Besides its humanitarian work,
the UN can boast of providing a situs in which officials of national
governments can talk to and with each other. The best opportunity for in-person
speeches and conversations annually is during the opening of the General
Assembly. Even granting there being value to such communicating. the UN was not
founded for this purpose; rather, it was founded to end war, and neither
speeches nor in-person meetings, typically not directly between warring nations,
so obviously have failed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s
occupation and genocide that may even be reckoned as another holocaust. All
this aggression has come with impunity, and in this regard, the UN has failed. Even
a UN official’s attempt to defend the international organization during the 2025
session of the General Assembly was weak. At the very least, the UN needed to
hire some public relations firms, but even a patina of efficacy only goes so
far. The staying power of such an institution is itself, I submit, a problem in
that organizations tend not to get “the memo” on when it is time (and even past
time) to close up and urge that another, different organization be
established.
Speaking at the General
Assembly on September 23, 2025, U.S. President Trump asked rhetorically, “What
is the purpose of the United Nations?”[1]
Later, standing next to his counterpart, E.U. President Von der Leyen, Trump
answered his own question by saying, “I mean, we shouldn’t have any wars if the
U.N. is really doing its job.”[2]
The purpose of the UN is to end wars, and being a place where national
officials can talk to and with each other is woefully below the UN’s potential
in reaching its purpose. In short, a speaking forum with side talks is so far
from the UN being able to stop wars and even genocides, not to mention holocausts,
that Trump went on to say in his speech to the General Assembly, “I’ve always
said (the UN) has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even
coming close to living up to that potential.”[3]
To be sure, he did not provide any suggestions on how exactly the UN could tap
into its potential, hence he left the UN to rot on the vine. Any suggestions
would almost certainly have had to include providing the UN with enforcement
mechanisms with which to implement its resolutions “on the ground” rather than
just in words, and the U.S. had a longstanding policy of resisting such
proposals due to the doctrine of absolute sovereignty held by recurrent
American administrations. So it is really no surprise that Trump was short on
ideas that could strengthen the UN in its task of ending wars and belligerent military
occupations.
It was left to General Assembly
President Annalena Baerbock to try to defend the international organization,
which of course is not a government. “Sometimes we could’ve done more, but we
cannot let this dishearten us. If we stop doing the right things, evil will prevail,”
Baerbock told the Assembly.[4]
That the UN had been unable to act even when Israel was bombing UN humanitarian
areas in Gaza, not to mention in stopping the genocide and perhaps even
holocaust there, begs the question: exactly what right things was the UN doing,
as per its role in ending wars and occupations? Clearly not enough right things
such that not doing them would enable evil to prevail. With Russia’s army
bombing civilian locations in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst of a full-blown
genocide and arguably a holocaust given the severity of the intentional
infliction of suffering besides death, if evil was not prevailing already, it
would be interesting to hear Baerbock’s definition of evil. In short, his
defense does not stand up to even easy scrutiny; hence his defense of the UN can
be regarded as being very weak, or deeply flawed. It is a defense that could be
expected of an utterly failed organization unwilling to accept reality, including
the organization’s abject failure to reach its potential.
The staying power of
organizations not subject to market competition is too much, given the ability
of even failed organizations to stay afloat. That even a weak defense can be
sufficient to keep a failed organization—failed in terms of its primary mission—going
may mean that more is needed to put failed organizations out of their misery,
which of course their officials would deny. In the midst of Russia’s Putin and
Israel’s Netanyahu easily dismissing the UN charter yet remaining members,
while the UN ignores even such fragrant violations of membership, it is
difficult to see how the UN has any integrity regarding even itself remaining,
if indeed it ever had any.
A new international body, without certain nations having veto power and with the body having real enforcement power of its own, such that it would not have to rely on countries for actual enforcement—such reliance is also a sign of abject weakness—was desperately needed, given the large-scale aggression of Russia and Israel that had been going on with impunity for more nearly two years. This alone should be the death sentence for the UN, even with its weak attempts to defend it’s legitimacy and usefulness. Yet in terms of organizations, and even more so, institutions, momentum of the status quo is like a force of nature that is difficult even to divert.
