Take me to the United Nations,’ Cary Grant’s character Roger Thornhill tells his taxi driver in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest. ‘The General Assembly building.’
The office block he enters soon after is a beacon of the future. Curved white balconies glide across a vast foyer, occupied by a glamorous community of international cosmopolitans. Visitors to the UN’s New York headquarters today, however, tend to instead observe faded 1950s grandeur. ‘The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind [the] speaker at UN always bothered me,’ future US president Donald Trump pronounced in 2012. ‘I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.’1
On 26 June, the United Nations will mark 80 years since the signing of its founding charter. Yet it is not an especially happy birthday. In March, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres commissioned the ‘UN80 Task Force’ to come up with proposals for major structural reforms in four key areas of the organization’s work: peace and security, humanitarian affairs, sustainable development and human rights.2 The document produced by the task force speaks of ‘significant overlaps, inefficiencies, and increased costs in the UN system’, ‘a fragmented development system’ and ‘outdated working methods’. In classic bureaucratic understatement, it notes the biggest challenge of all: ‘Geopolitical shifts and substantial reductions in foreign aid budgets are challenging the legitimacy and effectiveness of the organization.’
The suggested mergers of UN agencies – such as bringing the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS together – are avowedly designed to ‘ensure a system-wide commitment to delivering the UN’s mandate in ways that are principled, forward-looking, innovative and effective’. But the document is also peppered with references to ‘fiscal responsibility’ and ‘a strategic reduction of the UN’s presence in high-cost locations’. It could, in theory, lead to a better-functioning UN. Yet it likely signals the managed decline of the UN’s most effective humanitarian functions – and a retreat from the diplomatic stage at a time when the UN’s absence has never been more apparent.
‘Sometimes they look like an NGO, either for the relief work they do or because they’re shouting into a vacuum’'
If this assessment sounds unduly harsh, it’s worth taking stock. In today’s major global conflicts – in Palestine, Ukraine and Sudan – the UN’s role has largely been in the area of a humanitarian response rather than the diplomatic resolution that could save the most lives. ‘Sometimes they look like an NGO either for the relief work they do or because they’re shouting into a vacuum,’ says Nick Dearden, director of the campaigning organization Global Justice Now. He feels that the failure of the UN, and the international community more broadly, to prevent war crimes in Gaza has ‘broken the ability to hold anyone to account’.
Then there’s the botched response to Covid-19, with one study showing that global vaccine inequality could account for as many as one million deaths during the pandemic.3 One of the biggest obstacles to a just global vaccination programme was a WHO which has failed to effectively challenge the dominance of Western powers and pharmaceutical companies. When Guterres called for a global ceasefire ‘to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives’, it took the Security Council three months to echo the call, and it was still neither heeded nor enforced.4
And as Trump tears up the rules of the global economic order, the International Monetary Fund – a UN agency – and the World Trade Organization (WTO) – independent from the UN but part of the ‘UN system’ and written into its sustainable development goals – seem powerless to act. When WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala recently observed that the ‘decoupling’ of the US and China was ‘a phenomenon that is really worrying to me’, she sounded like a commentator, not an active player.5
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out 17 areas for ‘peace and prosperity for people and the planet’, with specific targets to be achieved by 2030. But according to the UN itself, ‘only 17 per cent of SDGs targets are on track to be achieved, nearly half are showing minimal or moderate progress, and progress on over a third has stalled or even regressed’.6
On the issue of climate change, there is arguably material for the defence case: it is, after all, under the auspices of the UN – at the COP conferences – that the most significant breakthroughs have taken place. At COP29 in Baku last December, rich countries pledged to collectively contribute $220 billion a year towards climate finance by 2035.7 And yet targets set at previous conferences have been periodically abandoned. In January the US, for instance, withdrew for a second time from the Paris agreement to keep temperatures well below two degrees above pre-industrial levels. And global carbon emissions continue to rise.
Far from singular
You might ask why the UN is to blame when the root causes of each of these failures lies elsewhere – generally with global superpowers and most frequently Western ones. The WHO’s recent announcement that it would slash jobs and programmes, for instance, was a direct result of US funding cuts.8 How can an international organization possibly function unless member states fulfil their obligations to it?
We should be clear too that the UN is far from a singular organization – it is a complex web of functions staffed by large numbers of people hired to do good, and in the words of one, ‘is only as strong as the people who deliver it on the ground’. Many of its functions save thousands of lives each year, and have brought about life-changing policy shifts in areas such as education, women’s rights and Indigenous justice.
But the UN is far from a disinterested player that can hold up its hands and blame others. It was created ‘to maintain international peace and security’ and ‘achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character’ by countries that each committed to these objectives. When the world it looks upon is so far away from this vision, what does that say? When its failures are attributable not to its hard-working personnel and teams, but rather the power imbalances baked into the wider UN system, is there not a demand for systemic, rather than simply bureaucratic, change?
It’s an oft-repeated truism that if the UN didn’t exist, it would have to be created. It’s surely more useful to say that if an effective system of global governance and co-operation didn’t exist, we’d have to create that. And we can safely say it doesn’t – so the question, surely, is this: how do we create it?
Victors’ justice
In the 1530s the theologian Francisco de Vitoria maintained that the colonization of South America could be justified because, in their resistance, the ‘savage’ natives had violated the Spaniards’ ‘right of communication’ which was an aspect of the ius gentium – ‘law of nations’ – which the Romans believed governed war and treaty making. The historian Perry Anderson marks this moment as the birth of modern international law, which he argues has been a weapon of imperialism ever since.9 When the League of Nations was founded after World War One, its all-powerful executive council gave veto power to the victors of the war: Britain, France, Italy and Japan. (The US, having effectively created the League, withdrew before its establishment.)
When the UN was created after World War Two, it ‘needed to be seen to create something new to take advantage of post-war reconstruction enthusiasm and to inspire confidence’, according to the historian Jane Mumby, but ‘away from the spotlight’ it was glad to ‘take advantage of the League of Nations’ many assets’.10 It elevated the US, Britain and France alongside the Soviet Union and China to the executive council’s successor, the Security Council, with exclusive veto power. And their vision for global justice was very much one of victors’ justice. France and Britain ‘had no desire at the time to grant any form of democracy to their colonies’, the human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson notes, while ‘all the Southern States in the US had “Jim Crow” laws discriminating against Blacks’ and ‘there were millions still consigned without trial to Soviet gulags’.11
Within its first two years, the UN would be giving its blessing to the Partition Plan for Palestine, which effectively rubber-stamped the Palestinian Nakba (see ‘Fiddling while Gaza burns’, page 33). And just a year after Roger Thornhill found himself clutching a bloody knife at UN headquarters in North by Northwest, the hallowed halls of the General Assembly would be in the spotlight once again as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev appealed to the world to oppose the colonial re-conquering of the former Belgian Congo. As brilliantly chronicled in the recent film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld caved to US and Belgian pressure to legitimize the breakaway state of Katanga and leave Congolese president Patrice Lumumba at the mercy of the troops that would soon execute him.
Diplomatic weapons
When it comes to the allegations of the UN’s absence in key global conflicts and selective application of international law, the organization’s chronic under-resourcing is undoubtedly a factor. ‘It’s also a question of prioritizing,’ former International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda tells New Internationalist. ‘But how do you prioritize heinous crimes, serious conflicts? Which one is more serious than the other?’
The likes of Robertson point to a vital if imperfect post-World War Two record, beginning with the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and reaching its zenith in the 1990s, with the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London and the convening of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
It was the latter events that would lead to the establishment of the ICC. Unlike the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which tries countries rather than individuals, the ICC gains its authority from a separate treaty – the Rome Statute – and is not a UN institution. But the Security Council does have the ability to refer cases to the ICC, and delay its proceedings.
The US leaders could not stomach bowing to the ICC’s jurisdiction themselves
That was not enough to satisfy the US, whose leaders, having played a key role in the ICC’s creation, could not stomach the notion of bowing to its jurisdiction themselves. Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who had more to fear than most from a truly independent international court, complained that the drafters of various treaties and conventions forming international law and human rights standards ‘almost certainly believed that they were stating general principles, not laws that would be enforced by national courts’.12
Having himself played a major role in drafting the Helsinki Accords, which sought to reduce Cold War tensions in Europe, he confirmed that ‘the administration I represented considered [them] primarily a diplomatic weapon to use to thwart the communists’ attempts to pressure the Soviet and captive peoples’. Kissinger argued that the Security Council – with the security of the US’s own veto, of course – should direct the ICC’s activities. It’s often tempting to see the relationship between the US empire and the UN as one of the former undermining the latter. But when the empire’s most prolific warlord makes the case for centralizing international power around a UN institution, it becomes easier to see the role the UN plays in securing NATO hegemony.
All this is vital context for the ICC’s current prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Like the US, Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute and thus argues that the ICC has no authority on its soil. ‘When the judges of the ICC take a decision, there’s an obligation on states who are parties to the ICC to implement those decisions,’ Bensouda says. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has done precisely the opposite, guaranteeing Netanyahu’s security from arrest on a recent trip to Budapest before announcing his country’s withdrawal from the ICC.
And up until now the ICC has only investigated African leaders and – more recently – opponents of NATO such as Russia and Venezuela. As for the recent prosecution of former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, East Asia analyst Kenny Coyle offers some crucial geopolitical context.13 Much as Duterte’s criminality is a matter of record, Coyle notes that ‘while Duterte quite astutely recognized the benefits of closer China-Philippines relations and the need to avoid being enlisted in the US-led cold war against China, [current president Bongbong] Marcos has swivelled on this 180 degrees’. Discrediting Duterte – and weakening the position of his daughter Sara, the Philippines’ current vice-president – serves to solidify the US empire.
Hague, schmague
The arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were issued some eight months after the UN’s own ICJ pronounced that Palestinians had ‘plausible rights to protection from genocide’, which were at real risk of irreparable damage. In the intervening period, a separate ICJ case – brought before the current war – delivered a ruling that Israel’s occupation and settlement of the Palestinian territories was illegal.14
‘Hague, schmague,’ Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir pronounced after the ICJ’s provisional ruling in the genocide case. But in spite of its professed indifference to international institutions, Israel clearly cares, having fought hard to get both cases struck out at the first hurdle. And it has suffered real damage as a result of the rulings, which have given much-needed succour to the Palestine solidarity movement and also begun to shift the sands of diplomacy. The judgments helped make the case for recognition of Palestinian statehood, which Ireland, Spain and Norway ratified last year. More practically, just weeks after the genocide ruling the aviation wing of Japan’s Itochu Corporation announced it would end a co-operation agreement with Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.15
Yes, the cases are progressing at a snail’s pace, but they seem positively pro-active compared to the refusal of world powers and other UN and international bodies – particularly the Security Council – to speak out. Both the ICJ and the ICC have proved their mettle as functional institutions of accountability and exercised the greatest leverage on Palestine because – much to the US’s chagrin – neither is bound by its Security Council’s veto.
As this magazine goes to press, the mood music around the Gaza war is rapidly changing. A Financial Times editorial has demanded that ‘US and European allies should do more to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu’.16 Leading Zionist New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman has argued that ‘this Israeli government is behaving in ways that threaten hard-core US interests in the region’17. And Trump has removed Saudi recognition of Israel as a pre-condition for his nuclear deal with the Middle East’s foremost headchoppers.18
‘For those killed and those whose voices are silenced: what more evidence do you need now?’ UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said on 13 May. ‘Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law? Or will you say instead, “we did all we could”?’
He was addressing the Security Council, and that was significant. His appeal came after the India-Pakistan bombardments in which another major global conflict of the UN period came to the brink, no doubt egged on by Israel’s impunity. ‘Humanity, the law, and reason must prevail,’ Fletcher said. ‘This Council must prevail. Demand this ends. Stop arming it. Insist on accountability.’
What is to be done?
Yet the future that takes shape as a result looks likely to be built not under UN auspices, but in high-stakes bilateral meetings between the US president and the Gulf powers he wishes to keep onside. It’s a pattern we’ve seen already in the US-Houthi ceasefire and the Ukraine critical minerals deal. As Western powers adjust to the age of multipolarity, outright warfare may well recede in favour of competitive tendering for trade and natural resources, with the poorest countries permanently on the losing side. ‘What you’re essentially doing is replacing international law with a protection racket,’ says Dearden.
And the post-World War Two promise of multilateralism – so often unfulfilled or, in the case of nuclear disarmament, used as a smokescreen for proliferation – will be more distant than ever. So what, as Lenin asked, is to be done?
Although we have established that international institutions can make progress without universal membership, the UN’s current status as an organization representing virtually every government is worth holding onto. It provides a structured basis for realizing the universal jurisdiction that is essential to any international law worthy of the name.
Yet the UN’s structure does not reflect universal membership. ‘It was founded in a completely different world,’ says Dearden, noting that many of the current members were still colonies in 1945. Much of the system they constructed was based on the Western powers’ own notion of optimal relations with one another.
Back to basics
It’s clear there can be no equitable, let alone united, organization of states that maintains the power of veto on its ruling body. Indeed, the very existence of a Security Council involving permanent members should be examined. Only a redistribution of powers towards the General Assembly, perhaps with day-to-day decisions invested in a rotating executive representing each of the continents, would open the door to truly representative multilateral decision making.
All very well and good, you’re thinking, but total cloud cuckoo land. None of the five existing Security Council members would give up their veto, let alone their permanent seat on the Security Council. Or would they?
It’s a lot easier to imagine pressure being brought to bear upon the veto holders in a post-nuclear age. That is not so distant a prospect as our rulers would have us believe. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev made such drastic progress on arms reduction that the notion of a nuclear-free future seemed realizable.19 More recently, lifelong anti-nuclear campaigner Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of winning Britain’s general election in 2017. If ever achieved, British disarmament could be used as leverage for a global nuclear weapons convention.
Of the veto five, China – as a soaring economic powerhouse with increasing numbers of allies across the majority world – has the least to lose from giving up its permanent seat. For the others, holding onto the veto massages their continued delusions of grandeur. Reconstituting the UN would require grassroots popular movements in each of these countries able and willing to take political power.
Reducing your country’s influence on the world stage might sound like the most unpopular popular movement in history. What kind of left-wing organization would adopt this demand when people could be far easier brought together around material issues like the cost of living or universal healthcare, or even climate change?
If the peace is to be determined by the likes of the US-Ukraine minerals deal, the peace dividend will be scooped up by corporations and corruption networks
And yet… recent developments have demonstrated the inextricable connection between the domestic and international agendas. How on earth can citizens shield themselves from the effects of climate change without international co-operation on an equitable basis? And while we’ve seen that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East can fuel rising energy costs – and therefore a rising cost of living – who benefits when the war is over?20 If the nature of peace is to be determined by the likes of the US-Ukraine minerals deal or the US-Saudi Arabia nuclear treaty, the peace dividend will be scooped up by corporations and corruption networks before citizens ever get a look in. There is a material benefit to putting in place a mechanism for multilateral international cooperation – even for the individual.
More still, the future United Nations must be built on the principle of prevention rather than relief. As it goes about preventing war and conflict, it must also promote co-operation, trust and mutual understanding between nations, fostering non-exploitative trading relationships and securing the eradication of poverty and exploitation. Central to this will be replacing the current system of development aid with a global wealth redistribution framework, building on the recent work done by the Expert Working Group on Global Public Investment.21
The UN’s own budget must also be underpinned by a contributory principle written into each member state’s constitution, to prevent the organization being thrown off course by the likes of Trump and Musk. An empowered secretary-general – who could even be chosen through a global electoral college – could lead an empowered General Assembly with a greater voice for civil society and mechanisms to ensure accountability to citizens.
‘History attests,’ Patrice Lumumba once said, ‘that independence is never brought to you on a silver platter. It must be won.’22 The same is true of a functioning and equitable framework for international co-operation. The climate crisis and an increasingly unstable political climate demands that we win it. The time for cynicism is over.
- Kevin Liptak, ’Trump has a long history with the UN…’, CNN, 18 September 2017, a.nin.tl/TrumpUN
- Elaine Ruth Fletcher, ‘Full Text of UN80 Task Force Pitch for Streamlined UN…’, Health Policy Watch, a.nin.tl/UN80
- Sam Moore et al, ‘Retrospectively modeling the effects of increased global vaccine sharing…’, Nature Medicine, 2022, a.nin.tl/CovidModelling
- Jess Gifkins and Benedict Docherty, ’Coronavirus: UN security council finally calls for global ceasefire after US and China delay talks’, The Conversation, 2 July 2020, a.nin.tl/CovidCeasefire
- ‘US tariffs will make global trade shrink, says WTO’, BBC News, 16 April 2025, a.nin.tl/WTO
- ‘Progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals’, UN General Assembly: Economic and Social Council, 2 May 2024, a.nin.tl/SDGs
- ‘COP29: Key outcomes and next steps for the UK’, Climate Change Committee, 11 December 2024, a.nin.tl/COP29
- ‘WHO to slash jobs and programs amid massive US funding cuts’, Le Monde, 22 April 2025, a.nin.tl/WHOjobs
- Perry Anderson, ‘The Standard of Civilisation’, New Left Review, No. 143, September/October 2023, a.nin.tl/Anderson
- Jane Mumby, Dismantling the League of Nations, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
- Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity, Penguin, 2024.
- Henry A Kissinger, ’The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction’, Foreign Affairs, 1 July 2021, a.nin.tl/Kissinger
- Kenny Coyle, ‘Duterte’s arrest: justice for the Filipino people won’t be found in the Hague’, Morning Star, 17 March 2025, a.nin.tl/Duterte
- ‘Experts hail ICJ declaration on illegality of Israel’s presence…’, OHCHR, 30 July 2024, a.nin.tl/ICJ
- ‘Japan's Itochu to end cooperation with Israel’s Elbit amid Gaza war’, Reuters, 5 February 2024, a.nin.tl/Itochu
- ‘The west’s shameful silence on Gaza’, Financial Times, 6 May 2025, a.nin.tl/FT
- Thomas L Friedman, ‘This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally’, New York Times, 9 May 2025, a.nin.tl/NYT
- Pesha Magid, ‘Under Trump, Saudi civil nuclear talks delinked from Israel recognition…’, Reuters, 8 May 2025, a.nin.tl/Saudi
- Thomas Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, ’Reykjavik: When Abolition Was Within Reach’, Arms Control Today, 7 October 2011, a.nin.tl/Reykjavik
- Ihab Shaarawy, ’Global Energy Markets on Edge: How Middle East and Ukraine Conflicts Shape 2025’, Egypt Oil & Gas Group, 22 January 2025, a.nin.tl/EnergyPrices
- ‘Building a better system: Making Global Public Investment a reality’, Expert Working Group on Global Public Investment, July 2022, a.nin.tl/GPI
- R A Ulyanovsky et al, Fighters for National Liberation, Progress Publishers, 1984
