This paper seeks to explain the sustenance of great power relations in a world espousing the principles of the collective security system under the United Nations. It shows how the system of veto rights enables the UN sustain an important role for itself, even in the calculations of the great power realism, by providing an interface between their need for balance of power and the desire of the rest of the international community for collective security system. Using the Syrian WMD crisis as a case study, and drawing from the experience of Berlin (1961) and Cuban missile (1962) crises for parallelism, it identifies patterns in the behaviours of US and Russia, the client states and the UN system, to suggest that the latter has acquired the role of seamless interface for great power bilateralism and the multilateralism of the present international system.

This paper seeks to explain the sustenance of great power relations in a world espousing the principles of the collective security system under the United Nations. It shows how the system of veto rights enables the UN sustain an important role for itself, even in the calculations of the great pow...