This is my Part III of the posts on global governance, the final part that I want to write for my “global citizen” duty. After this I will stop and switch to my financial education duty, to FinTech topics like blockchain and wealth management.
In the first two posts I outlined goals, identified problems associated with the hazard of excessive ideologies and tried to dig into their roots. Now I am ready to offer solutions or more accurately some quick solution proposals.
Reading Back the UN Charter
Let me begin with the United Nations. I must confess that I have never read the UN Charter (and its integral part of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) until two days ago, although I do not feel bad because studying something with intrinsic purposes is far more efficient than reading something assigned by someone else. I believe in the future colleges and universities will be replaced by individual specific education programs so that learning is tailored to each person and more self-driven.
Anyway, reading this historical document of 1945 still moves me, because its noble preamble still applies today perfectly well. Allow me to quote the opening words:
“WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS, DETERMINED to
- save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
- to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
- to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
- to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
- to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and
- to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
- to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
- to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples”
These words were written shortly after the end of WWII, when the authors and people of the world clearly saw the pressing need of stopping and preventing another hot war from happening again, once and forever, for the future generations that certainly include us.
Fortunately the communism was defeated peacefully without a hot war, one of the greatest human achievements in history. But unfortunately decades after the demise of the former Soviet Union we are hearing talks of WWIII more frequently than ever. I sincerely hope we humans come to our senses and wisdoms by keeping the UN Charter in minds.
That said, I must admit that I am not betting on it. I am a strong believer of the existence of more advanced civilization(s) out there in the universe, and there is a good reason we humans have not achieved what we could have: We fight with each other too much and are never tired of doing that.
The Limits & Weaknesses of the UN Security Council
Inspirational as the UN Charter is, it is no secret that the UN has limits, weaknesses, inefficiencies and conflicts of interests in its decades of existence. At the core of the problems is the Security Council. First of all, the notion of a few countries occupying permanent seats with the privileged vetoing power sounds just odd today. All sovereign countries should have the equal right and power to say “No” to others, not just the “Big Five” of China, France, Russia, UK and US.
Who is to say these countries will always do the right thing? History told us otherwise. None of the five countries has been the “model citizens of the world.” Even though at times they contributed positively to global security, they also damaged or weakened it — despite being the “premium” members of the Security Council.
Russia is the first one coming to mind these days, as it proves itself a “bad apple” that is worse than ordinary UN members. Instead of following the UN Charter that “armed force shall not be used,” it invaded an under-armed neighbor, which has been quickly re-armed by western countries with some weapons more advanced than Russia.
Although China made giant progresses in raising domestic living standard and lifting hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty, Beijing has been lagging behind or even reversing its trend in allowing freedom of expression by its citizens. It fails to reaffirm “the dignity and worth of the human person.”
France, UK and US all have issues “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” The worst of the three has been the US, with its international policies kidnapped by “Value Crusaders” and “American Superpower” like I discussed in last post.
In a nutshell, the UN Security Council proves something the American founding fathers knew centuries ago: Do not trust people, trust rules and laws. We can compare the official oaths between UK and the US. In the former, the “Oath of Allegiance (Judicial or Official Oath) is a promise to be loyal to the British monarch,” while in the latter the oath of office of the president is directed to the US Constitution: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Although all the inaugurated presidents thus far have placed one hand on the Bible, I will not be surprised to see someday a non-Christian president will not use the Bible in the ceremony. That will not be a big deal because after all, the president must be loyal to the US Constitution, not to the Bible.
But a country is just like a human person. If we cannot trust a human all the time, we cannot, and should not, trust an individual country. There is no guarantee that a human or a country will act in the best interests outlined in the UN Charter. Each country has its own agenda and preference, and its sovereignty allows it to follow the UN Charter voluntarily, not imperatively.
We need to make the UN Charter attractive (i.e., the “carrot” part) or liable (i.e., the “stick” part) to follow by countries, meaning to somehow align a country’s own interests with that in the Charter.
The biggest weakness of the UN Security Council is that any conflict of interests among its five permanent members inevitably damage the common interests of the world. As long as we are seeking commonly agreed resolutions, that issue will not go away by the recently proposed landmark reform of constraining their veto power.
We must emphasize fact-finding in all international affairs and conflicts. Once we have verifiable facts either from the ground or from governmental sources, finding agreeable resolutions is not that hard, especially when we apply the “comparative negligence” doctrine to assign split liabilities to countries involved — instead of accusing or assigning full liability to one side and zero to the other — and then split the loss coverage compensation based on separate shares of responsibilities.
This is not much different from a traffic accident. It is likely that both sides involved in an accident were somewhat responsible, like neither party stopped at the stop sign, or neither followed the speed limit. In those case, we do what the police would do to claim both parties 50% responsible, and their insurance carriers would settle the case accordingly.
The Security Council also does nothing to prevent crisis from occurring. All it does is to respond to a crisis with a resolution that may be vetoed. Even if the resolution is passed, it has little binding power and by the time conflict started, no resolution of any kind by any entity is likely to make an immediate difference. Conflict tends to run its own course until one side is poised to lose in the battlefield or when it becomes obvious that it cannot reach its goal — by then huge losses had already incurred.
There is currently no global crisis/conflict prevention entity in the world as we speak.
The final problem of the Security Council is its nature as a political entity, which opens back door, or even front door, to conflicts of ideologies and values. We need an entity that is less about politics and more about universal rules and laws, finding the “smallest common denominator” rather than the rarely obtainable goal of seeking shared value and ideology.
Introducing the Global Insurance Authority (GIA)
GIA is not a regular insurance entity but an inter-governmental non-profit agency. Unlike a regular insurer that will forego catastrophic risks like earthquakes, wars and nuclear attacks, GIA will step in as the largest insurer or reinsurer in the world.
Its mission is to enforce rules and international laws, much like FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) for security laws and NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) for the insurance industry. It leaves politics and ideologies aside, although not completely out as I will explain later. In other words, GIA is a rule enforcers, not an entity to mediate or settle ideological fights.
In the interest of putting politics and ideologies to a sideline, we can make GIA work much like a regular insurance business, starting from collecting “premiums” or membership dues from member countries and moving on to set up the same departments as a typical insurance firm would have (e.g., claims, finance, underwriting, marketing and legal).
GIA will be funded by membership dues. One possibility is to ask all members to deposit 1% of their GDP in a global escrow or trust account. The money will be invested in safe, fixed income securities like the US T-Bills, T-Notes and T-Bond to gain financial returns while sitting in the escrow/trust.
All members must sign an agreement or better yet, a smart contract sitting in a blockchain of its own to make all members the “trustors”, who then assign the GIA Board of Directors as the “trustees” to manage the pooled fund. Each country maintains complete ownership of its membership due as well as its interests generated and accumulated over time.
Unlike the UN Security Council with non-passable resolutions or resolutions with no binding power, when the majority of GIA Board of Directors, after holding a public hearing to a particular international issue or conflict, decides that one or more members are completely or partially liable of damages and must pay to cover damages caused by them, the country (or countries) must honor the decision.
Any member refusing or rejecting payment will see its membership due, together with its interests accumulated over time, completely or partially confiscated and transferred to a separate pool of public fund owned by the GIA and used for other issues or conflicts later. With smart contract on a blockchain, payment will be automatically and immediately taken out of the country’s sub-account in the escrow or trust. This ensures that it is in members’ own interests to be a rule-abiding citizen in global affairs.
This also solves the legitimacy issue of the financial sanctions imposed by the US (and sometimes its allies) to other countries, an over-used strategy with the risk of being impulsive and ideologically driven. Even with the best intent in the world, it is always risky for a single country to make decisions for the entire world, or for the US to act like a one-member Security Council. Such a system is essentially trusting a single country to do the right thing and is akin to “rule of men” rather than rule of law, not even democracy among member countries — against the will of the American founding fathers.
The pattern has been for everyone to see: Whenever the US Congress passes an international bill or imposes a sanction against some other country or countries, the whole world must follow because there will be a “secondary sanction” or sanctions against anyone dare to ignore the primary sanction. Even if we give the US the benefit of doubt and assume the primary sanction is completely justified, the secondary sanction targeting other countries is not automatically justified. It only serves to strengthen or to reinforce the bullying power of the world’s sole superpower. The US often is not shy to claim that “you are either with us or against us!” But that’s not the international rule of law supposed to work. Check with the UN Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice and see if you can find words supporting the US behaviors. Remember this simple rule: Unlimited power always leads to unlimited risks and liabilities.
However, the threat of the US sanction can be used as a “stick” to promote GIA membership: We tell every country that a GIA membership can protect it from the US sanction in the future, which I am sure the US will continue in the future. But if the US applies its unilateral sanction against another GIA member, the GIA Board of Director has the authority to deduct a part of the US membership due as penalty, because it is written in the smart contract of GIA that no member can sanction others without having GBI investigated, heard in a public hearing and then voted by the GIA Board of Directors.
We can even promote personal GIA membership to national leaders. With personal contributions made to GIA, the latter can protect leaders from being kidnapped, robbed, threatened or killed in foreign or international soils. Physical destruction of current or past leaders is never a good cause because it promotes terrorism. Of course, GIA reserves the right to reject membership application made by a particular leader on a case by case basis.
On the other hand, if a national leader is personally liable to international damages, GIA will have the authority to deduct person funds from the leader’s personal sub-account. This leads to more efficient and accurate sanction not against the whole country but to individuals.
Introducing Global Bureau of Investigations (GBI)
As an inter-governmental entity, GIA will establish its most important functional body similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI, to be called the Global Bureau of Investigations (GBI). Its operations will be funded by membership dues of GIA member countries, together with donations from wealthy individuals and/or philanthropies in the world.
The sole mission of GBI is to find facts and evidence through conflict investigations, investigations for treaty or rule violations or breach, or more generally for potential damages to international justice, peace and prosperity goals (JPP). Each GIA member is allowed to make inquiries of investigation, while GIA can also conduct its own investigations without request if it sees the need.
Like the Special Council of Robert Mueller for the presidential election fraud of 2016, every GBI project with end with a special report that will be published by GIA that is accessible to everyone in the world. The public hearing by GIA Board of Directors will be largely based on the GBI report.
GBI will establish its own blockchain or use the one by GIA to store security reports, country profiles, smart contracts plus verifiable, immutable and tokenized country specific documents, especially digital evidence to be used for future loss coverage and compensation and help future investigations. All documents on the blockchain will be transparent. GBI will have a smart contract with each member country so that it can automatically execute and enforce the contract when conditions are met (i.e., an event triggered smart contract) without human interaction or third party authority /intermediaries.
Both sides involved in a dispute have the right to pick and choose its own investigators, while GIA will assign, contract or employ its own investigators. This is where different ideologies and values are allowed to play a role, much like jury picking in a criminal or civil case: Each side will pick jury members they believe are in their favor.
The other reason having self-selected investigators is that sometimes facts are not clear or not fully emerged yet. At those times it is good for GIA to hear different opinions from both sides, which may help inspire new ways or new points of entry for investigations.
However, all investigators will be asked to swear in before investigations start. The oath is about loyalty to material facts and truth, even when they are not in favor of one’s motherland. All investigators (from both sides and from GBI) are subject to independent audit and those guilty of hiding, twisting, omitting material facts from an investigation will be financially sanctioned, black-listed, fired or contract not renewed to make the report as reliable and accurate as possible.
All GIA projects and each GBI report will bear individual signatures of all investigators before it is placed in the blockchain for permanent, immutable storage for anyone interested to read.
The drafted report will have 30 to 60 days for public comments, which allows anyone knowing any material facts to add to the draft — as long as they are facts, not pure opinions.
An Real Life Example for GBI
I found this unique account published on April 18 by an insider named Jacques Baud interesting. Mr. Baud is aformer member of the Swiss strategic intelligence and a specialist in Eastern countries. I want to use it as an example to show how GBI can check out verifiable facts associated with a claim made by an individual to make the facts completer and more balanced.
As a quick background check of the current war, Baud took us back to May 2014, when the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk conducted referendums, which according to Baud “were not referendums of ‘independence’ (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of ‘self-determination’ or ‘autonomy’ (самостоятельность).” Perhaps more importantly, “these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.”
If those words are true, it gives Mr. Putin a strong alibi for not premeditating the current war by manipulating the referendums in the past.
As an independent thinker I do my cross-checking and cross-referencing all the time. Is Baud accurate in claiming the referendums were all about autonomy and not about independence? Results from desktop research, mainly on the Wikipedia pages, come back mixed. Various polls did offer figures in favor of Baud’s statement, with the majority wanted to stay within Ukraine rather than join Russia.
Of all the polls cited by Wikipedia pages, the one by Pew Research Centre from 5–23 April had the most clearcut numbers: 70% wished to remain part of a united Ukraine, while 18% of eastern Ukrainians were in favor of secession. Another poll by the Kiev Institute of Sociology from 8–16 April showed only 27.5% were in favor of secession from Ukraine to join the Russian Federation. A final one taken by the Donetsk Institute for Social Research and Political Analysis, also found only 27% wanted to join Russia in some form.
On the other hand, Baud did seem to have over-simplified the causes or issues behind the Donbass referendums when he told us they were all about asking Kiev “guaranteeing them the use of the Russian language as an official language” which “the first legislative act of the new government resulting from the American-sponsored overthrow of [the democratically-elected] President Yanukovych, was the abolition, on February 23, 2014, of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law of 2012 that made Russian an official language in Ukraine.”
This Wikipedia page tells us what was on the ballot in Donetsk Oblast (an Oblast is an administrative division or region in Russia and the former Soviet Union): “Do you support the declaration of state independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic?” In Luhansk Oblast, voters similarly could select yes or no to the question: “Do you support the declaration of state independence of the Luhansk People’s Republic?“
In both places, the referendums were far more serious than picking up an official language.
Baud also did not mention the fact that the legitimacy of the referendums was questionable as the 1996 Constitution of Ukraine and the 2012 law on referendums specified that territorial changes can only be approved via a referendum if all citizens of Ukraine are allowed to vote, including those that do not reside in the area. In other words, regional referendums without national endorsement could not be counted.