Monday is United Nations Day – a holiday celebrating the anniversary of the day the intergovernmental organization was established on October 24, 1945. In the three quarters of a century since its founding, the UN has proven successful in its main goal: preventing World War III. On other fronts, the organization’s record is far more modest.
The United Nations is “made for” times of crisis like the one the world is presently experiencing, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said.
Since its creation 77 years ago by the victorious powers in World War II, the UN has proven instrumental in helping to resolve or at least temper dozens of civil, regional and global conflicts, from the Indo-Pakistan wars to the seemingly eternal Arab-Israeli conflict and the forty-year Cold War between the USSR and the USA, which saw the planet come dangerously close to nuclear armageddon on multiple occasions.
From the early 1990s onward, through lavish funding and vigorous diplomatic courting, the United States sought to turn the UN and other international institutions into arms of the State Department, hoping to create the post-Cold War unipolar “New World Order” declared by former President George H.W. Bush in late 1991.
But these efforts have not been completely successful, with the overwhelming majority of nations (including most of America’s allies) refusing to endorse the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and most of the Global South rejecting the West’s efforts to bully them into submission to condemn Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February 2022.
Unlike its League of Nations predecessor, which collapsed into irrelevance after Germany withdrew from the body in late 1933, the UN has managed to remain a truly representative international authority, with its 193 member states representing over 99 percent of the world’s population, and all of the planet’s major powers. The organization’s endurance can be credited in part to the work of Andrei Gromyko – the Soviet diplomat-turned Cold War foreign minister instructed to enshrine the right of veto into the authority of each of the five permanent Security Council members during negotiations on the UN’s creation.
The right of veto has stopped resolutions on key global security issues from becoming popularity contests and, for the most part, has prevented the international organization from being turned into a tool allowing one major power or bloc to pursue its interests.
The UN’s current setup allows nations to take their grievances directly to the body, have their perspective heard, and hopefully resolve conflicts before they escalate into a regional or global conflagration that could end humanity. For conflicts in progress, the UN is a key platform for brokering ceasefires and peace agreements, or at least facilitating talks between combatants. Pending approval from warring parties, the UN can deploy peacekeepers to put new conflicts on ice or prevent frozen ones from reigniting.
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