The Tower Center’s 2024 National Security Symposium explores the complex relationship between the United States—the world’s most powerful country—and the United Nations Security Council—the world’s most consequential international body. Supporters view the UN Security Council as a useful tool to legitimize U.S. foreign policies and make them more acceptable to skeptics, facilitate burden sharing with international partners, and foster global policy coordination on vital issues such as counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and postwar stabilization and reconstruction. Critics, meanwhile, argue that working through the UN Security Council imposes costly constraints and lengthy delays on the United States, often resulting in weak compromises and blunting America’s military power. Yet on balance, research suggests, the legitimacy and burden sharing benefits to the United States of working with and through the UN Security Council outweigh any short-term freedom of action costs.

Cooperation among the world’s major powers at the UN has clearly become more difficult in recent years, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So far, the UN Security Council has not come to a standstill: the United States, Russia, and China have continued to grudgingly and selectively cooperate on issues of mutual interest. Yet the days in the 1990s and early 2000s when the United States was so dominant that it could set the agenda at the UN and simply expect others to follow on a range of issues are likely over. Going forward, securing UN support for U.S. policy priorities will more than ever require skillful diplomacy— combining a fine sense for the reach and limitations of American power with a willingness to reassure skeptical partners and compromise when necessary—to advance common objectives and preserve major-power peace. This Tower Center event brings together leading experts from the United States and abroad to help us better understand whether and if so how the UN Security Council can continue to advance American interests at a time of increased global tensions and turmoil.

Date: Thursday, November 14, 2024

 

Location and time:

2:00 – 5:30 p.m. Panels, Martha Proctor Mack Ballroom , 3300 Dyer St., Dallas, TX 75205

6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Keynote Dinner - Jones Great Hall, Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas, TX 75205

Parking: Meadows Museum Parking, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas, TX 75205 (Accessible parking and elevator. For more accessibility questions email us at tower@smu.edu.)

 

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Please click below for registration. Click on each panel you plan to attend.

 

PROGRAM

 

Panels Location: Martha Proctor Mack Ballroom, Umphrey Lee Center, 3300 Dyer St, Dallas, TX 75205

1:30 - 2:00 p.m. Registration

2:00 - 3:40 p.m. Panel I – Lessons Learned: US-UN Relations Since the 1990s

“The Value of Security Council Approval: Lessons from Iraq.”

“Overcoming Opposition at the Security Council.” 

“Security Council Measures to Counter Terrorism.”

 

 

4:00 - 5:30 p.m. Panel II - Challenges Ahead: U.S. Interests and Great Power Rivalry

"The Permanent Five: Dead or Alive?"

“U.S.-China Competition: Leadership, Norms and Global Initiatives.”

"Who’s Writing the Next Chapter? Great-Power Tensions, Decline, and Change in UN Peacekeeping.”

 

 

Keynote Dinner Location: Meadows Museum, 5900 Bishop Blvd., Dallas, TX 75205

6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Keynote address

“Transcending Gridlock:  Navigating the Challenges of a Multipolar Security Council.”

 

 

Invitation image: The Security Council Chamber at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Credit UN Photo/Rick Bajornas 02/14/2017 12:09:12 PM

 

Any person who requires a reasonable accommodation on the basis of a disability in order to participate in this program should contact the SMU Tower Center at tower@smu.edu in advance at least 4 days prior to the event to arrange for the accommodation.

 

 

SMU Tower Center | http://www.smu.edu/TowerCenter

Southern Methodist University (SMU)

3300 University Boulevard, Dallas, TX 75275-0117

214-768-3954  tower@smu.edu