The United Nations Has Reached a New Height of Irrelevance

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The Iran War is the final nail in the coffin of the post-World War II global order.

The Iran War, which began on February 28, 2026, will be debated for years over strategy, escalation, and regional effects. But one of its most enduring consequences may lie elsewhere. The war has exposed with unusual clarity the United Nations’ total irrelevance to questions of war and peace.

This is not a new problem. For decades, observers have pointed to the UN’s paralysis in resolving major conflicts. But what distinguishes the Iran episode is not just the UN’s singular failure but rather the normalization of its impotence. The UN was not consulted in any meaningful way before the strikes. It did not authorize them. It did not and could not constrain them. After the war commenced, the UN played no role in shaping events leading up to the tenuous ceasefire announced this week. The international organization was reduced to a stage on which explanations were offered, not a forum in which decisions were made or accountability enforced.

That distinction matters. The UN was created to prevent exactly this kind of unilateral use of force. The central idea of the post-World War II order was simple but ambitious: that states, particularly powerful ones, would not go to war on their own authority. Instead, decisions about the use of force would be mediated through a collective body, the Security Council, acting on behalf of the international community. What we are witnessing today is the quiet abandonment of that idea.

To understand how we got here, it is worth recalling that the UN system was always built on a contradiction. In theory, all states are equal and bound by the same rules. In practice, the system privileges the great powers, which hold veto authority in the Security Council. That arrangement was meant to ensure their participation in the world body and prevent a repetition of the League of Nations’ failure between the world wars. But it also ensured that when their interests are directly involved, the system cannot function as it was designed to do.

For much of the Cold War, this paralysis was accepted as the price of stability. After the Cold War, there was a brief moment when the Security Council appeared to work as intended. The 1991 Gulf War, authorized by the UN, seemed to vindicate the idea of collective security. But that moment proved fleeting.

The turning point came in 2003, with the US-led invasion of Iraq. The United States sought UN approval and failed to obtain it. It went ahead with the invasion anyway. At the time, the action was widely criticized as a violation of international law. But the more important point, in retrospect, is that there were no institutional consequences for the breach. That was the moment when the rules began to change—not formally, but in practice. A major power could bypass the Security Council and pay no meaningful price for doing so. Over time, what was once exceptional became acceptable.

The 2026 strikes on Iran take this evolution one step further. Unlike Iraq, there was no serious effort to secure UN authorization. The Security Council was not even treated as a necessary forum for deliberation. Instead, the United States invoked the language of self-defense and moved forward.

The UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defense or with Security Council approval. But the meaning of self-defense has been steadily stretched. Once understood to apply only in response to an armed attack or an imminent threat, it is now invoked in far broader circumstances—against potential threats, proxy actors, and long-term risks.

In the case of Iran, the justification rested on precisely such an expansive interpretation. The result is a doctrine that allows states to define for themselves when force is justified. If each state is the judge of its own case, there is little need for the UN’s collective authorization.

The Iran War has also contributed to the evolution of humanitarianism as a justification for intervention. In the 1990s, interventions in places like Kosovo were justified on moral grounds, even without UN approval. The argument was that preventing atrocities could justify bypassing legal constraints. That logic later informed the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).

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At the time, this was seen as a progressive development, an attempt to reconcile sovereignty with human rights. But it also had unintended consequences. It introduced the idea that legal rules could be overridden in the name of higher principles. And it opened the door to selective application.

Over time, many countries—particularly in the Global South—came to see humanitarian intervention less as a universal norm and more as a tool of powerful states to coerce or subjugate weaker ones. The 2011 Libya intervention, whose objectives evolved from civilian protection to regime change, reinforced that perception.

The Iran strikes were not convincingly framed in humanitarian terms, but they follow the same underlying logic. Legal and moral arguments are used only to justify action but not constrain it. The language of international law is preserved, but its function is inverted. This inversion helps explain why the UN now appears increasingly irrelevant. It is not that states reject international law and norms outright. On the contrary, they invoke them constantly. But they do so only in ways and at times that serve their interests.

For much of the world, this has created a growing sense of double standards. Weaker states are expected to comply with international rules and are often sanctioned when they do not. Powerful states operate with far greater latitude. The gap between principle and practice has become difficult to ignore.

For this and other reasons, the international system is increasingly fragmented, more competitive, and less willing to defer to universal institutions and norms. In this environment, coalitions of the willing, a term introduced in the vocabulary of International Relations during the invasion of Iraq, are increasingly replacing collective decision-making.

The US-Israel operation against Iran is a case in point. It was not an international action; it was a coalition action. It did not seek universal legitimacy; it relied on alignment among a limited set of actors. This model is likely to become more common, not less.

The consequences of this shift are significant. When the UN no longer functions as a constraint, the threshold for the use of force is lowered. States are more likely to act unilaterally or in small groups. The risks of escalation increase. So does the likelihood of arms races, including nuclear proliferation, as countries seek to protect themselves in a system where collective security cannot be relied upon.

None of this means that the UN is about to disappear. It remains a forum for dialogue. But in the domain that mattered most to its founders—the prevention of war—it has become largely symbolic if it is consulted at all.

The real question is what comes next. One possibility is reform: changes to the Security Council, clearer legal standards, stronger mechanisms of accountability. But such reforms would require the consent of the very powers whose behavior would need to be constrained and who wield veto power.

The more plausible scenario is that the UN continues to exist in a limited form and performs useful functions in non-security fields—a place where states explain their actions if they so desire, not where those actions are decided.

That may not be a dramatic and total collapse, but it is a profound transformation. The UN was meant to replace a world in which power determined outcomes with one governed by rules. What we are seeing now is a gradual return to the older logic. The strikes on Iran did not create this reality. But they revealed, with a certain finality, that the world is headed toward a far more anarchic system than the one envisioned by the founders of the United Nations.

About the Author: Mohammed Ayoob

​​Mohammed Ayoob is a university distinguished professor emeritus of International Relations at Michigan State University and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy. His books include The Many Faces of Political Islam (University of Michigan Press, 2008), Will the Middle East Implode? (2014), and, most recently, From Regional Security to Global IR: An Intellectual Journey (2024). He was also the editor of Assessing the War on Terror (2013).

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© The National Interest