UN making of an institution

Once the world’s indispensable forum, the United Nations is becoming the world’s frustrated bystander. Its institutions are trapped in the power structure of 1945, even as the conflicts, rivalries and challenges of 2026 demand something very different

UN: A club that cannot reform itself

Growing up in small-town India, I knew that no quiz was complete without a question on the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Quizzers knew the names by heart, the way they knew cricket captains: Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjöld, U Thant, Kurt Waldheim, Pérez de Cuéllar, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon. The office was worth remembering because it mattered.

Contrast that with today. The Security Council is choosing a successor to António Guterres, has already held four straw polls, and most of the world could not name a single candidate, or would care to. That indifference measures the UN’s decline better than any budget line. The reasons begin with arithmetic. The Council still has five permanent members, chosen by the winners of a war that ended eighty-one years ago. It was last enlarged in 1965, when the UN had 115 members. Today it has 193. Africa, with 54 countries, has no permanent seat. Latin America has none. India, the most populous nation on earth and the fourth-largest economy, has none. Britain and France, whose combined population is barely more than half of Uttar Pradesh’s, hold seats and vetoes for life.

The selection of the Secretary-General shows the structure at work. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan led the fourth straw poll with ten “encourage” votes, but any winner must also avoid a veto from one of the five permanent members. The head of a 193-nation organisation is, in effect, vetted by five, in a consultation room from which 188 members are absent.

The irony is that the world has never needed the UN Security Council more than it does now. In 2025, the world recorded 65 state-based armed conflicts, the highest number since records began in 1946, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. They range from the battlefields of Ukraine to the killing fields of Gaza and Sudan to the forgotten war zones of Afghanistan. And the UN is missing in action from virtually all of them.

The reason is the veto, which turns a structural anomaly into paralysis. Any permanent member can block any resolution, including one about its own conduct. Russia invaded Ukraine and then vetoed the Council’s response. The United States has repeatedly shielded Israel from Council action on Gaza. China protects its partners with the same reflex. The Council acts when great-power interests happen to align and falls silent when they collide, which is precisely when the world needs it.

The rot is not confined to the Council. The World Health Organisation was created to keep disease above politics, and it has been pulled into politics from both directions. In the early weeks of Covid, it was accused of deferring to Beijing on the outbreak’s origins and on the pace of disclosure. Then Washington, its largest funder, walked out, and the American withdrawal took effect this January. The WHO has since had to shrink its budget and its staff. A body meant to coordinate the response to the next pandemic is now negotiating for its own survival with donors who have shown they can leave.

More troubling is what this says about the future of multilateralism. Under Trump, Washington has increasingly treated international institutions as constraints rather than instruments of American leadership. The United States, the UN’s largest contributor, is stepping back from the system it helped build. Guterres has responded with UN80, merging agencies and cutting posts. Some pruning may be overdue, but it is retrenchment, not reform. It reduces the UN’s capacity without addressing the paralysis at its core.

Into this gridlock walks India’s case for a permanent seat. It is a strong one. India is the most populous democracy, the fastest-growing major economy, one of the largest troop contributors in the history of UN peacekeeping and the natural voice of a Global South with no voice in the Council. Its G20 presidency showed that institutional reform need not take decades. Under New Delhi’s chairmanship, the African Union was admitted as a permanent member of the G20. It took one summit. The UN has had seventeen years of Intergovernmental Negotiations on Council reform without producing an agreed negotiating text.

Why has the stalemate lasted? Because the process is designed to protect the status quo. Under Article 108 of the Charter, an amendment needs two-thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two-thirds of members, including all five permanent members. Each of the five holds a veto over any dilution of its own privilege. Below them, the rivalries continue. The Uniting for Consensus group, led by Italy, Pakistan and others, opposes any new permanent seats. The G4 of India, Brazil, Germany and Japan has not settled with the African Union whether new permanent members should get the veto. Reform is blocked by the powerful at the top and divided by the aspirants below.

Will China and the United States yield? On present evidence, neither. Beijing says it wants greater representation for developing countries, but it has never endorsed India by name, and it has no wish to see a second Asian power sitting beside it as an equal. Washington has spoken warmly of India’s claim since the Obama years. But the present administration treats the UN as a cost centre, and a president who will not pay his dues is unlikely to spend political capital creating new vetoes. Russia, Britain and France offer support in principle, which costs them nothing while the other two hold the door shut.

So India must play a longer game. There are partial routes worth pushing: voluntary restraint on the veto in cases of mass atrocity, an idea France and Mexico have advanced for years; a new category of longer-term Council seats that could bring in India and Africa in stages; and a firm date for text-based negotiations, so that the annual ritual of reaffirming “urgency” ends.

Will the UN survive? Almost certainly. Voltaire said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The same holds for the United Nations. If it vanished tomorrow, the world would have to build something very like it, because no other body combines universal membership with the legal authority to authorise force and mandate peacekeepers. It also runs the world’s largest humanitarian operations and gives 193 states a place to talk.

Necessity, though, is no guarantee. The League of Nations was not abolished either. It simply stopped mattering, and one day it was wound up.

The real danger is drift. Great powers already build parallel arrangements, from ad hoc peace boards to small clubs of the willing, when the UN proves too slow, too cumbersome or too constrained to deliver. Each is a small withdrawal of confidence. Add enough of them and the UN risks becoming a spectator to the decisions that shape the international order, rather than the institution through which those decisions are made.

The permanent five believe they can wait this out. They are wrong. A Council that represents 1945 cannot enforce the peace of 2026, and the countries left outside the room will eventually stop treating its rulings as binding. The choice before the UN at 81 is between reform on terms its members negotiate together and irrelevance on terms the powerful dictate.

The Council still has five permanent members, chosen by the winners of a war that ended eighty-one years ago

The great UN paradox

The UN was created to prevent powerful states from making war on one another, but it can function effectively only when the powerful states are willing to cooperate. Its greatest achievements have generally come when major powers have found common ground — peacekeeping, humanitarian action and climate cooperation. Its most dramatic failures have often occurred when great-power interests have collided and the Security Council has become paralysed. That makes the UN neither simply a failure nor a success. It is a product of the international system: enormously useful in areas where states can cooperate, but structurally constrained when the interests of the major powers diverge.

Major turning points in UN history

1945 - Birth of the United Nations

• The UN replaced the League of Nations as the principal global organisation for collective security.
• Its Charter established principles including sovereign equality, peaceful settlement of disputes, international cooperation and restrictions on the use of force.

1948 - Universal Declaration of Human Rights

• The General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) on December 10, 1948.
• It became one of the foundational documents of the modern international human-rights system and influenced numerous subsequent treaties3. 1950 - Korean War
• The Security Council authorised a UN-commanded military response after North Korea invaded South Korea. The episode demonstrated that the UN could act militarily when the major powers were sufficiently aligned.

1950s-1960s - Peacekeeping emerges

• Traditional UN peacekeeping developed as a pragmatic instrument for managing conflicts where the great powers could not agree on more forceful intervention.
• The collapse of European colonial empires dramatically expanded UN membership.
• Newly independent Asian and African countries turned the General Assembly into a much broader forum representing the developing world.

1971 - China takes its UN seat

• The People’s Republic of China replaced Taiwan as China’s representative at the UN.
• This reflected the changing geopolitical balance and strengthened the representation of the developing world.

1980s - Development and humanitarian work

• The UN system increasingly became involved not merely in war and diplomacy but in poverty reduction, health, refugees, food security, education and development. Agencies such as WHO, UNICEF, UNHCR and UNDP became important instruments of international cooperation.

1989-91 - End of the Cold War

• The collapse of the Soviet bloc created expectations of a more effective UN.
• Security Council cooperation temporarily increased, allowing the organisation to authorise collective action more readily.

1990-91 - Gulf War

• Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait produced one of the clearest examples of post-Cold War collective security. The Security Council authorised force to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

1994 - Rwanda

• The genocide in Rwanda became one of the UN’s most devastating failures. The UN’s failure to prevent or stop the genocide profoundly damaged confidence in its peacekeeping system.

1995 - Srebrenica

• The massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica occurred in a UN-declared “safe area”.
• The failure of the international community and the UN peacekeeping operation became another defining failure of the post-Cold War system.

2001 - 9/11 and the war on terror

• The attacks in the United States transformed the international security agenda. The Security Council adopted measures against terrorism and terrorist financing.

2003 - Iraq War

• The US-led invasion of Iraq without explicit Security Council authorisation exposed one of the fundamental limitations of the UN system: the organisation cannot prevent powerful states from acting outside the Council.

2005 - Responsibility to Protect

• After Rwanda, Srebrenica and other mass atrocities, UN members endorsed the principle known as Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

2015 - SDG and Paris framework

• The UN adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, establishing a global development agenda to 2030.
• The Paris Agreement, negotiated under the UN climate framework, represented another major example of multilateral cooperation.

2022-present - Ukraine and the limits of the Security Council

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine again exposed the structural problem at the heart of the UN system: a permanent member of the Security Council can use its veto to block Council action against itself. The General Assembly has nevertheless provided a forum for states to express their positions on the war, while the UN system has continued its humanitarian work.

Major achievements

Peacekeeping: UN peacekeeping has become one of the organisation’s principal mechanisms for helping manage conflicts and support transitions towards peace.

Human rights: The UDHR and the subsequent body of international human-rights treaties helped establish universal human rights as a central principle of international relations.

Decolonisation: The UN provided a global forum for newly independent countries.

Humanitarian assistance: UN agencies have provided food, shelter, healthcare and emergency relief in humanitarian crises.

Climate change: The UN system became the principal framework for international climate negotiations.

A universal diplomatic forum: 193 countries now have a common forum in which they can debate every major global problem.

Major failures and limitations

The Security Council veto: The veto can prevent collective action even when a substantial majority of UN members supports intervention.

Rwanda, 1994: The UN failed to prevent or adequately respond to genocide despite warnings and an existing peacekeeping presence.

Srebrenica, 1995: The UN’s designated safe area failed to protect civilians from mass killing.

Iraq, 2003: The invasion demonstrated that the UN could be bypassed when a major power decided to use force without SC authorisation.

Ukraine: Russia’s status as a permanent SC member gives it power to veto any resolution against it, thereby giving it a protective shield.

The implementation gap: The UN can pass resolutions, treaties and declarations, but enforcement ultimately depends heavily on member states.

Why was UN created?

• The failure of the League of Nations: The League, established after the First World War, failed to prevent aggression in the 1930s and ultimately could not stop the Second World War. Its weakness demonstrated the need for a stronger system of collective security.
• The idea of collective security: The Allied powers sought an organisation through which states could resolve disputes peacefully and act collectively against threats to international peace.
• The Atlantic Charter and wartime planning: The foundations were laid during the war, including the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the 1942 Declaration by the United Nations.
• Representatives of 50 countries met from April 1945 to draft the UN Charter.
• The great powers accepted a common international organisation but insisted on retaining a veto in the Security Council. The five permanent members were the US, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China.

The writer is a former High Commissioner of India to Canada and has served as spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs; Views presented are personal.