Eight vetoes in a single year. The Security Council's worst deadlock since 1986 — while Gaza burned and Ukraine bled.The US exited 66 international organizations. China pledged $500 million to the WHO. The vacuum is not empty — it's being filled.
As Security Council vetoes hit a 38-year high, the United States walks out on 66 international bodies, and China quietly rewrites the rules from the inside, the world's most ambitious peace project faces its existential reckoning. This is an investigation into whether the United Nations can survive the century it was built to shape.
There is a peculiar ritual that plays out in New York every autumn. The motorcades descend on Midtown Manhattan, the flags of 193 nations line First Avenue, and the world's leaders queue up to tell each other, with great solemnity, that they remain committed to a rules-based international order. Then they fly home and break the rules. The ritual is the United Nations General Assembly, and it captures, in miniature, the central paradox of the institution itself: an organization that is simultaneously indispensable and impotent, universally attended and increasingly ignored, never more needed and never more paralyzed.
The question of whether the UN has become irrelevant is not a new one, but it has sharpened dramatically as the organization marks its eightieth year. What was born in the wreckage of the Second World War — a bold wager that nations could resolve their differences through speech rather than slaughter — now finds itself caught between a paralyzing power struggle at its Security Council, a historic funding crisis triggered by American retreat, and the rising ambition of China to rewrite the institution's values from the inside. The question is no longer whether the UN is perfect. It is whether it is functional enough to survive — and functional enough to matter.
To understand how we got here, you need to go back to the architecture of 1945, when five victorious powers — the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China — granted themselves permanent seats on the Security Council, each with the power to veto any resolution they disliked. The logic was ruthlessly practical: without the great powers on board, the organization would be toothless; with them included but given no special status, they simply wouldn't join. The veto was a founding compromise, a bribe dressed up as a principle. For eighty years it has both sustained the UN and corroded it, because the same powers that guarantee the organization's relevance can also guarantee its paralysis whenever their interests are at stake.
That paralysis has rarely been as visible or as lethal as it was in 2024 and 2025. When Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the Security Council became a theater of diplomatic futility. The United States vetoed four ceasefire proposals before finally allowing Resolution 2728 to pass in March 2024 — 171 days into the assault, by which point over 10,000 people had already been killed. Israel's immediate response was to announce it would ignore the resolution entirely, secure in the knowledge that Washington would shield it from consequences. Russia, meanwhile, used its veto to block action on Ukraine, on North Korea sanctions monitoring, and on Sudan, demonstrating with forensic precision how permanent membership can be weaponized to place an aggressor beyond accountability.
The raw statistics are staggering. According to the Security Council Report, 2024 saw the highest number of vetoed draft resolutions since 1986. In 2025, the Council adopted only 44 resolutions — the lowest count since 1991 — as deep divisions prevented meaningful responses to Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine. The body charged by the UN Charter with primary responsibility for international peace and security is, by measurable output, producing the worst results in a generation. Meanwhile the world is experiencing more armed conflicts than at any time since World War II. The mismatch between mandate and performance has never been so stark, or so costly in human lives.
The structural problem goes beyond the veto. The Security Council's permanent membership reflects the world of 1945, not the world of 2026. Africa — a continent of 1.4 billion people — holds no permanent seat. Latin America, with another 650 million, is similarly excluded. India, the world's most populous democracy and a rising global power, sits outside the inner circle while former colonial powers France and Britain retain permanent status. As CIVICUS has noted, the permanent members represent a shrinking and increasingly unrepresentative minority of the world's people, yet they hold a monopoly on the Council's most consequential power. The global south's exclusion is not merely an affront to fairness — it is a direct cause of the institution's legitimacy deficit, particularly among the younger, faster-growing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose cooperation the UN needs most desperately.
Reform has been debated for decades with almost nothing to show for it. The catch-22 is almost beautiful in its cruelty: amending the UN Charter requires a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly and ratification by two-thirds of member states including all five permanent members. In other words, the same powers whose veto paralyzes the institution can veto the reform that would fix it. Kofi Annan tried in 2003 with a High-Level Panel on reform. Nothing came of it. Successive secretaries-general have floated proposals, convened committees, and issued reports. The September 2024 Pact for the Future, agreed by world leaders through negotiations led by Germany and Namibia, committed member states to developing a consolidated Security Council reform model — progress, but progress without a timeline or enforcement mechanism. In March 2025, Secretary-General António Guterres launched UN80, a major reform initiative aimed at making the organization more effective, cost-efficient, and responsive. It builds on the UN 2.0 modernization agenda, which focuses on harnessing innovation, data, and digital tools. Whether these efforts produce structural change or simply more elegant paperwork remains to be seen.
Into this already turbulent picture stepped Donald Trump, whose second administration has delivered the most dramatic blow to UN financing and political cohesion in the organization's history. Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Human Rights Council, UNESCO, and ultimately signed a memorandum directing withdrawal from 66 separate international organizations and UN entities. The White House framed these bodies as "redundant, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run." The real motivation was ideological: most of the targeted agencies focus on climate, labor, migration, reproductive health, and diversity — themes that the Trump administration has relabeled as costly "woke" initiatives contrary to American sovereignty.
The financial consequences have been severe. The UN's total revenue already fell from $74.3 billion in 2022 to $67.6 billion in 2023. The organization faces a $2.4 billion funding gap in 2025. With Washington withholding assessed contributions, the risk grows that accumulated US arrears will trigger suspension of American voting rights in the General Assembly under Article 19 of the Charter — a constitutional crisis the organization has never faced from its largest historical donor. European states, ordinarily the backstop for American disengagement, have found themselves unable to fill the gap; defense budgets have ballooned in response to Russia's war in Ukraine, and several governments including the UK and the Netherlands have made further cuts to aid budgets. The multilateral system is being squeezed from every direction simultaneously.
The strategic beneficiary of all this is China, and Beijing knows it. As China has pledged $500 million to the WHO — stepping in as the largest donor after Washington's exit — Beijing has made unmistakably clear that it intends to shape global health governance in America's absence. China has systematically expanded its footprint across UN agencies over the past decade, placing its nationals in leadership roles across the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and others. According to the 2025 Chicago Council survey, 68% of Chinese citizens say China's participation in the UN has been very important for influencing global policies, and 77% believe China should be more willing to make decisions within the UN framework — even when it requires compromise. That public confidence reflects a deliberate government strategy of institutional capture rather than institutional withdrawal.
The character of a Chinese-led multilateral order, however, would differ fundamentally from the values-based architecture the West constructed after 1945. China consistently prioritizes absolute state sovereignty and non-interference over universal human rights. It regards civil society scrutiny with hostility. After the United States halted engagement with the Human Rights Council in February 2025, China and Russia moved quickly within UN bodies to push language that relativizes human rights as culturally contingent rather than universal — a philosophical shift with enormous practical consequences for dissidents, minorities, and activists across dozens of countries. As Foreign Policy has warned, liberal beliefs threaded into the UN's founding may not just fray under these conditions — they could be actively rewoven along illiberal and authoritarian patterns. The organization that survives an American exit may be structurally intact but philosophically transformed, its universal language hollowed out into a tool of great-power legitimation.
The deepest irony in all of this is that beneath the broken politics, the UN's operational machine continues to deliver extraordinary humanitarian results that no bilateral or regional alternative could replicate at the same scale. In 2024, UNICEF delivered over 1.5 billion polio vaccine doses to 87 countries, contributing to a nearly 25% reduction in global polio cases between 2023 and 2024. It reached 251 million children under five with early detection services for wasting and malnutrition, treated 9.3 million children for severe acute malnutrition, provided education access for 26 million out-of-school children, and delivered mental health and psychosocial support to 22.3 million children — all across 104 countries experiencing active emergencies. The World Food Programme fed tens of millions in Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, and the Sahel. The UNHCR managed the largest displacement crisis in recorded human history, with over 120 million people forcibly displaced globally. These are not small achievements dressed up in statistics. They represent the difference between life and death for tens of millions of the most vulnerable human beings on earth.
UN peacekeeping, for all its imperfections, still operates in some of the world's most ungovernable places. The current 2024–2025 peacekeeping budget stands at $5.59 billion — modest by comparison to a single American aircraft carrier group. Operations have been forced to withdraw from Mali and Sudan under pressure from military juntas that preferred no international oversight at all, and recent deployments in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been scaled back. But the peacekeeping infrastructure — the logistics, the doctrine, the rapid-deployment capacity — represents something no alternative institution currently offers. The last time a major new peacekeeping operation was deployed was to the Central African Republic in 2014, a retreat that partly reflects the Security Council's political gridlock. The machinery exists; the political will to use it does not.
The tension between the UN's operational relevance and its political dysfunction is perhaps most visible in the climate domain. Successive secretaries-general have used the annual General Assembly season to host climate gatherings alongside the main session. The UNFCCC process, now abandoned by the United States, remains the only genuinely universal mechanism for coordinating the world's response to carbon emissions. There is no Plan B. No regional body, no bilateral treaty framework, no multilateral trade arrangement encompasses enough of the world's major emitters to substitute for it. The American withdrawal does not make the climate crisis less real; it simply makes the global response to it structurally weaker at the precise moment that emissions trajectories demand the opposite. The UN's role on climate in 2025 and beyond is, as the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has noted, "an important test" — one that the Trump administration has effectively decided to fail on behalf of the rest of the world.
One new and deeply disturbing challenge to the UN's centrality in peace and security has emerged from an unexpected quarter. In late 2025, the Trump administration launched the so-called Board of Peace — initially conceived as a temporary body under Security Council Resolution 2803 to govern Gaza — which has since mutated into something approaching a permanent rival institution. Trump chairs it with sweeping personal authority: sole power to appoint and dismiss members, veto decisions, issue resolutions, and set agendas. Its membership is skewed toward authoritarian regimes including Belarus, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, while democratic states including France and the UK have broadly declined invitations. Human rights do not appear in its draft charter. The Board of Peace is not merely an alternative venue for diplomacy; it is a rival conception of world order — one in which power is exercised through personal authority and selective membership rather than universal law and collective legitimacy. Its emergence represents the most direct challenge to the UN system since the organization's founding.
What, then, are we left with? The answers depend heavily on which part of the UN you are looking at. The Security Council is, in its current form, approaching functional obsolescence on the issues that matter most — it cannot stop wars between or within states when a permanent member has interests at stake, which is precisely when the wars tend to be most dangerous. The Sustainable Development Goals are off track, with over a third stagnating or regressing. The Council on Foreign Relations describes the organization as facing "a convergence of crises that threaten its effectiveness and relevance." The peacekeeping apparatus is contracting. The financial situation is precarious and worsening. The values architecture — human rights, universal norms, multilateral accountability — is under ideological assault from within.
And yet. Most publics in the 25-nation 2025 Pew Global Attitudes Survey hold net-positive views of the United Nations. Nations including South Africa, Nigeria, and Germany have seen favorable views of the organization rise over the past year. The UN remains the only institution on earth that brings nearly every government in the world into the same room, bound by the same charter, subject — however imperfectly — to the same principles. There is no existing alternative. The African Union has neither the budget nor the authority. Regional bodies like ASEAN are built on non-interference as a founding principle. NATO is a military alliance, not a peace architecture. The G20 has no charter, no legal standing, and no mechanism for accountability. If the UN did not exist, the world would need to invent something very like it — probably under worse conditions and with fewer of the norms and institutions that have accumulated over eight decades.
This distinction — between the UN failing and member states failing the UN — is the one most consistently made by the institution's most thoughtful defenders. The General Assembly President said as much in a recent Euronews interview: "Unfortunately, in these times, member states do not all take up their responsibility, but even use their veto rights to defend the breach of international law." The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of another state. Russia has breached it in Ukraine. The Charter demands respect for Security Council resolutions. Israel has defied them. The Charter's human rights provisions are among the most foundational documents in modern international law. They are violated daily by member states who sign onto them in September and shred them the rest of the year. The problem is not the machinery — it is the drivers.
The reform agenda is real, even if its prospects are uncertain. The Pact for the Future commits member states to meaningful Security Council reform for the first time in a substantive, intergovernmentally negotiated document. The UN80 initiative is the most ambitious restructuring effort since the organization's founding — proposing to consolidate overlapping agencies, shift functions away from expensive cities like New York and Geneva, mandate staff reductions, and harness innovation and behavioral science for better delivery. The 2025 Peacebuilding Architecture Review provides an opportunity to bridge the peacekeeping-peacebuilding divide that has hamstrung UN peace operations for two decades. Proposals on the table include merging the Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, adopting a more flexible and adaptive approach to deployments, and expanding the voice of non-state actors and civil society in Security Council deliberations.
The veto is the hardest nut to crack. The France-Mexico initiative, backed by over 100 states, would have permanent members voluntarily pledge to refrain from using the veto in cases of mass atrocities. The ACT Code of Conduct makes similar commitments. Neither is binding, and neither the United States nor Russia has signed on. But political commitments, even voluntary ones, can create accountability pressure over time. The 2022 veto initiative, which requires the General Assembly to convene following every use of the veto, has already made the political cost of vetoing more visible. When Russia blocks accountability for its own war of aggression, it must now do so in front of every UN member state immediately afterwards. That is not nothing. Public shame is not a sanction, but it is a form of pressure that accumulates.
The deeper question facing the international community is not whether to reform the UN — everyone agrees reform is necessary — but whether the political will exists to do so before the institution's credibility erodes past the point of recovery. Secretary-General Guterres's phrase, "reform or rupture," has acquired new urgency in a world where the United States is building parallel institutions, China is colonizing existing ones, Russia is weaponizing the veto to protect its wars, and the Global South is demanding a seat at a table it helped build but has never been fully admitted to. The window for meaningful reform is not permanently open. Every year that the Security Council fails on Gaza or Ukraine, every year that a ceasefire resolution arrives 171 days too late, every year that the funding gap widens and the peacekeeping budget shrinks, the institution's moral authority diminishes and the argument for bypassing it entirely grows stronger.
What the UN needs, urgently, is a coalition of the genuinely committed — not the transactional multilateralism of states that use the institution when convenient and ignore it when costly, but a sustained political investment in the architecture of cooperation that has, for all its failures, helped prevent a third world war for eighty years. That coalition will need to come from unexpected places: the emerging democracies of the Indo-Pacific, the increasingly assertive regional powers of Africa and Latin America, the smaller European states that have more to gain from rules-based order than any great power. It will need to demand Security Council reform loud enough that the permanent members can no longer plausibly pretend the status quo is acceptable. And it will need to provide the financial and political support that the UN system requires to function while the reform debate unfolds.
The United Nations is not irrelevant. It is the only institution capable of being relevant at the scale that twenty-first century challenges demand. Climate change does not stop at the borders of the Security Council's jurisdiction. Pandemic viruses are not deterred by bilateral treaties. Artificial intelligence governance cannot be managed by any single state or regional bloc. The very crises that make the world most ungovernable are precisely the ones that require the kind of universal, rules-based coordination that only the UN system — for all its dysfunction — is structurally positioned to provide. The argument for giving up on it is an argument for a world governed by the logic of raw power: one where the strong dominate the weak, where norms are enforced only when convenient, and where the safety net beneath billions of the world's most vulnerable people is simply cut away.
The UN was born from catastrophe. It may yet need another catastrophe to be reborn. But the alternative — the slow, bureaucratic, underfunded, paralyzed, politically-abused, vetoed-to-near-death organization on First Avenue — remains, for now, the only thing standing between the world we have and the world we fear. Declaring it irrelevant is easy. Replacing it is something no one has yet managed to do.
Sources for this article include the Security Council Report, the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Foreign Policy, IPI Global Observatory, CIVICUS, UNICEF, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, IPS News, and original UN documentation. Statistical data is drawn from official UN reports, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, and peer-reviewed analysis published in the Michigan Journal of International Law. All links are to primary or authoritative secondary sources.
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