Opinion – the United Nations is powerless in a globalised world

Soft power + Security Council paralysis

Perhaps the UN’s biggest vulnerability lies in the structure of the Security Council, where real power exists.

The UN’s ability to deploy peacekeepers or broker ceasefires is restricted by the veto power of the Security Council’s five permanent members: the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom.

In the event that one of these countries has geopolitical interests at stake in the conflict being discussed, meaningful action to prevent violence and civilian suffering can be immediately vetoed, and ultimately, blocked.

With the Council’s five nations more entangled than ever in global trade, security alliances, and regional power struggles, the veto has enabled leaders to make decisions not based on humanitarian concerns, but on geopolitical and economic interests.

Not to mention, modern warfare increasingly involves non-state actors, insurgent groups, and cyberattacks — areas where the UN has limited authority.

The rogue nature of these threats challenges the UN’s traditional peacekeeping model, which was designed for post-war stabilisation rather than complex, asymmetrical conflicts.

As the world has become more interconnected, the lines between local conflicts and international interests have blurred, making a unanimous consensus within the council difficult to land on.

The UN Charter, while enshrining the organisation as a force for peace, upholds the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states. This creates a paradox: the UN is meant to prevent human suffering, but it cannot act without the consent of the very governments that may be perpetrating that suffering.

As a result, the efficacy of the United Nations Security Council’s structural weaknesses are exposed and its ability to manage global crises hindered.

This gridlock has become devastatingly apparent during the ongoing conflict in Sudan.

Since April 2023, the country has witnessed violent clashes between rival military factions, spiralling the country into a humanitarian disaster.

Though the total number of people killed during the conflict is unknown, medics in the region put the figure between 20,000 and an even more disturbing 150,000 people.

A further 7 million people in Sudan have been displaced from their homes and into the desert where they face other serious challenges, including dehydration and starvation.

More than 80 hospitals have been bombed, basic services have collapsed, and food and medical supplies have become increasingly scarce. The UN has repeatedly called for ceasefires, peace talks, and humanitarian access, but members of the Security Council have failed to act decisively.

The cause of this inaction, of course, is rooted in geopolitical interest. Russia, for instance, has a lot to lose in Sudan, including gold mining operations and military agreements. A reluctance from Russia to alienate its allies has led to the UN’s diplomatic inaction.

Meanwhile, China has remained cautiously neutral due its strategic ties to numerous African nations, aiming to avoid intervention that could be seen as infringing on Sudanese sovereignty.

This veto gridlock means that while Sudan burns, the Security Council is forced to continue deliberations.

A lengthy case study in peacekeeping failure

If Sudan exposes the paralysis of UN diplomacy, the Democratic Republic of the Congo highlights the limitations of its peacekeeping operations.

The DRC has been entrapped in conflict for more than two decades, with various rebel groups, militias, and foreign actors battling for control of its mineral-rich regions.

The UN Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) is one of the largest and longest-running peacekeeping missions in history, operating in the region since 1999.

Despite deploying tens of thousands of troops and raising billions of dollars in funding – primarily via the UN Peacebuilding Fund and from several European governments – MONUSCO hasn’t been successful in bringing peace to the region.

More than six million people have been killed in the conflict since the late 1990s, with brutalities ranging from mass killings to sexual violence on a horrifying scale.

Rebel groups, including the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and the March 23 Movement (M23), continue to operate with impunity, terrorising civilians with the goal of gaining ultimate control over the region.

In fact, MONUSCO has been regularly criticised for failing to protect civilians in the Congo.

In 2012, for example, the city of Goma in eastern Congo fell to the M23 rebels while UN peacekeepers stationed nearby did nothing.

Peacekeepers on the ground cited restrictions in their mandate as the reason for their inaction. They stated that they were authorised to use force only in self-defence or to protect civilians, but this instruction was so narrowly defined that they were incapable of preventing a rebel takeover.

In 2021, another tragedy highlighted MONUSCO’s powerlessness when a UN peacekeeping convoy in eastern Congo was ambushed, leading to the death of the Italian ambassador to the country.

Despite the UN’s presence in the Congo for over two decades, more than half of locals view MONUSCO as ineffective, and in the worst cases, view it as complicit in the conflict.

The organisation has withdrawn around 15,000 of its peacekeepers in recent months.

Israel-Palestine: a decades-long struggle

The UN’s powerlessness is perhaps most evident in the Israel-Palestine conflict, where more than 70 years of resolutions, envoys, and peace processes have failed to produce any lasting solution.

In many ways, the Israel-Palestine conflict is a model example of the UN’s larger issues: the paralysis of the Security Council, the multi-failures of diplomatic initiatives, and the complexities of sovereignty vs. intervention.

Since the creation of Israel in 1948, the UN has made a long list of attempts to resolve tensions and various conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians.

Numerous resolutions have been passed calling for a two-state solution, addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees, and condemning illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank – the latter practice has continued throughout the years regardless, even more so in recent months.

Still, the Security Council’s actions have been consistently thwarted by the United States veto.

As a devoted ally of Israel, the US has blocked at least 53 UN Security resolutions which it viewed as too critical of Israeli policies.

This includes those that condemn the expansion of settlements or the use of disproportionate force against Palestinians. More recently, the US also blocked UN calls for humanitarian pauses during Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza.

As a result, the UN’s involvement has been reduced to calls for ceasefires and urges to both sides to return to peace talk negotiations – appeals that are almost always ignored.

Security Council talks continue as the situation on the ground deteriorates, especially with the expansion of Israel’s military operations into Lebanon.

In solidarity with the people of Gaza, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel. Israel responded by conducting airstrikes not only on Hezbollah targets, but on civilian infrastructure in Lebanon too.

The UN, particularly through its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL), issued calls for restraint urging both parties to avoid further escalation, but once again, these appeals fell on deaf ears.

For more than a year, Israel’s deadly airstrikes have continued with little more than symbolic condemnation from the international community.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah remains a potent military and political force in Lebanon, unperturbed by UN sanctions or diplomatic pressures.

Reshaping the future

The UN’s powerlessness in the face of these conflicts – whether in Sudan, the DRC, Israel-Palestine, Lebanon, or Yemen – points to a serious crisis of relevance.

Rethinking the veto power of the Security Council’s permanent members must be addressed if the UN is to regain credibility as a force for peace in the world where modern warfare and weapons of mass destruction are now a reality.

Peacekeeping operations also need to be reformed to ensure they are properly resourced, with workers given clear mandates, to help them act decisively when civilian lives are endangered.

While the UN remains a critical forum for international diplomacy and humanitarian efforts, its reliance on soft power – and the veto politics within the Security Council – has rendered it basically incapable of halting many of today’s most serious conflicts.

Former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld once said, ‘The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.’

But in Sudan, Congo, Gaza, and Lebanon, the UN seems powerless to stop such a descent.