised.
On February 9, 2024, Ambassador Rusu released a working paper to the ATT delegates and other interested people that stated that the theme of the Tenth Conference was The Role of Interagency Cooperation in the Effective Implementation of Arms Trade Treaty Provisions. Rusu’s report is a gentle way of alerting the world to the failure. Although interagency cooperation is not part of the Treaty, without cooperation from various government agencies, the ATT delegates could not continue to make progress. They needed to take a break from Treaty work and fix the problems that needed fixing before they could resume work on the actual Treaty.
Ambassador Rusu indicated that individuals and related entities were not cooperating in a way that would promote peace as promised, and until they could, work related to the ATT goal was at a standstill. In effect, he complained that major changes were required before the treaty delegates could get back to their primary job of furthering arms control as the path to achieving global peace.
This could be almost any organization suffering from uncontrollable internal and external dysfunction. But it’s a microcosm of societal challenges at the global level, a sad reminder of our very faulty species. If mankind has a path to peace, it is not through disarmament, no matter how wonderful that may sound, how many people believe it, or how many times disarmament proponents might repeat it.
WHO AUTHORIZED RUSU’S WORKING PAPER?
It became immediately obvious that a mere diplomat appointed by his country’s leaders, even at a senior level, would not have the authority to decide to reveal such a damaging judgment. Rusu described a “brainstorming workshop” on January 17, 2024, in Bucharest, Romania, involving the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), the Conflict Armament Research (CAR), and the Stimson Center. Paul Holtom, the Head of Conventional Arms and Ammunition Programme at UNIDIR, wrote a 32-page report describing that workshop.
UNIDIR, the Stimson Center, and other pro-weapons-control activist groups already knew about the severe problems regarding the uncontrolled diversion of arms into secret markets and knew that the diversion of arms was also plaguing the ATT. But now, the problems facing the Treaty itself were so crippling that the UN and their disarmament cronies knew that they had no choice but to reveal these problems to the world. They needed to control the information and the consequences of public knowledge of the failure.
And that explains why Romania and its UN diplomat, Razvan Rusu, were used to expose the failure. The UN and the disarmament community needed to go public, but in a low-key, non-shocking manner. They are not abandoning their loathing for weapons, but they can no longer cover up the failures of peace through weapons control.
Holtom, in his report for the Stimson Center, revealed that there were multiple problems. Ignorance and incompetence was rampant among participating individuals and groups. Holtom discovered widespread misunderstanding of the ATT process and goals; too many delegates admitted not having enough responsibility or were reluctant to share responsibility. He also found examples of poor communication and cooperation between government entities in judicial, defense, foreign affairs, and other related areas of government. Holtom also admitted there might be a lack of basic technical knowledge because of such a simple thing as staff turnover. Many things required change if the Treaty was to be implemented, and so the apologia by Paul Holtom delves directly into changes that are necessary if the Treaty will ever begin to at least appear to be fully functional.
In short, the Stimson Center’s attempts to switch the blame to normal government functioning and away from ATT’s intrinsic problem with a philosophy that has been unworkable for over 100 years. UNIDIR desperately needs to ignore the very rational fear of unilateral disarmament to which participating states are subject and to focus instead on the typical structural and communications problems that plague all governments and that ideally might be fixed once noticed. Only an irresponsible international organization like the UN could imagine that restructuring the culture and function of government to conform to the needs and goals of the Treaty is a feasible idea, just requiring ever more time and funding.
If Treaty failure could be passed off as the result of poor communications and common procedural problems within the participating states, then the more intractable problems, like the lack of international trust and massive resistance to disarmament, could more easily be hidden behind a facade of busy-work.
THE ENIGMA OF ATT FINANCES
By creating a treaty that required self-funding from treaty participants, the UN considers that the ATT was not worthy of official funding. Otherwise, this lack is not easy to explain. If the UN believed that the treaty was the way to peace, why would they neglect to fund it properly?
In a report by Dumisani Dladla, then head of the ATT Secretariat, we find the simple truth. Referring to membership dues that pay for the function of the ATT, he says, “The ATT is building an annual deficit of 7% on average, which will be rolled over into next year’s budgets. The implication is that liquidity challenges will materialize in the medium term if outstanding contributions remain unpaid.”
A crucial problem for the ATT is that funding is also required to aid poorer countries to function on a higher level, for example, regarding the initial and annual reporting requirements. However, sufficient funding was not available. We are told by Rachel Stohl of the Stimson Center that, “the most heated debates within the CSPs have been budgetary related.” Additional funding would help that problem quite a bit – enough money to reduce the scramble for scarce resources.
Additional funding would not lessen the existing lack of trust. A small increase would, however, allow the Secretariat to focus on producing improved yearly weapons reports. More importantly, funding would allow UNIDIR to continue ignoring the fact that members simply do not want to give up their state secrets and do not accept the ongoing process of disarmament.
Disarmament is not what cooperating states signed up for, as they require security more than an imposed peace. And security is not forthcoming from a magician’s top hat because of a promise. But UNIDIR claims that more available money would ease the concern and mistrust of officials in a few participating states.
DISARMAMENT LEADS TO VIOLENCE
What countries know is that they require a promise of safety and stability that engenders confidence that it will likely to be kept. There must be a firm and believable promise of security from attack by nations who have not yet disarmed, and if attacked, rescue must be immediate if promises are worth anything. However, countries know that no such promise can possibly be valid, except in the dreams of disarmament proponents. What does exist is the stuff of nightmares. Unilateral disarmament has been dangerous to the naive states who have attempted it, and simultaneous disarmament of the entire globe is not possible.
In January of 1994, Ukraine signed the Trilateral Agreement with Russia and the U.S. in which Ukraine, with promises of peace, would give up all of their original Russian nukes which remained in Ukraine after the fall of the USSR. The world knows the rest of that story.
Then there is the Libyan example of broken promises. On December 19, 2003, in exchange for the promises of peace and financial aid, Libya and the U.S. signed an agreement for Libya to give up all of its nukes. Those promises meant nothing. On March 14, 2011, as the ATT was getting written and just three years before it entered into force, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed the bombing of Libya and the destruction of the regime, leaving Libya a failed nation for all to see and remember. After Gaddafi’s death, his son, Saif al-Islam surmised, “it’s a good lesson for anybody…that you have to be strong, you can never trust them…and you have to be on the alert. Because those people, they don’t have friends. Over one night, they change their minds, and they start bombing … and the same thing could happen to any other country.”
Why, after Libya’s experience, would any country now trust the statements of arms control proponents who promise peace after disarmament? Neither the ATT nor the UN can address the problem of state security because their promises cannot be kept. Perhaps the UN and its member states should concentrate on providing security and good governance instead of demands for disarmament that promises peace but too often leads to violence without anyone responsible for rescue.
Where is the empirical evidence to support claims that disarmament leads to a stable world peace? Are there factors that predict peaceful outcomes, and what are they? Research during the late twentieth century pointed to out an alternative path to unilateral disarmament. The work of R.J. Rummel suggests that “The most important fact of our time is that democracy is a method of nonviolence… democracies do not make war on each other.” See his book ‘Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence‘. The UN might meddle a bit in the internal workings of failed or failing states and even send in their blue helmets, but according to the UN Charter, it can never question or control the type of governance in member states, including whether or not they are democratic. This limitation may be a UN blind spot that has worked to encourage non-democratic governments.
So the facts remain. The path chosen for the ATT has failed. Even if the UN and other disarmament proponents create a facade of renewed function, no one may realistically expect a successful outcome. Rather than rely on a philosophy that sows failure, why not reject the fake promises of disarmament and search out other paths towards that elusive goal of global peace?
Why do we cling to UN vaporous mandates? We must choose a better path towards species survival. Such paths appear to be elusive ways, and we need to remove all blinders to find them.
How will the UN react to the failure of the ATT? Anyone who understands and respects the protective value of weapons need to keep watch! The Stimson Center again signals that there will be minimal change if any.
On August 19, 2024, just before the tenth Conference would begin, Rachel Stohl, Research Director of the Stimson Center, opines;
“In the current global context, the ATT faces a pivotal moment…A decade of treaty implementation has revealed shortcomings in current modalities, practices, and approaches…all stakeholders must be willing to learn and innovate from these early lessons, including in terms of reorienting Conferences of States Parties to meet new priorities, expanding treaty scope to respond to changing contexts and technological developments in arms, and working together to raise common standards and understanding of obligations.”
She concludes, “As we move to the second decade of the treaty, preserving and improving the ATT will depend on overcoming the expanding deficit of political will.”
With unelected, unaccountable members who are unwilling to examine the undeniable truth that their philosophy is a failure, what’s the United Nations’ response?
Business as usual!
About The Authors
Gary Mauser is a professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Check out his blog at JusticeForGunowners.ca for more information.
Alan J. Chwick has been involved with firearms much of his life and is the Retired Managing Coach of the Freeport NY Junior Marksmanship Club. He has escaped New York state to South Carolina and is an SC FFL (Everything22andMore.com). AJChwick@iNCNF.org | TWITTER & TRUTH: @iNCNF
Joanne D. Eisen, DDS (Ret.) practiced dentistry on Long Island, NY. She has collaborated and written on firearm politics for the past 40+ years. She, too, escaped New York state, but to Virginia. JoanneDEisen@cs.com
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