A bigger Security Council?

Bill Richardson, the U.S. representative at the United Nations, has come up with an ingenious proposal to remedy an old problem at the world organization: the composition of the Security Council. He would expand the council by adding five permanent members: Germany, Japan, and three from the developing world. Enlargement is long overdue.

But on the critical matter of veto power -- now wielded by the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- Richardson hedges. He says Washington has taken no position and would defer its position as to whether newcomers should be given this powerful weapon. In our view, they should not.

In Cold War years, the veto, or its threat, repeatedly paralyzed the Security Council. That body's growing reliance on consensual decision since 1990 is a notable and hopeful development, even though China did derail participation in peacekeeping in Haiti and the dispatch of military observers to Guatemala. Whatever the inequities of the current system, doubling the number of potential naysayers would be a remedy worse than the affliction it is designed to cure.

The case for expanding the Security Council is strong. Since its birth, the United Nations has grown from 51 to 185 members, yet the Security Council essentially reflects the world as it was in 1945. Germany and Japan, the war's defeated nations, are now among the world's most prosperous and stable democracies. They belong on the Security Council. Because both are bound by postwar constitutions and custom to limit military activity beyond their borders, they cannot share equally in the financial or material burdens of UN peacekeeping missions. That is an additional reason they should not hold veto power.

-- The New York Times