The United Nations was created to preserve peace and protect human rights. Eighty-one years later, wars rage, dictatorships sit in judgement of democracies, and the organisation increasingly seeks influence over decisions once made by sovereign nations. Perhaps it is time to ask a simple question: what is the UN actually for?
A Strange Gathering of Nations
The latest United Nations General Assembly again demonstrated the contradictions at the heart of the organisation.
Donald Trump delivered a characteristically blunt attack on the UN and international institutions. Argentina's Javier Milei challenged the growth of supranational government and defended national sovereignty and individual liberty.
Others defended the institution. Emmanuel Macron declared:
“More than ever, we need our United Nations.”
Secretary-General António Guterres called for greater international cooperation while simultaneously acknowledging the need for substantial UN reform.
But behind the speeches lies a more fundamental problem.
The UN is supposed to represent the nations of the world.
It does.
It does not, however, represent the democratic peoples of the world.
Dictators and Democracies Get the Same Vote
The General Assembly has 193 members.
Australia gets one vote.
So does North Korea.
Canada gets one vote.
So does Iran.
Governments chosen in free elections sit alongside regimes that imprison political opponents, suppress free speech and deny their citizens the elementary democratic rights supposedly championed by the United Nations.
The Security Council is hardly more democratic.
Five nations—the United States, China, Russia, France and Britain—hold permanent seats and veto powers inherited from the settlement following World War II.
Russia can veto action affecting Russia. China can block measures contrary to China's interests. America can do the same.
This isn't a malfunction.
It is the system.
And the Wars Continue
The UN Charter begins with the ambition to:
“save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.
How is that going?
Ukraine. Gaza. Sudan. Myanmar. Repeated conflicts across Africa and the Middle East.
The UN distributes food, assists refugees, vaccinates children and operates peacekeeping missions. These are valuable achievements and should not be dismissed.
But providing humanitarian assistance after war begins is not the same thing as fulfilling the organisation's central mission of preserving international peace.
When powerful countries or determined armed groups choose war, the United Nations repeatedly demonstrates how little power it actually possesses to stop them.
Israel: The Double Standard
Perhaps nowhere is the UN's political imbalance more obvious than in its treatment of Israel.
Israel is not beyond criticism. No democracy should be.
But criticism should be proportionate and standards should be applied consistently.
They plainly are not.
In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 17 resolutions focused on Israel and seven concerning all other countries combined. In 2025, the comparable figures were 15 and 11.
Consider what that means.
The world includes North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Sudan, Myanmar and numerous governments with appalling human-rights records.
Yet one tiny democracy receives extraordinary and continuing institutional attention.
The Gaza war has made that imbalance even more obvious.
Israel did not begin the war on October 7. Hamas crossed the border, murdered civilians, took hostages and then fought from within one of the most densely populated urban environments on Earth.
Israel's military response has caused enormous destruction and civilian suffering. That deserves scrutiny.
But so does the extraordinary problem Israel faced: fighting an enemy embedded among civilians.
Israel has used evacuation orders, telephone calls, text messages, leaflets and other warnings intended to move civilians away from military targets. Whether those precautions were adequate in particular attacks is legitimately debated, but their existence is rarely prominent in the sweeping accusations heard from the UN podium.
Nor is Israel routinely judged against the conduct of other nations fighting comparable wars.
Instead we repeatedly hear some of the world's least democratic governments passing judgement upon one of the Middle East's few democracies.
That is the deeper problem.
The UN's moral authority depends upon consistent standards.
If similar conduct produces outrage when committed by one country and relative silence when committed by another, the institution ceases to look like an impartial defender of human rights.
It begins to look like politics conducted by majority vote.
Mission Creep
There is another problem.
The UN of 1945 was primarily about peace and cooperation between sovereign states.
Today's UN reaches into climate policy, migration, health, development, gender policy, internet governance and now artificial intelligence.
International cooperation in these areas can be useful.
But there is a legitimate democratic question:
How much influence should institutions that voters cannot remove have over policies decided by governments that voters can?
Large countries can ignore international pressure when it suits them.
Smaller countries often cannot.
The gradual transfer of authority from national parliaments towards international agreements, conventions and bureaucracies therefore deserves considerably more scrutiny than it receives.
So What Do We Do Instead?
Simply abolishing the United Nations would solve little.
China would still be China. Russia would still be Russia. Iran would still be Iran.
And the world would lose useful mechanisms for diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, aviation, shipping, telecommunications and disease control.
Perhaps the mistake is assuming there can be only one international organisation.
Why shouldn't democratic nations create another?
Imagine an international organisation whose membership required free elections, freedom of speech, independent courts, rule of law and peaceful transfers of power.
Countries abandoning those principles could lose membership.
The UN could remain the forum where everybody talks.
A United Democracies could become the organisation through which free countries cooperate and act.
What Is the UN For?
The United Nations is not useless.
That would be too simple.
The more uncomfortable conclusion is that an institution can do many useful things while failing at the purpose for which it was principally created.
Eighty-one years after its creation, wars continue, authoritarian governments help determine the UN's human-rights agenda, great powers veto action against themselves and the organisation's ambitions extend ever further into matters traditionally decided by sovereign governments.
Trump and Milei expressed their criticisms with unusual bluntness.
But behind the rhetoric lies a question worth asking.
If the United Nations cannot reliably defend peace, freedom or consistent standards of human rights, perhaps the world's democracies need an institution that can.
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