The United Nations is withering away. It remains a major humanitarian actor and a forum for international debate, but its capacity to manage conflicts, let alone prevent them, has diminished dramatically. Those who view the organization with skepticism might rejoice at the news. But in a world where the great powers face increasingly few constraints on their actions, the doubters should be careful what they wish for.
As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, Secretary-General António Guterres did little more than publicly appeal to Vladimir Putin to pull back. As the Gaza war unfolded, he issued denunciations and visited the Rafah crossing, but the UN never established itself as a consequential political mediator. In Sudan, where the organization once maintained multiple peacekeeping and political missions, its diminished presence speaks volumes. In the American-Israeli war against Iran, the UN was barely an afterthought; the parties that mattered looked elsewhere for solutions. Sadly, the UN has become conspicuously peripheral to the central diplomatic and strategic calculations of today’s world.
The UN is currently in the news because of the race to find a successor to Guterres. Optimists hope that a more dynamic leader will restore some of the UN’s role. But such hopes have too often been dashed by the structural inability of the organization to protect peace and security.
The Retreat of UN Leadership
I spent four years (2001-2005) working as a UN political officer. During that time I deployed to Israel and Palestine during the Second Intifada, to Lebanon during the investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and to Sudan during the Darfur crisis. I had the opportunity to work closely with senior UN officials and observe how Secretary-General Kofi Annan navigated the constraints imposed by powerful member states. Divisions among the permanent members of the Security Council, competing interests, and a combination of arrogance and shortsightedness on the part of governments severely restricted his ability to push peaceful settlement to fruition.
Under Guterres, the retreat from consequential conflict diplomacy has become harder to ignore. He has frequently said the UN has no power because it has no army, presenting this as a justification for withdrawing the organization from active diplomacy.
Yet Annan managed to wring relevance from these difficult circumstances. His 1998 mission to Baghdad helped avert an imminent military confrontation over weapons inspections. He certified Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, helped create the Quartet that led Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts for years, supported the peace process that culminated in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, created an agreed framework to mitigate the crisis in Darfur, and developed the most promising plans yet to resolve the conflicts in Cyprus and Western Sahara. These initiatives did not all succeed, but they demonstrated that the Secretary-General could exercise meaningful diplomatic leadership despite severe institutional constraints.
Even so, Annan was often considered too passive by UN staff and diplomats, many of whom yearned for an assertive leadership in the style of Dag Hammarskjöld, who had established the Secretary-General as an independent center of international diplomacy.
Ban Ki-moon’s subsequent tenure made everyone miss Annan. The wars in Syria and Yemen, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the conflict in South Sudan exposed UN impotence and reduced it to issuing statements. Even so, Ban helped secure the Paris climate agreement and advance the Sustainable Development Goals.
Under Guterres, the retreat from consequential conflict diplomacy has become harder to ignore. He has frequently said the UN has no power because it has no army, presenting this as a justification for withdrawing the organization from active diplomacy. Whether by exhaustion, pessimism, or a narrow understanding of the potential of his office, Guterres has largely abandoned the ambition of making the UN a meaningful actor in conflict diplomacy.
A dynamic secretary-general could make a noticeable difference: engaging leaders before crises erupt, deploying envoys and back channels, building coalitions to exert diplomatic pressure, and creating conditions for peaceful settlements. But even the most skillful UN leader will encounter structural barriers that are becoming increasingly formidable.
An Old Design for an Older World
The UN was designed to build international security on the cooperation among the major powers, with global economic and social development as a cushion consolidating peace. Human rights and international law became additional pillars. Yet the Cold War quickly eroded that cooperation, trapping the Security Council in great-power rivalry. The organization’s economic and social development machinery fell victim to bureaucratic and competing national agendas, as did human rights protection later. Whatever the UN achieved was the result of the determination of committed diplomats and civil servants working around institutional constraints rather than a consequence of the institutional design itself.
Today, rivalry among the United States, China, and Russia has all but killed what remained of collective security. And this is not the only problem. Many conflicts result from state failure, armed non-state groups and internal fragmentation, challenges that the UN is ill-designed to handle effectively even if great-power rivalry allowed it to function.
The UN also lacks adequate means to accommodate the growing power of private actors, particularly technology companies. Artificial intelligence, cyber operations and autonomous weapons demand common standards and accountability mechanisms that the organization struggles to deliver.
These problems cannot be resolved by appointing a new Secretary-General or rearranging the organizational chart. Nor is meaningful Security Council reform likely to emerge from negotiations in which the permanent members retain the power to block changes that threaten their privileges. Even if it did, a more representative Council would remain dependent on political agreement among states. Institutional reform cannot eliminate the underlying contradiction between collective security and national interests. A different approach is needed.
Building a New International Security Structure
A functioning global security structure needs four things. Agreed norms, standards and rules are the first precondition. The liberal rules-based order was an aspiration to create universally-agreed norms, and it has now all but collapsed. The lesson for a future security community is not to abandon norms but to adopt ones their members accept and apply consistently, especially when it is costly.
Second, the definition of security must widen. Today’s war are no longer only between states. Since the end of the Cold War we see internal state conflicts spilling over into international ones – a problem the UN was not designed to handle. There are still some classic interstate wars, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or a potential Chinese move on Taiwan, with their classic arsenal of military responses. But we are increasingly seeing resource disputes, like those involving control of the water of the Nile, which need standing mediation and arbitration before they turn into war. And then there are the conflicts stemming from state failure, as in Sudan, Somalia or Libya, which demand help in rebuilding the capacity to govern. Proxy wars, like those orchestrated by Iran in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, combine interstate rivalry with hollow states and so require both classic deterrence and state-building efforts in the countries that are prey to them.
New international institutions have historically emerged from devastation. The current security system is not working and the potential for global crisis is high.
Third, a functioning security structure needs a decision-making system backed by a power structure able to enforce it. Decisions must be made by those who can carry them out. We might not like power hierarchy, but power is decisive in this matter. Powerful states are the ones who carry the burden of implementing decisions; their power makes their interests hard to ignore. So decisions can’t be made through a body like the UN general assembly, where every state gets a vote (including marginal ones). Each state’s vote has to be weighted according to its power, as in NATO.
Finally, such a structure needs a permanent capacity for conflict prevention and mediation, mutual defense, coordinated approaches to governance and economic reform, energy security and strategic supply chains, and common standards for artificial intelligence, cyber threats and autonomous weapons. Private companies must be brought into frameworks of public accountability.
There are existing examples of how such a structure might look. Think of NATO’s shared norms and binding commitments. The IMF and World Bank are advocating far-reaching reforms, with institutional capabilities to carry them out, and greater openness to states beyond the Western Bloc.
States would join such a UN structure for one of two reasons: some countries, such as the EU states and Japan, are committed to the organization’s norms and want to protect them globally, while others are weak and recognize that stronger institutions would help them grow and stay out of conflict. (This applies to the many smaller states, some in the developing world, who find protection in a rule-based order.) What holds them together is the process of integration itself: shared institutions, aligned policies and mutual dependence that make leaving unattractive. That is what separates a community from an alliance, which lasts only as long as its members’ political moods. The limits on national sovereignty become, in this view, part of the norms states accept as they join.
New international institutions have historically emerged from devastation. The current security system is not working and the potential for global crisis is high: think what would happen if – or when – in addition to the current wars in Ukraine and the Gulf, China moves on Taiwan. The consequences for the global economy are likely to be devastating.
When a transformative crisis hits, there will be a practical need for a new security structure. But the work, the thinking and the vision have to come first. Thinking about novel approaches to maintaining peace and security is one thing a new UN secretary-general can initiate.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
