Speaking at Harvard in late September,
2024, Noeleen Heyzer, a former undersecretary and later a special envoy of the UN, related the need for
multilateral governance internationally to the need for the UN to evolve. The
UN Charter created a system in which both large and small nations would be held
accountable to international law in a rule-based order. This would protect
the weak from the strong, but the Security Council had long been dominated by the veto-wielding powerful countries, so the UN has been unable to end wars.
The UN had become, according to Heyzer, “severely weakened.” “The strong do what they
can and the weak suffer what they must," she explained. Peaceful coexistence that rectifies
power imbalances was at the time decimated in Ukraine and Gaza. National vetoes in the Security Council were inflicting
much damage in this regard. The implications for the UN, she
admitted to me after her talk, are not at all good even concerning whether the international
organization can even reform itself sufficiently to rise above being an abject failure.
The full essay is at "International Multilateralism: The United Nations."
