It was hailed as a “one-of-a-kind moment” for world leaders to come together and tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.
It was also dismissed as the annual gathering of a “dying organization” that has been rendered impotent and irrelevant by its own rules, a yearly exercise that at its core “just wastes time and money” as the world’s problems are addressed elsewhere.
Those two descriptions of this week’s United Nations General Assembly — the first by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the second by Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee — underscore the two competing realities on display this week in New York. On one hand, the annual event is unmatched in both scale and prestige. It is the only regularly scheduled international forum in which the leaders of rival nations peacefully come together under one roof, and where top officials from every corner of the planet develop multinational plans to address hunger, climate change, disease, peacekeeping, nuclear proliferation and virtually every other issue on the global docket today.
On the other hand, critics say the event demonstrates just how ineffective and paralyzed the U.N. has become in the 21st century, providing irrefutable proof that the organization is in dire need of significant reforms. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave voice to that view this week, singling out Russia’s status as a veto-wielding permanent member of the body’s 15-member Security Council as the central reason why the U.N. is incapable of taking meaningful action, such as stopping a war.
“Regardless of who you are, the current U.N. system still makes you less influential than the veto power possessed by a few and misused by one: Russia. That is to the detriment of all other U.N. members,” Mr. Zelenskyy said, speaking through an interpreter.
“We should recognize that the U.N. finds itself in a deadlock on the matters of aggression. Humankind no longer pins its hopes on the U.N. when it comes to the defense of the sovereign borders of nations,” he said. “World leaders are seeking new platforms and alliances that could reduce the disastrous scope of problems — the problems that are met here within these walls with rhetoric, rather than real solutions; with aspirations to compromise with killers, rather than to protect lives.”
It’s not a new complaint, but one that appears to carry particular force this year as the world body struggles to define its role and deal with its internal contradictions in the face of multiple crises. The struggle comes even with an administration in Washington that pays its dues and says it wants to boost international cooperation.
As one of the council’s five permanent members, along with the U.S., Britain, France and China, Russia wields veto power and has used that power on multiple occasions since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Last September, for example, Moscow vetoed a binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would have forced it to abandon its war against its neighbor.
Core mission
At the most fundamental level, the idea of the U.N. as an international body capable of halting major wars — one of the foundational concepts behind its creation in 1945 — no longer seems applicable. In fact, leading U.N. nations now seem directly responsible for starting them. In Russia’s case, it’s also propping up some of the world’s worst actors.
For example, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol this week took aim at Russia’s growing defense partnership with North Korea, which has built a ballistic missile and nuclear weapons arsenal in violation of unanimous Security Council resolutions.
“It is paradoxical that a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, entrusted as the ultimate guardian of world peace would wage war by invading another sovereign nation and receive arms and ammunition from a regime that blatantly violates U.N. Security Council resolutions,” Mr. Yoon said.
Russia’s transgressions aren’t the only reasons this year’s U.N. General Assembly has been met with derision from some critics. Mr. Risch and others contend that the forum as currently constructed does as much harm as good, providing platforms for incendiary speakers while freezing out some democratic allies.
“This year’s U.N. General Assembly is not based in reality,” Mr. Risch said in a remarkably blunt statement late Wednesday. “In addition to excluding democratic Taiwan’s participation, this year’s UNGA has been used as a platform for the murderous Iranian regime to share its anti-American and anti-democratic ideas, to attempt to shame Israel — the only democracy and our strongest ally in the Middle East — and to focus on climate change when the world is plagued by grave dangers and threats of many varieties.”
Indeed, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in his speech Tuesday, among other things, accused the U.S. of fomenting the Russia-Ukraine war as part of its master plan to weaken Europe. He also denied that Iran is supporting Russia’s war, despite clear evidence that Russian troops routinely use Iranian-made drones in their attacks on Ukraine.
Inflammatory rhetoric on its platform aside, the U.N. certainly isn’t an inept organization. Using Ukraine alone as an example, the U.N. over the past 18 months has spearheaded massive humanitarian aid initiatives for Ukrainian citizens at home and for refugees forced to flee the country. Its nuclear inspectors also helped defuse a tense standoff at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. U.N. officials helped broker a deal to maintain grain exports from Ukrainian ports — though Russia recently pulled out of that agreement.
Many of the U.N.’s less glamorous but indispensable roles, including peacekeeping forces in troubled countries around the world and its programs promoting multilateral health and education initiatives, would be hard to recreate in the absence of a single, central body.
Its annual New York gathering, for all of its faults, is certainly a unique global event. At a press conference last week, Mr. Guterres called the General Assembly “a one-of-a-kind moment each year for leaders from every corner of the globe to not only assess the state of the world but to act for the common good” and stressed that “people are looking to their leaders for a way out of this mess.”
But even the U.N. chief acknowledged that the power-World War II institutions upholding the current multilateral system — including the U.N. — needed to make changes to address contemporary challenges.
It’s “reform or rupture,” he wrote in his annual report on the state of the United Nations.
A ‘dying organization’?
Yet few argue with the notion that the U.N. could benefit from reforms. In his own address this week, President Biden reiterated U.S. support for adding more nations to the Security Council to better reflect the shift in global economic and political power since the organization was created in the wake of World War II.
“In my address to this body last year, I announced that the United States would support expanding the Security Council,” he said. “We need to be able to break the gridlock that too often stymies progress and blocks consensus at the council.”
One of the most common reform proposals would add Brazil, Germany, India, South Korea and South Africa as permanent council members, greatly increasing representation on the panel from different corners of the globe.
But such a move wouldn’t impede the ability of Russia, China or other permanent council members from wielding their veto power and blocking measures supported by an overwhelming majority of countries. To do that, more sweeping reforms would be needed.
One such idea centers on a so-called “veto override,” whereby a supermajority — at least two-thirds of member countries — could overcome a veto by any permanent member.
But that proposal, along with all other major reform ideas, faces major structural challenges. They would require changes to the U.N. Charter itself, meaning the five permanent security council members — including China and Russia — would have to approve them.
“The obstacles to council reform are daunting,” Stewart Patrick, senior fellow and director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a June analysis.
“Any change to the council’s composition or voting rules would require the approval of two-thirds of U.N. members … accompanied by relevant domestic legislation,” he wrote. “Given intensifying geopolitical rivalry and deepening political polarization in many countries, prospects for updating the council appear slim.”
Slim as those chances may be, critics say the alternative to reform is a future of irrelevance.
“True reform at the U.N. is the only path forward for this dying organization,” Mr. Risch said in his statement.
— Guy Taylor contributed to this report.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.