Elder abuse in the frothy swirl of debates regarding the role of the United Nations is currently modish. The body has, after all, reached the age of 80 years. It has been a life ramshackle, rickety and marked with failure. But it has also been one of audacity, experimentation and industry. The occasion of the UN General Assembly was, however, a chance to cast blame.
The blame for the body’s failings is characteristic. It’s elder abuse writ large. Too many instances of constipated failure. Too few cases of efficacy over aspiration. Bedridden, permanently in need of treatment, constantly offering the excreta of failure. Yet, the body continues to chug along. As UN Secretary General António Guterres says, “Eight decades later, one can draw a direct line between the creation of the United Nations and the prevention of a third world war.” In a commemorative message sounding almost jubilant, the organisation claims that, “By promoting peace, human rights and social progress, including access to healthcare and education [the UN] has improved the lives of people around the world, creating better living standards for all.”
It’s often forgotten by the sceptics and chauvinists that the functions of the UN can only ever be as good as the membership permits it to be. From the outset, the nature of the UN was one of imperfect republicanism, its various bodies more loosely divided than the binding, cast-iron arrangements of any country. The General Assembly has 193 members; the qualifiedly powerful Security Council 15, of which only five are permanent. The sting in the membership of the five – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China – is their use of the veto, one which all have made use of at various points to sink international measures seen as threatening to their causes.
A club ceases to have meaning in either form or function if its members run amok, soil the lavatory, trash the furniture and fail to observe the rules of engagement. The Security Council, the only body that approximates to a policing role in a busily anarchic international system, is often nobbled by great power disagreements. At times, they have done much to paralyse the broader international organisation when important decisions have been required on issues of international peace and security. The United States, for instance, has vetoed UNSC resolutions pertaining to Israel with habitual consistency. (As of December 2023, the US had used the veto favouring Israel 45 times out of the 89 instances it has used it in international relations.) The vetoes have assuredly extinguished any number of proposals: that Israel adhere to international law; that the Palestinians be granted statehood; that Israel be condemned for its policies of displacement and settlement in the West Bank.
Between 1946 and 1971, the Soviet Union used the veto power with the enthusiasm of a vulgar inebriate: 109 times in all, making it over four times that the number of the US and China for that same period.
Another important feature of the international system, even with the UN embedded into it, is that cheating on binding resolutions is not infrequent. In 2002, it was found that at least 91 Security Council resolutions were blithely ignored, with Israel and Turkey doing most of the ignoring (31 and 23 violations respectively). In September 2018, the Institute for Science and International Security expressed its stern disapproval at the conduct of 52 states for violating UNSC sanctions resolutions between January to September 2017 specifically pertaining to North Korea.
Institutes, think tanks and demagogues spend their time and efforts complaining about the UN, a body that tends to function like a matron with few powers of discipline. President Donald Trump’s cranky, narcissistic assertions in his speech to the 80th session of the UN General Assembly are a classic case of monumental, wilful misunderstanding. He spoke of his own fabled powers in ending seven “un-endable” conflicts without any assistance from the very organisation who should be doing that very thing. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter, and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words – and empty words don’t solve war.”
It would help if various UN members – the US being at the forefront – acknowledged that the stuffing in such words lies in their observance, not rejection. It would also be helpful to acknowledge that member states have sometimes taken unkindly to the peacemaking efforts of UN representatives, most notably coming from the Secretariat. In September 1961, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s efforts to broker peace in the Congo saw him pay with his life in circumstances that look much like murder. To date, relevant member states continue to withhold information on the crash of the chartered Douglas DC6 aircraft.
Rather than focus on such facts, Trump, with mendacious novelty, argued that the organisation was “actually creating new problems for us to solve.” It had, for instance, funded “an assault on Western countries and their borders”. Rather than halting invasions, it was creating and financing them, fulfilling a “globalist migration agenda”. He instanced the spending of US$372 million to aid “624,000 migrants to journey to the United States to infiltrate our southern border.”
When the members prove so unclubbable, serious questions of them should be asked. Imperfect at 80, it is fortunate that, on some level, the UN still exists. Hammarskjöld’s words, which may have been drawn from similar observations made by others, remain fittingly relevant: “that the United Nations was not created to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
