How a UN Security Council Resolution Really Gets Made: The Vote I Asked My Ambassador to Risk

This week most of the world's heads of state are in New York for the General Assembly, and most of what anybody will see of it is speeches. I spent three years at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, 2013 to 2016, and the thing I'm proudest of from twenty years in the Foreign Service happened there in March 2014, over a stretch of late nights that almost nobody outside a handful of offices knew was going on.

A tanker had smuggled oil out of Libya. The country was coming apart, and a shipment like that, if it got through, handed the armed groups a way to pay for themselves outside any government's control. It also handed every other conflict that was watching a playbook. Washington wanted the Security Council to respond with sanctions, and fast. I took the lead with Washington in getting our Security Council colleagues on board for a resolution that was sure to face challenges from the Russians, who many argued were supporting the rebels in Libya at that time.

People picture a resolution as something that happens in the chamber. Fifteen countries around the horseshoe table, the flags, the hands going up. By the time anybody raises a hand, though, the real work is finished. The real work is the text, and text is slow and fussy and almost entirely invisible. Even the smallest word means something to some government somewhere, and getting the words right is the difference between a resolution that does something and one that only sounds like it does.

Our first plan was to tuck new language into a Libya resolution we were already negotiating. After several days of late-night sessions it was clear we weren't going to get the votes in the three days we had, so we pulled it out and went for a stand-alone resolution a few days later. What we wanted in it was aggressive: authority to interdict ships carrying smuggled Libyan oil on the high seas. Most of the Council didn't like the timing or how far it went, and that included some of our closest allies. Precedents make governments nervous, and this was going to be one.

It was long nights sitting through even longer sessions with the National Security Council and Treasury to understand what every line of the text would actually do, and gaming out what happened if Russia vetoed it. That last part was not a thought experiment. Russia had just vetoed a resolution on Ukraine. The instinct in a moment like that is to slow down, keep talking, give everybody more time, and I thought that was exactly the wrong move. More time meant more rounds with Russia and China, and more rounds meant a text so watered down it wouldn't have been worth passing. So we kept the schedule tight on purpose. I held smaller sessions with the countries who were already with us to work through the legal detail, turned around every other delegation's questions as fast as they came in, and kept Washington up to date as it all moved, which it did, more or less hourly.

Then it came down to whether to call the vote at all, and the person I had to convince was on my own side of the table.

My ambassador was Samantha Power, and before she took anything to the Council she wanted one more read from me. "Are you sure the Russians won't veto this?" I told her I was sure. Nobody had promised me anything, nobody ever does, but I had gone through the Council country by country and I had a pretty good idea how each one was going to vote. My recommendation was to force the vote. More negotiating wasn't going to get us anything except a weaker text.

She took it. I found out later, when it was quoted in my evaluation that year, what she wrote back to Washington: "I am fine with forcing/risking a veto because, as Cynthia says, we will gain nothing by more negotiations other than a text too weak for our taste."

I have never in my life counted anything as slowly as I counted those hands going up at the table that day.

It was unanimous. All fifteen, Russia and China included, on the most aggressive high-seas interdiction language the Council had adopted up to then. Our Deputy Permanent Representative told me afterward, "I wasn't sure we could pull it off." Honestly, neither was I, not completely, and I'd been the one telling everybody I was sure.

I think about that week more now than I did in the years right after it, mostly because of the consulting work. Clients ask me some version of the same question all the time: do we push this to a decision, or do we keep working it quietly and wait for a better moment? I hear myself make the argument I made that week, that the cost of asking is usually smaller than people think, and I believe it. I also know I only get to tell this story because the hands went up. If Russia had vetoed, it would have been a public loss for the United States, a few days after Ukraine, with my name on the recommendation. I'd be telling you a very different story about judgment and timing. More likely I wouldn't be telling it at all.

So I can't tell you how much of that week was judgment and how much of it was a good read on a room that happened to hold. I'd make the same call again. I just don't think I'd be any more sure of it.

Most stories about nerve are really stories about how it turned out!

—Cynthia

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