Last month, world leaders converged for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly. The intended agenda focused on the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals on climate change, poverty and inequality.
The reality was slightly different.
Dominating were Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the multifaceted conflagration in the Middle East. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that Russia was losing its war of conquest and so was trying to break civilian morale by attacking Ukraine’s energy network. In counterpoint, Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, deployed the standard tropes of his country’s innocence, while warning darkly that NATO’s support for Ukraine was a “suicidal escapade” because of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
The recently elected president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, spoke of his desire for reform and international engagement, while denouncing Israel’s “desperate barbarism.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an uncompromising address condemning “savage enemies who seek our annihilation,” prompting several national delegations to walk out.
Some took a broader approach. The always-upredictable President Javier Milei of Argentina borrowed heavily from an episode of “The West Wing” as he gave a speech redefining the U.N.’s goal as the right for people to live without “political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer tried to present his new government as an avatar of all that was best about the U.N.: “the very essence of what it is to be human — of equal and inalienable rights based on a foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Overwhelmingly, the speakers neglected the bigger picture: The United Nations is failing everywhere. It is an ineffective organization that teeters on the brink of irrelevance.
It has been unable to intervene in the expanding crisis in the Middle East. Its 10,000-strong peacekeeping force in Lebanon has been reduced to the status of bystander as Israel confronts Hezbollah. The civil war in Sudan has seen 2.1 million refugees flee the country while another 12 million have been internally displaced, and 750,000 Sudanese are on the verge of starvation. The Security Council has backed the Kenyan-led security mission in Haiti, but it is making little headway against widespread chaos.
Zelensky, facing an enemy who does not believe Ukraine exists as a nation, identified the institutional crisis: “Unfortunately, at the U.N., it’s impossible to truly and fairly resolve matters of war and peace because too much depends in the Security Council on the veto power. When the aggressor exercises veto power, the U.N. is powerless to stop the war.”
This goes to the heart of the problem but also to its insoluble nature. The U.N. was founded in 1945, an earnest response to World War II, embodying a passionate desire to prevent such a war from ever happening again. But it retains the strategic architecture of that era.
The five permanent members of the Security Council, which alone have the power of veto, are the victorious powers from that conflict: the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia, France and China (until 1971, that last place was occupied by Taiwan, formally the Republic of China, not the Communist People’s Republic). This ignores seven of the world’s 10 largest countries by population and five of the top 10 by GDP. Repeated schemes for reform — to increase the number of permanent members, to include India, Japan, Germany or Brazil, to guarantee a seat for a country in Africa or from the Arab League — have foundered.
There are two unpalatable truths about the U.N. The first is that it is founded on a fallacy — that all nations are equal and have equal moral weight and integrity. That is untrue and leads to grotesque outcomes, such as Iran chairing the Human Rights Council Social Forum last year.
The second is that the U.N. is only genuinely effective when one of the major nations puts its weight behind a mission, diplomatic or military. For example, U.N. did ameliorate the savage conflict in the former Yugoslavia and helped hasten the 1995 Dayton Accords thanks to the military and financial contributions of the U.S. and NATO allies. It has also overseen a more or less overseen an uneasy peace in Cyprus, thanks to the constant contribution from the U.K., which retains 3,500 military personnel on the island as British Forces Cyprus.
But when the countries of the world look away, as they did in Rwanda in 1994, no resolution or communique can stop a catastrophe.
There is no obvious solution. The permanent members of the Security Council will never abandon their veto power voluntarily, especially given Russia’s increasing isolation and defensiveness. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s credibility is low, with widespread accusations of sexual abuse by peacekeeping forces, terrorist infiltration of UNRWA and a pervasive sense that the secretary general, António Guterres, cannot see a conflict without trying to split the moral difference and hope it comes to an end.
Our increasingly polarized world is a cold climate for multilateral organizations. As violence flares, ethnic tensions boil over and trade barriers are erected, it is difficult to see not only how but why nations should submit to an overarching jurisdiction that ineffectively preaches a sometimes-contentious common good.
The U.N. relies in principle on a strange combination of idealism and moral relativism, while in practice it is just a backdrop to great power politics and expression of historic grievances. That is not a sustainable future.
Eliot Wilson is a freelance writer on politics and international affairs and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
