{"id":312831,"date":"2026-02-09T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=312831"},"modified":"2026-02-03T05:27:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T05:27:40","slug":"dont-blame-the-un-for-the-worlds-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/02\/dont-blame-the-un-for-the-worlds-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Blame the UN for the World\u2019s Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UN is weaker and more delegitimized than ever, but it would be a mistake to blame the institution for the world\u2019s problems: the UN simply mirrors our fractured geopolitical reality.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1 Feb 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0The United Nations is facing the deepest crisis in its eighty-year history. Its legitimacy has been eroding for years, attracting criticism from across the political spectrum. Critics of US and Western foreign policy denounce the organisation as powerless in the face of mass slaughter in Gaza and repeated unilateral US military actions carried out without Security Council authorisation. Liberal Atlanticists fault it for its inability to halt Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine or bring the war to an end. Meanwhile, the MAGA movement portrays the UN as an instrument of a \u201cglobalist elite\u201d bent on eroding national sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Today, however, the organisation confronts a more direct challenge: an open assault from the country that has long been its principal architect, sponsor and largest financial contributor \u2014 the United States. Donald Trump, a long-standing critic of the UN, has moved from rhetoric to action. Since returning to power, his administration has slashed voluntary contributions to UN agencies and withheld mandatory payments to both the regular and peacekeeping budgets. According<\/a> to UN officials, the US currently owes billions of dollars in assessed contributions, prompting the Secretary-General to warn that the organisation faces the risk of \u201cimminent financial collapse\u201d.<\/p>\n

The pressure is set to intensify. Trump\u2019s proposed 2026 budget would drastically reduce or eliminate<\/a> funding for several UN bodies, including the regular budget and peacekeeping operations. At the same time, he has launched a parallel initiative \u2014 the so-called \u201cBoard of Peace\u201d \u2014 explicitly framed as an alternative to the existing multilateral system and chaired by Trump himself. So far, only a limited number of countries, largely US-aligned governments in the Middle East, Central Asia and Latin America, have signalled participation. Notably, Western countries have declined or hesitated, while major powers such as China, Russia and India have refrained from formal commitment.<\/p>\n

For these reasons, the initiative is unlikely to displace the UN in the near term, as it is rightly perceived as little more than a tool for projecting US power \u2014 and legitimising Trump\u2019s cowboyish foreign policy. The UN system will thus probably endure, but in a weakened and increasingly contested form. This erosion of authority, however, cannot be attributed solely to institutional failure. The UN \u2014 like any international organisation \u2014 ultimately mirrors the global distribution of power.<\/p>\n

This has always been the case. Despite the language of universal legality, international law has often been largely a myth, enforced selectively when it aligned with the interests of dominant powers and ignored when it did not. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq is a textbook example of this asymmetry. But it couldn\u2019t otherwise: international law lacks an independent enforcement mechanism; there is no global police force capable of compelling compliance. Its force has therefore always been less coercive than normative \u2014 grounded more in legitimacy and shared expectations than anything else.<\/p>\n

What distinguishes the current moment is not merely the persistence of power politics but the diminishing effort to cloak it in legal or moral justification. Previous US administrations at least sought the appearance of multilateral legitimacy; today, that veneer is gone. The UN has limited means to counter such unilateralism. Yet concluding that the organisation \u2014 or international law itself \u2014 is therefore obsolete would be a leap. Even without hard enforcement, international norms exert real influence. States, including powerful ones, remain dependent on alliances, trade and diplomatic recognition. Disregarding widely accepted norms carries reputational and political costs, as the global backlash against Israel and Trump illustrates.<\/p>\n

A system in which states retain at least a normative incentive to respect shared rules is preferable to one governed openly by raw force. At the same time, it is unrealistic to expect the UN alone to resolve the world\u2019s crises. The fate of conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine or any other region is ultimately shaped by the broader balance of power rather than by resolutions passed in New York.<\/p>\n

Meaningful change therefore depends less on institutional reform than on geopolitical accommodation among major powers. Should they succeed in forging a new equilibrium \u2014 a kind of updated global Westphalian understanding \u2014 the UN could regain relevance. If they fail, its capacity to prevent escalation will remain limited. In this sense, the organisation reflects the fractures and alignments of the international system itself.<\/p>\n

But we should be clear about who the outlier is. On a wide range of issues, the global majority frequently votes with remarkable consensus, leaving the US and its closest Western allies isolated. Far from being detached from reality, the UN often mirrors it \u2014 a \u201cworld minus one\u201d, as some have put it<\/a>, or perhaps more precisely, a world minus the West.<\/p>\n

What is clear is that a more balanced, cooperative and genuinely multipolar framework is urgently needed. The hope is that that this systemic reconfiguration can occur through negotiated accommodation rather than the mass conflict that catalysed the UN\u2019s formation.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Thomas Fazi – Husband, dad,\u00a0 journalist, writer, socialist. New book just out:<\/em> \u201cThe Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor\u2014A Critique from the Left\u201d (bit.ly\/3i68kk5<\/a>). Columnist for<\/em> “UnHerd” and<\/em> “Compact”.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thomasfazi.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Feb 2026\u00a0–\u00a0The UN is weaker and more delegitimized than ever, but it would be a mistake to blame the institution for the world\u2019s problems: the UN simply mirrors our fractured geopolitical reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":233181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[124,1888],"class_list":["post-312831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-united-nations","tag-united-nations","tag-unsc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312833,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312831\/revisions\/312833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}