This year marks the 80th anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter. During these eight decades, much has been accomplished that calls for celebration. Yet, there is no denying that the United Nations is facing perhaps the greatest crisis of its 80-year history.

A repost from 19 September 2025.

The difficulties confronting all parts of the UN system — not just the Security Council and the General Assembly — are many and varied. They are not, as several commentators have intimated, merely a case of states asserting their interests, seemingly unconcerned about the interests of the international community.

States have always made it their business to place self-interest at the heart of their decision-making. Nothing new in this. According to a major study, between 1945 and 2023, the US, the world’s pre-eminent military power, conducted more than 200 interventions, the vast majority without UN authorisation.

So, why is it that the UN is seen as increasingly impotent to control the rising use of military power? Largely because the hopes raised by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War have been rudely shattered.

Contrary to expectations, since the 1990s, the US has launched more military operations than it did during the Cold War years, even though in most cases the use of armed force did not achieve its aims.

More to the point, the last several years have seen a succession of armed conflicts — from Ukraine to Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan, Myanmar, Syria and Israel-Palestine — and countless humanitarian crises fuelled by civil war, insurgencies, and the ravages of climate change.

With these have come the displacement of peoples on an unprecedented scale, now estimated to be in excess of 122 million.

The last few years have also witnessed the almost complete collapse of global arms control, a trend in the making over two decades, beginning........

© Pearls and Irritations