Let us dispense with the charitable illusions. The United Nations, that gleaming palace on the East River, does not suffer from a mere perception of weakness. It is architecturally, philosophically, and functionally impotent. It was born not as a lever of power, but as a monument to a hope that evaporated with the first chill of the Cold War. Today, it stands as the world’s most elaborate stage for a play where the actors openly rewrite the script to suit themselves, while the audience is lectured about the performance’s profound meaning.
Its very design is a recipe for irrelevance. The Security Council, the only body with a semblance of authority, is a frozen snapshot of 1945’s victorious powers. The veto is not a procedural tool; it is the institutionalized right of a handful of nations to place their own interests above international law, human rights, and basic human dignity. It renders the UN’s highest chamber a place not for action, but for theatrical gestures. Debates are held, stern statements are issued, and resolutions are drafted only to be gutted or discarded. The message is unambiguous: sovereignty—at least for the powerful—is absolute. The UN serves merely as a forum for them to announce their intentions, not as a body to restrain them.
This structural paralysis metastasizes into a moral bankruptcy. The organization is perpetually caught in a cycle of observing, documenting, and lamenting atrocities it is powerless to stop. It sends envoys to war zones where they are ignored. It commissions detailed reports that catalogue massacres, only to see those reports tabled indefinitely. It provides a vocabulary of condemnation—“grave concern,” “deplores,” “calls upon”—that has been hollowed out through overuse in the face of unheeded calls. This ritualized response has become a form of international catharsis, allowing member states to feel they have “done something” by participating in the script, all while the bombs fall and the displaced flee. The UN thus inadvertently sanitizes inaction, dressing it up in the dignified robes of multilateral process.
Worse, its presence can be actively pernicious. The blue helmets of peacekeeping missions, once a symbol of neutral aid, are too often deployed into impossible situations with rules of engagement written in cowardice. They become witnesses to slaughter, barred from intervening, their very presence creating a false sense of security that is catastrophically betrayed. Meanwhile, corrupt dictators and authoritarian regimes use the platform of the General Assembly not for dialogue, but for propaganda, leveraging the principles of sovereignty and non-interference as a shield behind which they brutalize their own people. The UN grants them legitimacy, a seat at the table of nations, laundering their reputations through mere participation.
The specialized agencies, often cited as proof of the UN’s value, are but a salvage operation on a sinking ship. Yes, the World Food Programme feeds the starving, and UNICEF vaccinates children. But these efforts are eternal treatments of symptoms, not cures for the diseases of war, corruption, and state failure that the UN’s political bodies are designed to address and utterly fail to. It is as if we have built a hospital that excels only at dispensing bandages in the parking lot, while inside the operating theater, the surgeons are forever vetoing each other’s choice of scalpel.
Ultimately, the UN’s impotence is not an accident; it is its purpose. It was never meant to be a government. It was meant to be a meeting house for a world of rival powers, a cushion for conflicts, not a solver of them. Its greatest achievement is its own continued existence, which is mistaken for utility. It provides the powerful with a podium and the powerless with a microphone, fostering the dangerous illusion that the speechifying is synonymous with action. It is a placebo administered to the global conscience, making us feel that there is a “system” at work, when in reality, the age-old rules of raw power, cynical realpolitik, and national interest continue unabated, merely with more polished rhetoric.
We are left with a stark reality. The United Nations is useless precisely where we need it most: in stopping aggression, enforcing justice, and upholding a common set of rules. It is a mirror that reflects our fractured world, not a tool to mend it. To continue investing it with moral authority it lacks, and expecting results it cannot deliver, is not diplomacy. It is a form of collective self-deception, a costly and elaborate theater where the admission price is paid in the currency of our own diminished expectations for what a just world order could be.
