Troubled assembly: Critics bash ‘dying organization’ as U.N. faces reform calls

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It was hailed as a “one-of-a-kind moment” for world leaders to come together and tackle humanity’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” while the world’s problems are addressed elsewhere.

Those two descriptions of the United Nations General Assembly — the first by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the second by Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho, 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 General Assembly is unmatched in scale and prestige. It is the only regularly scheduled international forum where leaders of rival nations come together peacefully under one roof and where top officials develop multinational plans to address hunger, climate change, disease, peacekeeping, nuclear proliferation and virtually every other global issue.

On the other hand, critics say the event demonstrates how ineffective and paralyzed the United Nations has become in the 21st century. They provide irrefutable evidence that the organization is in dire need of significant reforms.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave voice to that view this week. He singled out Russia’s status as a veto-wielding permanent member of the 15-nation Security Council as the central reason why the United Nations cannot take 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,” said Mr. Zelenskyy, 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.”

The complaint is not new, but it appears to carry particular force this year as the United Nations struggles to define its role and deal with its internal contradictions in the face of multiple crises, even with an administration in Washington that pays its dues and says it wants to increase 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 it multiple times since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In September 2022, Russia 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 United Nations as an international body capable of halting major wars — one of the foundational concepts behind its creation in 1945 — no longer seems applicable. Leading U.N. member nations now seem directly responsible for starting wars. Russia is also propping up some of the world’s worst actors.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol took aim this week 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 for derision. Mr. Risch and others say the forum, as currently constructed, does as much harm as good by 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.”

In his speech Tuesday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi accused the U.S. of fomenting the Russia-Ukraine war as part of its master plan to weaken Europe. He 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 aside, the United Nations, over the past 18 months, has spearheaded massive humanitarian aid initiatives for Ukrainian citizens at home and refugees forced to flee. Its nuclear inspectors helped defuse a tense standoff at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and U.N. officials helped broker a deal to maintain grain exports from Ukrainian ports.

Many of the United Nations’ less glamorous but indispensable roles, including dispatching peacekeeping forces to troubled countries and overseeing programs to promote multilateral health and education initiatives, would be hard to re-create without a single, central body.

For all its faults, the annual New York gathering is undoubtedly 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.” He stressed that “people are looking to their leaders for a way out of this mess.”

Yet even the U.N. chief acknowledged that the post-World War II institutions upholding the multilateral system must address contemporary challenges.

It’s “reform or rupture,” he wrote in his annual report on the state of the United Nations.

A ‘dying organization’?

Few argue that the U.N. could benefit from reforms. In his address to the General Assembly, President Biden reiterated U.S. support for adding more nations to the Security Council to better reflect the global economic and political power shift since the organization was created.

“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, significantly increasing representation from around the globe.

More members wouldn’t impede the authority of Russia, China or other permanent council members from wielding 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 “veto override,” whereby at least two-thirds of member countries could overcome a veto by any permanent member.

Reforms would require changes to the U.N. Charter, 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.”

As 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.

• Guy Taylor contributed to this report.