The UN is going the way of the League of Nations in the 1930s: unable to stop the imperialist powers from starting wars, it loses all purpose.
Michael Roberts is an Economist in the City of London and a prolific blogger.
Cross-posted from Michael Roberts’ blog
The 80th edition of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA 80) opened yesterday in New York. The theme this year is: ‘Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights’, highlighting the urgency of delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and reinvigorating ‘global cooperation’.
When the United Nations was born in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, the overriding goal of the 50 participants who signed the UN Charter was stated in its first words: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” One of the UN’s earliest achievements was to agree on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, outlining global standards for human rights. “The UN was created not to lead mankind to heaven,” said Dag Hammarskjold, UN secretary general, “but to save humanity from hell.” 80 years later, the current secretary-general Antonio Guterres cannot have such ambitious aspirations. “Guterres does say quite bold things. But he is now dismissed as on the sidelines and not a player,” says Mark Malloch-Brown, a former head of the UN Development Programme who was also deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan in 2006. “The briefing room in Kofi’s day brimmed with journalists. Now it’s more mausoleum than press room.”
The demise of the United Nations mirrors the decline of all the international institutions formed by the agreement of the major powers who won the Second World War, when they met at Bretton Woods, US. The IMF, the World Bank, the UN and later the World Trade Organisation were international agencies set up supposedly to support nations in financial crisis, help end global poverty, achieve equitable trade; and avoid wars.
But that was always an illusion. These agencies were really formed to work under the hegemonic leadership of the US, backed by its junior partners in the top capitalist economies. They were institutions of post-war ‘Pax Americana’. The UN was different in that the policies and interests of US imperialism could not always be approved. The UN Security Council was the executive body of the UN, composed of the major post-war powers. And each member had a veto to block any UN action on ‘peacekeeping.’ That meant the Soviet Union and later Maoist China could stop US expansion and warmongering, although not all the time – the UN approved the US war against North Korea in the 1950s, a war conducted by the US under the UN flag. And there have been many other UN peace-keeping forces used to ensure the status quo for Western interests in the last 80 years. But increasingly, because of the Soviet/China veto, the US had to promote its war objectives globally outside of the UN: Vietnam in Asia; NATO intervention in the Balkans; and straight-forward US action in Cuba, Grenada, Libya and others. The ‘peace’ objectives of the UN were increasingly ignored as the US expanded its military might (with over 700 bases now around the world).
A key turning point was the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the early 1990s. Now it appeared that the US had carte blanche to do as it wanted, using the cover of UN approval. But with the two invasions of Iraq in the 1990s and then in 2003 American leaders found that they could not use the UN to support their ambitions. In 2003, after a series of grotesque lies were presented to the UN assembly on Saddam’s supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify the invasion of Iraq and regime change, the US eventually decided to bypass UN approval and rely on the ‘coalition of the willing’ – ie the alliance of imperialist powers, which always chipped in to support US policy. The new political strategy of US imperialism was now the Washington Consensus, namely that the ‘democracies’ of the West should ally to weaken and defeat the ‘autocratic’ powers of Russia, Iran and Asia. The international rules for the world order would be set by the imperialist core without any input or consultation with the UN.
However, trends in the world economy brought down the Washington Consensus. Far from ruling the roost economically, US capitalism was in relative decline. That decline had started as far back as the mid-1970s as the European capitalist economies gained manufacturing share, followed by Japan. And in the 1990s, China emerged from its backward past and joined the World Trade Organisation. The US was increasingly left with only superiority in services, finance and military prowess – and still in the control of the IMF, World Bank and other ‘aid’ agencies. The US’ ‘exorbitant privilege’ of owning the world’s reserve and transactions currency, the dollar, was gradually undermined.
US net international investment position as % of US GDP
Source: IMF
This relative decline was grudgingly accepted by successive US administrations while the world economy appeared to expand and the profitability of US corporations rose through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. But the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession that hit all the world’s capitalist economies changed all that. Globalisation – namely the exponential growth in world trade and capital flows – came to an end. US capitalism could no longer depend so much on the transfer of value through trade and capital returns to subsidise its deficits and debt – as it had for decades since the 1980s. This was a new world with new economic powers resisting US attempts to take the lion’s share.
Source: World Bank
Now the US was increasingly unwilling to use the Bretton Woods institutions to promote its interests – internationalism was replaced by nationalism – culminating in Donald Trump and MAGA. Now the UN was not only to be circumvented but even more, to be minimised and attacked. As Jean Kirkpatrick, who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, famously suggested: the US would like to leave the UN but it was just “not worth the trouble”. The US under Donald Trump has withdrawn from the WHO and the UN Human Rights Council; while the UN Security Council is paralysed in the face of the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza; an intensfying trade war, and a funding crisis for the UN agencies.
Nothing more illustrates the irrelevance of the UN in the 21st century than the issue of climate change. It is the UN-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that collects and presents the science on global warming and predictions for the future of the planet and humanity. The IPCC delivers ever more stark warnings about the damage from global warming. But each international climate change meeting (COP) called by the UN, is ever more excruciatingly slow in reaching any agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and, once over, national governments ignore or reject even the most mild targets for global action.
Indeed, the latest report shows that governments are now planning more fossil fuel production in the coming decades than they were in 2023.
This increase goes against the commitments that countries have made at UN climate summits to “transition away from fossil fuels” and phase down production, particularly of coal. If all the planned new extraction takes place, the world will produce more than double the quantity of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with holding global temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Projected 2030 production exceeds levels aligned with limiting warming to 1.5ºC by more than 120%.
Then there is economic development to end poverty globally. In September 2015, the UN agreed on a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. All countries supposedly pledged to work together to eradicate poverty and hunger, protect the planet, foster peace and ensure gender equality. What has happened in the last ten years? Just one-third of the SDGs are on track, with little prospect of achieving any significant progress in the next five years.
The 2024 Sustainable Development Goals Report highlighted that nearly half the 17 targets are showing minimal or moderate progress, while over a one-third are stalled or going in reverse, since they were adopted. “This report is known as the annual SDG report card and it shows the world is getting a failing grade,” UN Secretary-General Guterres said at the press conference to launch the comprehensive stocktake.
Then there is war and the UN aspirations for world peace. The UN now appears to have no role in avoiding wars or maintaining peace. Instead, Donald Trump proclaims that he, as the leader of the US, the hegemonic power, is ending wars (seven so far, according to Trump). The US is now openly running ‘peace’ negotiations globally as it suits it, not the UN. Trump has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize!
Alongside all Trump’s boastful rhetoric about ending wars, the cruel reality is that US imperialism is stepping up conflicts globally. Trump calls for Canada to become the 51st state; he wants to buy Greenland from the Danes (despite the inhabitants having their own autonomous parliament); he begins to surround Venezuela with his military. And of course, above all, the US continues to back Israel in its horrendous destruction of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, leaving the UN paralysed. As Sigrid Kaag, a former deputy prime minister of the Netherlands who has had several roles at the UN, including as special co-ordinator of the Middle East peace process, put it. “The UN is at a point of irrelevance. That is its predicament. The dream might live on, but no one looks at the news and says: ‘What happened in the UN?”
The dark reality is that the UN is heading for the same fate as The League of Nations in the inter-world war period of the 20th century. The League was founded in 1920 and lasted only 18 years of relative peace until fascist states in Europe and Japan launched their invasions. Now in 2025, military spending is rising fast everywhere. Defence budgets are being doubled, with NATO countries aiming at 5% of GDP for the armed forces by the end of this decade – a level not seen since the founding of the UN. Trump has (rightly) changed the name of the US Department of Defense to the Department of War.
The failure of the UN is the organisational symbol of the failure of world capitalism to unite people and states to end poverty globally, stop global warming and environmental collapse and prevent continual and unending wars. Mark Malloch-Brown, a former head of the UN Development Programme who was also deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan in 2006 summed it up: “In many ways the UN is the walking dead,” he says. “It never quite falls over and yet it is still a corpse.”
Be the first to comment