Celebrated journalist Anne O’ Hare McCormick once remarked that
“Today the real test of power is not the capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it.” The United Nations on 24th October 1945 came into being for the aforementioned purpose of preventing war and pledged in its Preamble to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” However, it is evident that the UN has failed in its mission. Several wars fought since its inception like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American invasion of Iraq have given a deadly blow to the credibility of this world organization. Therefore to answer the question head on, undoubtedly global institutions are ineffective in addressing contemporary challenges to peace and security.

In the post-World War II era, the UN had pledged to protect small nations from being exploited by the big and powerful nations but unfortunately, it failed to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a battleground for two superpower adversaries. To quote from an article “ The UN has allowed any number of wars, genocides and human rights atrocities to take place with little success in curbing any of these even with its Security Council and the strength of the 5 permanent members.” (Tim Zubizarreta, 2021). When USA attacked Iraq in 2003 just based on its suspicion that Saddam Hussain possessed WMD and violated all Human Rights conventions by brutally torturing the POW in Abu Ghraib, the UN still sat idle. Two decades later, the same story is on, only the nations have changed. Now it’s Russia and Ukraine instead of USA and Iraq but what’s constant is UN’s impotency to prevent its P5 members from flouting international law and order repeatedly.

There are several reasons behind the failure of the UN, first one being the Veto power bestowed upon P5 countries. Time and again, proposals and resolutions have been blocked in UNSC using veto power resulting in failure to take prompt action. Second reason behind the ineffectiveness of UN and other world organizations is the incapability of member countries to keep their bilateral issues aside. For instance, in 2022, China vetoed against the resolutions introduced by US and India to blacklist extremists like Abdul Rehman Makki, Shahid Mehmood and Talha Saeed in the 1267 list of the UNSC. Despite terrorism being a global issue, certain countries cannot forbid bilateral relations from taking precedence over matters of global importance. Another glaring reason for the inevitable failure of world organizations has been the prioritization of national interest above all. The present activities of European nations amply substantiate this point. The hypocrisy of EU as busted by leading news reporter Palki Sharma Upadhyay shows how Europe is still bankrolling the Russian war machine. From March 2022 to January 2023, the EU imported $186 BN worth of Russian goods, the biggest chunk of which was LNG. As pointed out by her, despite ten rounds of sanctions by EU, Russian LNG supplies, nuclear industry and diamond imports have not been sanctioned. Russian companies like Gazprombank and Lukoil are not on EU’s blacklist. To quote Palki Sharma, European sanctions on Russia “is a classic case of cherry picking” (Firstpost,2023). This no doubt reveals how European nations despite claiming to be pro-Ukraine are unwilling to take the risk of derailing gas imports from Russia, reason being, fear of economic consequences and political backlash at home. The US too under the garb of fighting for Ukrainian democracy is actually financing the war for its own ulterior motives, which as highlighted by Palki Sharma, has been to fill the coffers of its oil companies. The staggering profits being made by American oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell are reflective of the same (Firstpost,2023). Clearly, achieving unity is definitely a herculean task at hand considering how conflicting every nation’s interests are. The name United Nations today sounds like a misnomer. Who's united when there is clearly no unity even amongst the P5 members? Instead of promoting peace and security these members do nothing but going against each other and prioritizing their ego clashes. How will consensus be ever achieved in the UNSC which is the main decision making body of the organization? Clearly America is a staunch adversary of Russia and China and their relations being so hostile, they can never bring themselves to the same table of discussion. UK and France too have their own personal interests to be taken care of and just as history has witnessed, they're bothered about none but only themselves. That's the reason we see why the Israel Palestine issue could still not be resolved by the UN. Terrorism and climate change is wreaking havoc all over the world, insurgency and ethnic clashes are skyrocketing in Africa, Syria and Yemen see no end to civil wars and yet we see the P5 countries, the so called 'upholders of world security',adding to the woes of the global community by attacking another nation, by forcefully encroaching in on a neighbouring country' territory, by disrespecting international borders, by imposing sanctions and by fueling wars. Is this how global institutions like the United Nations seek to promote international peace and security? 

Having looked at the failures of the United Nations, a pertinent question arises over here. If the United Nations cannot prevent a full blown war from taking place, the most recent incident being the Russia Ukraine War, then how can it handle other massive threats in subtle forms plaguing the world like neo-colonialism, climate change, food scarcity, rapid exhaustion of non-renewable resources and so on ? As pointed out by Kwame Nkrumah in his book Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, neo-colonialism of today represents imperialism in its final and perhaps its most dangerous stage. Foreign aid, Multinational Corporations, arms trade and transfer of technology are all devices of neo-colonialism. China's policy of lending loans to weak developing nations and then subsequently pushing them into its debt trap mechanism is an apt example of how foreign aids can lead to neo-colonies. The American PL 480 or "Food for Peace" given to the Third World countries including India, was nothing but a US plan to dump their agricultural surpluses in the name of aid (Ghosh,2021,p.200). Neo-colonialism has led to the widening of gap between the rich and poor countries. The World Bank has produced a list of 140 failed nations all of them possessing huge natural resources. This new manifestation of colonialism is referred to as post modern imperialism. Earlier in the Victorian era, the justification for colonialism was provided in terms of "white man’s burden " and now the justification is to save the failed states and spread democracy (Ghosh, 2021,p.203).

Today the need of the hour is to reform the UNSC to ensure it’s representative of realities of power in today’s world. As retorted by Ruchira Khamboj, the UN charter is anachronistic. She also vehemently criticized the UN over the issue of incessant delay in UNSC reforms by questioning - "is the gap between UN and mock UN shrinking ?". The UNSC visibly lacks inclusivity as it fails to represent India which is the largest democracy of this world, Latin American countries and also the entire continent of Africa. Reform proposals as suggested by the Rezali formula which proposed addition of five new permanent members and four new non-permanent members must be taken into account (Ghosh,2021,p.292). Moreover as opined in a research paper, moving towards weighted voting rather than the present veto system should be given a serious thought. Another idea should be to introduce weighted voting into the committees created by UNSC to oversee sanctions implementation, counterterrorism, etc (Fearon,2005,p.25-26). The most challenging task would be to move away from veto system towards weighted voting but radical reorganization of the UN is needed. Other global institutions should also try to achieve consensus among their members otherwise they will keep on failing to promote peace and security and protect the world from massive threats like neo-colonialism, climate change, food scarcity etcetera.

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REFERENCE:

• Firstpost. (2023, March 31). Ukraine War : Europe’s Hypocrisy Exposed [Video].YouTube. https://youtu.be/SRMCOGfpFNg
• Firstpost. (2023, April 14). The Verdict is Out : War between Russia and Ukraine Has a Clear Winner [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/GS6BSeW1bQc
• Fearon, J.D. (2005, January 6). Reforming International Institutions to Promote International Peace and Security. Stanford, CA.
• Ghosh, P. (2021). International Relations (5th Ed.). Delhi : PHI Learning Private Limited.
• Zubizarreta, T. (2021, August 25). How International Law Has Once Again Failed Afghanistan. JURIST – Professional Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2021/08/tim-zubizarreta-international-law-failed-afghanistan/

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