Europeans Circulate New Syria Draft Resolution
In 2011 European governments repeatedly tried to get the UN Security Council to condemn Syria's crackdown. Russian and Chinese vetoes set a pattern that lasted the whole war.
As Syrian security forces fired on protesters through the spring and summer of 2011, Britain, France, Germany and Portugal drafted a series of UN Security Council resolutions condemning the violence and threatening measures against the government of Bashar al-Assad.
The vetoes
Russia and China, wary of a repeat of the Libya intervention, which they believed had been stretched beyond its mandate to achieve regime change, resisted. In October 2011 they vetoed a European draft. In February 2012 they vetoed a further resolution backing an Arab League plan for a political transition. Over the course of the war, Russia would veto more than a dozen resolutions on Syria.
A paralysed council
The deadlock meant that the Security Council never authorised meaningful action to stop the killing. Its main agreements were narrower: the 2013 deal to remove Syria's declared chemical weapons after the Ghouta sarin attack, and resolutions on humanitarian access across borders, which themselves became the subject of repeated vetoes.
The legacy
The Syria votes marked a turning point in post-Cold War diplomacy, exposing the limits of the "responsibility to protect". When Assad's government finally fell in December 2024, it was the result of events on the ground, not of any decision in New York.