Impotent in the Face of Crises, What Can Be the Future of the UN?

The legitimacy of the UN continues to sink.

Just one week before the opening of the UN's September meeting in New York, the General Assembly decided to postpone by one year a "Summit of the Future" scheduled for 2023. The event went almost unnoticed, while this summit was supposed to bring “multilateral solutions for a better tomorrow.”

Faced with the current ills of the planet, the future could wait until 2024.

And yet, the venerable United Nations, created in 1945 in San Francisco by the winners of the Second World War to preserve peace and international security, has been seized with an emergency. And now besieged on all sides for its impotence in the face of the war in Ukraine, after Syria, Ethiopia, Burma, or Yemen, for the impotence and the blunders of its Blue Helmets in Mali and the DRC.

Emerging from a long sleep, after two years of confinement linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, the organization has been entangled in the invasion of Ukraine since February 24, 2022: by chance of the calendar, Russia held the presidency of the Security Council at the time and had ample opportunity to explain to the cameras the “real” causes of this “special military operation,” attributed to the “Nazi” regime of Kyiv as well as to the American “bio laboratories” that were supposed to be developing hellish weapons.

“If your format cannot be changed and if nothing can be done about it,” thundered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “then the only solution is to dissolve you once and for all. Where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee?”

Aware of the shortcomings of the “thing” that General de Gaulle castigated in 1960 for its supranational pretensions, but also of his limitations in the face of the shady master of the Kremlin, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had finally gone to Kyiv on April 28, 2022, after a futile mission of good offices with Vladimir Putin.

Five Russian missiles had fallen 1,500 meters from him as he walked the streets of the Ukrainian capital (1 dead, 10 injured). The experience had, in the words of a UN official, “shocked but not completely surprised” the former Portuguese prime minister, 73 years old and criticized for his pusillanimity.

“We can't be sure that the message was intended for the UN, but at the very least it shows that the Russians are not giving Antonio Guterres the respect he deserves as secretary-general,” commented Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group.

One has to go back to 1961 and the Bizerte crisis to find a “shaken” secretary-general on the front lines: it was the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld, confronted by French paratroopers defending this Tunisian naval airbase. In the history of the UN, “Hammarskjöld remained the secretary general least appreciated by the USSR,” underlines the Ukrainian representative Sergiy Kyslytsya. “The bombing of Kyiv during Guterres' visit proves that the cards have been reshuffled,” he said ironically.

Of course, agrees to Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation, the UN is “doing a commendable job”: its food and humanitarian programs are providing relief to many refugees, even in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But the record remains pitiful and expectations unfulfilled, judging by the Chinese repression with impunity in Xinjiang.

“More secretary than general,” according to the wish of the five permanent member states, the current UN boss has hardly made his mark on the war in Ukraine, leaving the competent organizations to get involved: the IAEA for the supervision of the Zaporijjia nuclear power plant, the High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) for the evacuation of civilians and soldiers under siege in Mariupol in the spring of 2022, his emissaries for the negotiation of the agreement on the export of Ukrainian wheat.

The reform of the Security Council, both in the sense of its enlargement and the abrogation of the right of veto, remains a chimera: for the General Assembly to be able to take up the issue, a unanimous vote of the Security Council is required. France suggests a minimal reform, that of a moratorium on the right of veto in cases of mass crimes.

The legitimacy of the UN continues to sink, in a world overwhelmed by a combination of scourges.