Besides its humanitarian work,
the UN can boast of providing a situs in which officials of national
governments can talk to and with each other. The best opportunity for in-person
speeches and conversations annually is during the opening of the General
Assembly. Even granting there being value to such communicating. the UN was not
founded for this purpose; rather, it was founded to end war, and neither
speeches nor in-person meetings, typically not directly between warring nations,
so obviously have failed to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s
occupation and genocide that may even be reckoned as another holocaust. All
this aggression has come with impunity, and in this regard, the UN has failed. Even
a UN official’s attempt to defend the international organization during the 2025
session of the General Assembly was weak. At the very least, the UN needed to
hire some public relations firms, but even a patina of efficacy only goes so
far. The staying power of such an institution is itself, I submit, a problem in
that organizations tend not to get “the memo” on when it is time (and even past
time) to close up and urge that another, different organization be
established.
The full essay is at "The United Nations."
