This is where an international navy staffed by blue helmets comes in and grabs the vessel, right? Right??
UN inspectors would be allowed into any member country, to inspect potential human rights violations, nuclear and chemical weapons development, and large environmental hazards. They need to have teeth to enforce things.
The Peacekeepers should be a decentralized organization with only three main rules:
1. Your only job is to defuse existing conflicts and violence, and force warring sides to resort to using courts and diplomacy.
2. Anyone in the organization found breaking the first rule (using force to take sides or escalate a conflict, like Norriega) will be put on trial and executed if found guilty.
3. Any alumnus of the organization breaking the first rule is likewise hunted down, captured and put on trial. The only difference is, if they are not on active duty, they aren’t even empowered to carry out Rule #1 fully but must call on-duty reinforcements.
Don’t like it - don’t join the peacekeepers. Every cadet would be trained in these three rules, so no one can take over the peacekeepers and rule the world.
And there is a set of rules that all countries can abide by:
4. If there is a sectarian conflict between groups A, B and C in a region, only peacekeepers from countries and backgrounds with no serious stake in who wins can intervene. Others are sanctioned / excluded from that conflict etc.
5. The peacekeepers wear a specific and unmistakable white-themed uniform. Anyone in any country caught impersonating their uniform would constitute a criminal offense, like impersonating a police officer.
6. They all wear body cameras, they present themselves and warn any armed combatants or terrorists to put down their weapons or they will shoot to kill. They are also able to pre-emtively kill in certain situations where they can prove massive harm (eg a bomb) and that a warning could have allowed it to happen.
This monopoly on force would probably lead to a net reduction in harm, assuming it can’t be taken over or corrupted.
It’s honestly terrifying to me that anyone thinks that this is a sound idea that would lead to a better world in the long run.
If there is anything that human history has proven, it’s that you cannot prevent corruption and that the centralization of power only further incentivizes corruption.
2. This proposal assumes that there is a single set of values and rules that can be applied to everyone. I don't think this is actually true. The world currently allows several value systems to exist simultaneously, which can all be valid. Your proposal would raise a single value system above all others. How do we chose which one ?
3. The further the government is removed from the citizens, the less it cares about their actual needs. Special measures would need to be taken to make sure that police force actually serves the interests of the people. I don't think the current forms of democracy actually work in that case, when so many people and cultures are involved, you can't be satisfied with a majority rule.
My feeling is it will be corrupted, and the only thing worse than multiple dangerous governments is one single dangerous government.
In fact I'd probably rather have every country introduce 2nd amendment rules than accept this.
For example Russia and Crimea - Russia took it over with little violence, but to undo that requires violence, which your rules do not permit.
A UN blue hat more often than not means they're coming to your poor country to rape children and trade food aid for sexual favors, not that they're there to help.
The only open question I have - who decides upon engaging? The UN Security Council which should deal with issues is effectively gridlocked as the Russians and Chinese veto everything.
The UN General Assembly isn't that much trustworthy either, given how many countries would vote an instant Yes on the question if Israel should be sanctioned.
In the end we need some form of "global democracy" with strong protections of individual rights.
As for who makes a decision to go into a country ... well, if you're squads of people from Peru and Japan etc. and there's escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, then you are welcome to go there. It's all decentralized. It's sort of like "actors" in Erlang, each running their own program and enforcing on others.
The only thing that's sort of more centralized would be the due process for those peacekeepers or groups of peacekeepers who violate rule #1. Besides this, peacekeepers would try to screen out peacekeepers who travel to an area where they are found to have a significant stake in the outcome.
Of course, this force would not need any weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, etc. All those could be gradually destroyed by the various nations. They would, however, have crowd control non-lethal weaponry.
My point is that from a utilitarian point of view, it's even better to kill all the belligerents early (after warning them) than let the thing escalate into, say, the Russian Revolution where 20 million people died in fighting. Just the chilling effect alone that "violence only backfires" (analogue of "crime doesn't pay") will deter many from joining the escalation. As opposed to now where the US "world police" merely takes one side and arms them to demolish the other.
The fact that, currently, the powerful countries of the world would not go along with it does not make the idea stupid / horrible.
For what it's worth, something like the UN even existing and many nations having signed arms control treaties was unthinkable prior to WW2.