The United Nations: Equal Nations, Unequal Power

There is a sentence buried near the beginning of the United Nations Charter that may explain everything that has happened to the organization since 1945.

“The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

It is difficult to imagine a clearer statement

Every nation is sovereign. Every nation is equal.

Except the great powers did not design The United Nations to function that way.

At almost the same moment the Charter announced the equality of nations, it created a Security Council in which five countries would possess permanent seats and extraordinary authority over everyone else. Those five—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China—would have something no other nation possessed: the ability to stop the most powerful body in the United Nations from acting simply by saying no.

The veto.

There, in the architecture of the institution itself, was the contradiction.

The United Nations was founded on a promise it never fully kept because it was built on a compromise it could never escape.

The principle was equality. The operating system was power.

That was not an accident, an oversight or something discovered years later when the bureaucracy got out of hand. It was present at the creation.

And it may be the most important fact to understand about the United Nations.

The organization has spent more than eighty years attempting to reconcile two competing ideas: that international law should apply equally to nations, and that the world’s most powerful nations will never surrender the privileges that come with being powerful.

Sometimes the UN has narrowed that distance. Sometimes it has performed extraordinary work. Sometimes individual men and women carrying the blue emblem have displayed extraordinary courage, intelligence and compassion far beyond anything visible in the speeches delivered in New York.

And sometimes the distance between the promise and the reality has swallowed entire countries.

That is the story worth telling. Not whether the United Nations is “good” or “bad.”

That question is too easy.

The question, the real question Dr. Gary Kelkner poses, is whether an institution created to restrain power can ever escape the power arrangements that created it.

Before the UN, There Was a Graveyard

The United Nations was not humankind’s first attempt at this. That distinction belonged to the League of Nations.

The League emerged from the wreckage of the First World War, when a generation that had watched Europe convert itself into a slaughterhouse became convinced that diplomacy had to be institutionalized before the next catastrophe arrived.

President Woodrow Wilson became the great American evangelist of the crusade.

The logic seemed reasonable.

Nations went to war partly because they operated in an international system without a sufficiently powerful forum for resolving disputes. Create that forum. Establish rules. Make aggression a concern not simply of the victim but of the international community. Give nations somewhere to go before they send armies across borders.

There was only one problem. The United States never joined.

Wilson helped build the house and could not persuade his own country to move in.

The League continued without America. It settled some disputes and performed useful technical and humanitarian work. But when international politics became truly dangerous, its limitations became devastatingly clear. But without America it never had a chance.

Japan invaded Manchuria. Italy invaded Ethiopia. Germany abandoned the restrictions imposed after World War I, rebuilt its military and devoured Europe.

The League could condemn. It could investigate. It could issue reports.

What it could not do was stop an aggressor.

A rule is not the same thing as the ability to enforce a rule.

By 1939, Adolf Hitler had supplied the world with the most brutal possible demonstration as Nazi Germany swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia without firing a shot.

Then came World War II.

Bombing rads reduced cities to piles of smoldering ruins Industrialized murder produced the Holocaust. Armies crossed continents. Tens of millions died. The war ended only after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, introducing a weapon capable not simply of winning the next war but potentially ending civilization.

The architects of the postwar order did not have the luxury of theoretical discussion. They had just watched the alternative.

The United Nations was born not from optimism but from terror.

The Victors Design a World

This is where the United Nations becomes interesting.

We often describe its creation as though the nations of the world gathered after World War II, reflected upon the tragedy and collectively designed a better international system.

Not quite.

The victors designed the new world.

Franklin Roosevelt had been thinking about the postwar order long before the war ended. The term “United Nations” itself was Roosevelt’s. Planning developed through wartime conferences involving the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China, followed by the Dumbarton Oaks discussions and the Yalta Conference.

By the time delegates from fifty countries assembled in San Francisco in April 1945, the essential architecture had already been negotiated. The Charter was signed by those fifty nations in June; Poland signed later and became one of the original 51 members. The organization formally came into existence on October 24, 1945.

The men designing the system had learned something from the League of Nations. A world organization without the great powers would be irrelevant. So, they made certain the great powers would remain inside.

But there was a price. The United States, Soviet Union, Britain, China and France received permanent seats on the Security Council.

And the veto.

This was the bargain.

The new organization would proclaim principles larger than any individual nation while giving the strongest nations protection from having those principles imposed upon them against their will.

Article 2 states that the organization rests on the “sovereign equality” of its members. Article 27, however, gives the permanent members of the Security Council a unique capacity to prevent substantive Council action.

Read those two provisions together and the central tension of the United Nations appears almost immediately.

Every country is equal. Five are more equal than the others.

Cynical? Perhaps. But there was also a cold realism behind it.

Would Stalin have placed the Soviet Union inside an international organization capable of authorizing action against Moscow over Soviet objections? Of course not. Would the United States Senate have accepted an organization capable of sending the world against the United States without American consent? Certainly not.

The veto was not a corruption of the system added later. It was the admission price charged by power. And without those powers, the founders knew that they would simply have created another League of Nations.

So the United Nations began life carrying its own contradiction in its pocket.

Idealism made the organization worth creating. Realism made its creation possible.

The struggle between them has never ended.

The Room Where Everyone Gets a Microphone

If the Security Council institutionalized inequality, the General Assembly did something nearly revolutionary in the opposite direction.

It gave countries a seat at the table.

That sounds trivial until we remember how international affairs had traditionally been conducted.

For centuries, empires decided. Great powers negotiated. Colonial peoples were discussed and never consulted. The international table was small, and most of humanity was not invited to sit at it.

Then the world changed.

The United Nations began with 51 members. Today there are 193.  That expansion is one of the great geopolitical stories of the twentieth century.

Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and eventually the remnants of European empire elsewhere, colonies became countries. Flags appeared where colonial administrators had once ruled. Newly independent states suddenly possessed something their populations had rarely enjoyed internationally:

A vote.

Not much military power. Little economic power. But a vote. And votes accumulate.

The General Assembly gradually became a place where countries Europe had once governed could challenge Europe, where African nations could organize as a bloc, where Latin American states could resist Washington, and where small countries whose populations might fit inside a large American city could stand at a podium and address the world.

The General Assembly cannot command nations the way the Security Council can. But it can confer legitimacy. It can foster coalitions. It creates a forum for discussion.

The institution created primarily by the victors of World War II gradually filled with countries that had not been independent when those victors drew the blueprint.

The building stayed essentially the same. The neighborhood changed completely. And the new occupants began asking an obvious question:

Why should the political order of 1945 determine who holds permanent power forever?

Five Chairs Frozen in 1945

Imagine designing the international order today.

Would the five permanent members of its most powerful council automatically be the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China?

One cannot conceive of a reason to award the British and the French that kind of power today.

India has more than a billion people and no permanent seat. Africa has 54 UN member states and no permanent African seat. Latin America has none. Japan and Germany—two of the world’s most important economic powers—remain outside the permanent five.

Yet France and Britain retain seats partly because of the world that existed when Hitler had just been defeated.

This is the peculiar nature of institutions. Temporary arrangements become traditions. Traditions become entitlements. Entitlements become nearly impossible to remove.

The Security Council has expanded since 1945, adding more elected members, but the permanent structure remains. The five still possess the veto. A negative vote by any one of them can stop a substantive Security Council resolution from being adopted.

That means the organization responsible for maintaining international peace is often least capable of acting when one of the world’s most powerful countries—or an important ally of one of those countries—is involved.

This is not hypocrisy. It was a necessary accommodation to get the major powers to participate.

The UN does not merely suffer from geopolitics. Geopolitics is built into its constitution. And that explains why the organization can appear astonishingly powerful in one crisis and almost theatrically helpless in another.

The difference is not the severity of the suffering.

The difference is whose interests are involved.

Korea: The Moment the Machine Actually Moved

The Korean War provides one of the strangest examples of the system working precisely because one of the permanent powers was temporarily out of the room.

In June 1950, North Korean forces invaded South Korea.

Normally, Soviet opposition might have prevented decisive Security Council action. But the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council over the question of which Chinese government should hold China’s UN seat.

Moscow’s absence meant it could not cast its veto.

The Security Council condemned the invasion and ultimately authorized military assistance under United Nations auspices. A multinational force, overwhelmingly American in combat strength, fought beneath the UN flag.

For a brief moment, the collective-security mechanism envisioned in 1945 appeared to work.

Aggression occurred. The Council acted. Force answered force.

But there was an irony almost too perfect to invent.

The system worked because one of the countries given the power to stop it had failed to show up.

The Soviets did not repeat the mistake. The lesson was obvious. The veto only protects you when you are in the room to use it.

Korea therefore demonstrated both the potential of the United Nations and the limitations. The institution could act decisively when the great powers aligned—or when one accidentally got out of the way. When they did not, another system emerged.

The Cold War Moves into the Building

For the next four decades, the United Nations became one of the stages upon which the rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union played out.

Washington and Moscow competed everywhere. Europe. Asia. Africa. Latin America. The Middle East. Space. Nuclear arsenals. Foreign aid. Propaganda. Proxy wars.

And the United Nations.

Speeches became theater.

Nikita Khrushchev understood that very well.

His famous confrontation at the United Nations in 1960—remembered in popular culture through the image of the Soviet leader pounding his shoe on a desk—captured something about the institution that remains true. The UN is partly government. Partly diplomatic marketplace. Partly courtroom.

And partly Broadway.

Leaders speak there not only to one another but past one another, to audiences at home and abroad.

Sometimes the speech is the action. Sometimes outrage becomes policy. Sometimes it is simply performance. But performance should not be dismissed. International politics depends heavily on legitimacy, and legitimacy is created partly through public argument.

A government wants more than to win. It wants the world to believe it was entitled to win.

The United Nations became the arena where that argument could be made.

Then the Colonies Walked In

While Washington and Moscow glared at each other across the Cold War, another revolution was transforming the institution.

Decolonization.

This may be one of the most important changes in the UN’s history because it altered who could define international consensus.

In 1945, enormous portions of Africa and Asia remained under colonial rule. Over the following decades, independence movements dismantled much of the European imperial system. Ghana became independent in 1957. Nigeria in 1960. Dozens followed.

Newly independent nations created the Organization of African Unity in 1963, and its successor, the African Union, would eventually represent a continent of independent states increasingly determined to negotiate with the world collectively rather than as former colonial possessions.

As these countries entered the United Nations, arithmetic began reshaping diplomacy.

One country, one General Assembly vote.

The United States had one. The Soviet Union had one. Ghana had one. Kenya had one. Senegal had one. Brazil had one. Tiny island states had one.

The equality promised in the Charter suddenly acquired political consequences.

It allowed countries with little individual leverage to create collective leverage.

And that is why Africa matters enormously to any serious discussion of the future of the United Nations. Africa is not simply a region awaiting decisions made elsewhere. Collectively, African nations constitute one of the largest voting blocs in the institution.

The countries once excluded from designing the system now possess significant power over its political legitimacy. They may not have a permanent Security Council seat. But they are no longer spectators.

That imbalance cannot remain intellectually invisible forever.

The United Nations of 1945 was built for the world after World War II. The United Nations of the twenty-first century must operate in a world where the populations, economies and ambitions of Asia, Africa and Latin America have transformed the distribution of influence.

The furniture has not caught up with the guests.

The Blue Helmet Problem

No image is more closely associated with the United Nations than the blue helmet.

It is also one of the most misunderstood.

People often speak of UN peacekeepers as though the United Nations possesses an army.

It does not. Member nations provide troops. Member nations provide equipment. Member nations determine how much risk they are willing to accept. Mandates are negotiated. Rules of engagement matter. Political support matters. Money matters.

And above all, political will matters.

The UN frequently arrives in places where there is no peace to keep, carrying a mandate written by governments thousands of miles from the danger. A peacekeeper may stand between armed groups while lacking legal authority to force either side to stop. The world sees the blue helmet and assumes international power has arrived.

Sometimes what has actually arrived is international permission to observe.

There is a terrible difference.

Nowhere was that more devastating than Rwanda.

Rwanda: When the World Was Watching

In 1994, Rwanda descended into genocide.

Over roughly one hundred days, approximately 800,000 people were killed, overwhelmingly Tutsi along with moderate Hutu and others who resisted the extermination campaign.

There were UN personnel in Rwanda. There were warnings. There was information. There were human beings asking for help.

Yet the international system failed catastrophically. UN peacekeepers stood inert while men, women and children were butchered before their eyes, literally.

Years later, an independent UN inquiry reached an unusually severe conclusion: the failure to prevent and stop the genocide was a failure of the United Nations system as a whole. It identified a lack of resources and, more importantly, a persistent lack of political will. The Security Council even reduced the mission after the killing had begun.

Consider what that means.

The problem was not that humanity lacked an institution designed to prevent catastrophe. The institution existed.

The problem was that an institution did not empower the peacekeepers to do what they were commissioned to do.

People must decide to act through it. Governments must provide troops, accept risk, spend money. And decide that the death of people far away matters enough to become their problem. A Charter and a blue flag cannot make that decision. Political will is the oxygen of international institutions. Without it, even beautifully written principles suffocate.

Rwanda remains among the most haunting examples because it strips away the comforting belief that creating an organization is the same thing as creating a conscience.

It is not.

The United Nations You Rarely See on Television

And yet this is where criticism of the UN can become too easy.

Because the Security Council is not the entire United Nations. Neither is the General Assembly. Neither are the motorcades, speeches, receptions, diplomatic quarrels or famous green-marble podium.

Far from headquarters, a different United Nations exists.

It vaccinates children. It feeds refugees, coordinates emergency relief after disasters, monitors elections, supports maternal health and negotiates access to villages most of the world cannot locate on a map. Organizations including UNICEF, the World Food Programme, UNHCR and numerous other agencies and programs perform work that rarely produces dramatic geopolitical headlines.

There is no veto involved in delivering a vaccine.

And this is where Dr. Gary Kellner’s own experience informs the story.

Kellner is not inclined toward institutional romance.

His experience with large bureaucracies has made him deeply suspicious of organizations that confuse process with accomplishment. He has watched international institutions become preoccupied with reports, procedures and conferences while people on the ground continue waiting for something tangible to happen.

But experience also taught him not to confuse the institution with every person working inside it.

That distinction matters.

A Woman in Ukraine

During the first phase of the Ukraine conflict in 2014 and 2015, Kellner worked with a UN official coordinating efforts on the ground.

Her name is less important here than how he remembers her.

She was practical. Compassionate. She understood the people with whom she was working. She knew what could actually be accomplished, and she facilitated it.

And Kellner and his team loved working with her.

That is significant precisely because it comes from someone willing to criticize the organization she represented. At headquarters, Kellner sees bureaucracy. In the field, he encountered competence.

The contradiction is worth examining.

Large institutions are frequently judged by their leadership while their most valuable work is performed far from the leadership.

A vaccination campaign does not look like the General Assembly. A field officer attempting to get medicine through a checkpoint does not look like diplomatic theater in New York. But to the person who receives the medicine, that is the only part of the United Nations that matters.

This is why declaring the UN either a triumph or a failure is intellectually lazy.

It is several things at once. It can be bureaucratic and indispensable. Cowardly in one crisis and courageous in another. Politically paralyzed in New York while remarkably effective in a village.

The contradiction at its founding reproduces itself throughout the institution.

Principles at the top. Reality on the ground.

Ukraine and the Return of the Original Question

Then Russia invaded Ukraine. And suddenly the founding question of the United Nations was no longer historical.

What happens when a powerful nation uses force against another sovereign country?

The Charter tells member states to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state.

But Russia is not merely a member of the United Nations. Russia occupies the permanent Security Council seat inherited from the Soviet Union.

Russia has the veto.

The country accused of violating one of the central principles of the Charter therefore possesses extraordinary power inside the body charged with maintaining international peace and security.

There is the 1945 contradiction, alive and breathing in the twenty-first century.

Equality meets power. And power still has a key to the building.

Kellner approaches Ukraine not as an abstract foreign-policy debate but through relationships accumulated over decades. He has worked in the country since the late 1990s, participated in the development of a Western-style graduate school and worked with leaders across Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim communities to deliver humanitarian aid to people displaced by Russian aggression.

For him, Ukraine is populated by people, not briefing papers. That makes institutional paralysis look different.

When international organizations debate mandates and resolutions, the people affected by those decisions do not experience “multilateral complexity.”

They experience time. Another day without protection. Another destroyed home. Another funeral.

International diplomacy moves at the speed of consensus.

War does not.

The Charter Cannot Climb Out of Its Frame

This may be the mistake when judging the United Nations.

We ask it to behave like a world government. It was never given that authority. It does not tax the world independently. It does not possess a sovereign army. Its power comes overwhelmingly from member states.

That means the UN often reflects the international system more accurately than we would like.

When nations cooperate, the United Nations can accomplish extraordinary things. When great powers agree, the Security Council can act. When donors provide resources, humanitarian operations can expand. When countries contribute troops and mandates, peacekeeping can matter. When nations refuse, the limitations become painfully visible.

We blame the mirror because we dislike the face in it.

But the United Nations is not separate from the world that created it.

It is the world—organized into committees, councils, agencies, votes, rules and procedure.

Its hypocrisy is our hypocrisy. Its indecision is the accumulated indecision of its members. Its courage comes from individual people acting inside a cumbersome system. Its failures begin when governments decide that somebody else’s catastrophe is not worth the price of intervention.

That does not excuse the UN.

Officials became insulated from consequences. Political interests overwhelmed principle. Corruption and scandal damaged the organization’s credibility.

But reform begins with understanding what the institution actually is. The United Nations was not designed to abolish power politics. It was designed to make power politics less catastrophic.

That is a smaller promise than world peace.

It may also be a more realistic one.

An Organization Built for Yesterday’s Winners

The larger question now is whether the United Nations can change quickly enough to remain credible.

The world of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin is gone.

China has transformed from a war-ravaged country into a global economic and military power. India has emerged as one of the most consequential nations on Earth. Africa’s population and geopolitical importance are rising. The Gulf states possess influence unimaginable in 1945. Global supply chains and technology allow countries once treated as peripheral to leapfrog stages of development.

And the great competition of this century will not look like the great competition of the last.

China is expanding trade and infrastructure relationships across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Russia seeks influence through security relationships and disruption. Europe remains economically important but carries less relative geopolitical weight than it did when the international architecture was constructed.

The United States remains powerful, yet it operates in a world increasingly resistant to American assumptions about what the international order should be.

Countries that were once expected to choose between Washington and Moscow—or later between Washington and Beijing—are learning that they can negotiate with several powers at once.

And they want options. Options create bargaining power. This matters inside the United Nations. Voting blocs once treated as supporting characters are becoming protagonists.

Africa will matter more. Latin America will matter more. India will matter more. The countries usually described as the Global South increasingly understand that great-power competition gives them leverage.

They ask why the rules written before many were independent remain the rules forever?

That question becomes hard to ignore.

Reform Has a Catch

There is broad agreement that the Security Council no longer reflects the modern distribution of population and power.

Agreement on what should replace it is much harder.

Give India a permanent seat? Then what about Pakistan? Give Japan a seat? What does China say? Germany? Brazil? Nigeria? South Africa?

An African permanent seat sounds reasonable until someone must decide which African country occupies it. Or should Africa receive more than one? Should new permanent members receive vetoes?

If they do, paralysis could increase. If they do not, have we merely created another class of unequal permanent members?

And here the original contradiction returns yet again. Reforming the system requires the cooperation of countries that benefit most from the existing system.

Power is being asked to vote against its own privilege.

History suggests we should not expect enthusiasm.

What Is the United Nations For?

Perhaps the answer is less glamorous than the founders imagined.

The United Nations has not ended war. It has not created equality among nations. It has not removed conquest, genocide, imperial ambition, terrorism, civil conflict, dictatorship or great-power rivalry from human behavior.

But imagine removing it.

Remove the room where 193 governments can speak directly or indirectly to one another. Remove the Security Council, flawed as it is. Remove the refugee agencies. Remove UNICEF. Remove food programs, election observers, peacekeepers, the international networks that respond when earthquakes famines and wars push millions of people across borders and remove the machinery through which adversaries who will not speak publicly can still communicate privately.

Then ask whether the world becomes safer.

The United Nations may be less like a world government than a pressure valve. Pressure valves do not eliminate all the heat. They eliminate enough to prevent the machine from exploding.

And in international affairs, sometimes enough can mean millions of people.

The Building and the People Inside It

Kellner’s experience leaves us with an important distinction.

Institutions tend to become abstractions. The United Nations. The government. The military. The Church.

We speak as though each has a single mind.

They do not. They contain people. Some imaginative. Some frightened. Some ambitious, corrupt, brave, or bureaucratic.

Some extraordinary.

The woman Kellner worked with in Ukraine did not resolve the contradiction in the UN Charter. She did something more immediate. She helped displaced people. Perhaps that is too modest an ambition for an organization founded after a world war.

Perhaps it is also the reason the institution survives.

Grand systems are judged by history. Human beings experience them one encounter at a time. A village threatened by violence does not care whether diplomatic language was elegantly negotiated.

It wants someone to arrive before the gunmen do.

This is where the United Nations is simultaneously most impressive and most vulnerable.

Its greatest ambitions depend upon governments. Its most human achievements depend upon individuals.

The Contradiction Is the Story

Maybe the United Nations should never have been described as the beginning of a new world.

It was the beginning of an argument about one. The argument is still underway. Can institutions save lives even while the political machinery above them is failing?

Rwanda tells us no.

Every competent humanitarian worker in the field tells us yes.

Can the United Nations be both deeply flawed and worth preserving? We may have no other choice. That is the tension established in San Francisco in 1945. The founders wanted a world governed by rules. They also knew that the strongest countries would not participate unless those countries remained stronger inside the system.

So they wrote equality into the Charter and inequality into the machinery. For eighty years, the institution has lived between those sentences.

That is not merely its weakness.

It is its biography.

Better to Talk Than to Shoot

After all the contradictions, contributions and criticisms, Dr. Kellner arrives at a conclusion that may surprise some people.

He does not believe the United Nations should be dissolved. He does not believe it should be ignored.

And he does not believe that its failures make the idea behind it irrelevant.

Quite the opposite.

He believes it should be held accountable.

Accountability is not abandonment it is action.

The Security Council should be challenged when power overwhelms principle. Bureaucracies should be exposed when process becomes more important than people. Member nations should be confronted when they invoke the Charter selectively, demanding international law for their adversaries while finding exceptions for themselves.

The United Nations should be judged against the promises it made.

But Kellner’s criticism stops short of wishing the institution away because the alternative is not some cleaner, more efficient international order.

The alternative is nations dealing with one another without even this imperfect table between them.

And history has shown us what that can look like.

The United Nations was created because governments that distrusted one another still needed somewhere to meet and talk. A room with a seat at the table.

That need has not disappeared.

Diplomacy can be tedious. It can become theater. Negotiations can drag on while people suffer. But talking keeps a door open that war closes very quickly.

There are moments when nations must act. There are aggressors who cannot be persuaded by another speech, another committee or another carefully drafted resolution. Kellner’s own experience in Africa and Ukraine leaves little room for romanticism on that point.

But even adversaries eventually need a channel through which to communicate.

Wars typically end at negotiating tables. Prisoner exchange is negotiated. Humanitarian corridors are negotiated. Ceasefires are negotiated.

Someone has to remain in the room.

That may ultimately be the most practical defense of the United Nations. Not that it has fulfilled the promise of 1945. Not that all nations are treated as equal or the institution has prevented war. It has not.

The case for the United Nations is smaller than that, and perhaps stronger because of it.

Keep the table. Keep the microphones. Keep the diplomats arguing. Keep the adversaries within reach of one another. Then demand more from the institution that brings them together.

Reform it. Challenge it. Expose its failures. Force it to answer for the distance between the equality written into its Charter and the inequality built into its structure.

But do not confuse disappointment with uselessness.

The United Nations does not have to save the world to justify its existence. Sometimes it may be enough that, when nations are furious with one another, there is still somewhere they can go before the armies move.

Dr. Kellner’s final judgment is therefore neither sentimental nor particularly complicated.

Hold the United Nations accountable. Make it better. Make it answer for what it claims to represent.

But keep people talking. Because in the affairs of nations,

It’s better to talk than to shoot.