The UN is an abject failure at stopping war. Could Australia help it escape Trump’s America?

In New York, the United Nations General Assembly is gearing up for its big annual session, starting on Tuesday. Which foreign leader will the United States prevent from attending (last time it was Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority) along with the judges it has blacklisted from the UN’s International Criminal Court ?

Benjamin Netanyahu is always made welcome, but this year might he be arrested by order of the city’s new Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani? Will Vladimir Putin, the truly evil emperor responsible for over half a million deaths , have the effrontery to attend an organisation with a UN Charter purpose to “end the scourge of war”? At a Chatham House seminar last week on the subject “what is the UN good for?”, the most agreed answer was to run the Universal Postal Union.

Of course, there are a number of well-run UN agencies, mostly headquartered in Geneva and Vienna and Nairobi. They are necessary – indeed indispensable – for international co-operation on climate, health and nuclear proliferation. But the primary purpose of this organisation is world peace. In this regard, it is an abject failure as its Security Council watches passively while hundreds of thousands of civilians are killed by bombs, drones and bullets in the 56 armed conflicts (involving fighting by 92 UN member states) currently being waged across the world.

The reason for its failure is no secret. The design of the international order, which dates back to 1945, leaves the General Assembly as not much more than a talking shop with actual power reserved to the Security Council and, in reality, to its five permanent members which can veto any action that it should take. The council is now, and for the foreseeable future, pole-axed: Russia vetoes any resolution for a ceasefire in Ukraine, just as China will veto any attempt to stop a possible invasion of Taiwan; and the US, on behalf of Israel, has vetoed various actions in relation to Gaza (although, at Trump’s insistence, it has rubber-stamped his “Board of Peace”, notwithstanding the unlikelihood of it ever living up to its name).

For other deadly conflicts where the identity of the aggressor is clear – Myanmar, Sudan, the Congo and so on – the Security Council does nothing.

Scholars and diplomats have for years urged reform: limiting or abolishing the veto, expanding the number of non-permanent members, strengthening the role of the General Assembly – but to no avail. The “Big Five” – Russia, the US, China, the United Kingdom and France – will never surrender their veto power voluntarily and will use it to stop any reform that might undermine it. Many nations favour at least one change – to stop the veto being used to prevent action in relation to atrocities – but this has been rejected by the “Big Three”, the US China and Russia.

The other blind spot is that the UN, and the international law that it supports, does nothing to protect democracy. The very word is not mentioned in its charter and the two authoritarian permanent members will keep it that way, so the UN can do nothing when democratic governments are invaded or overthrown.