Does the United Nations Still Matter in an Age Where Power Decides the Rules?

When the United Nations was established in 1945, it emerged from a world profoundly altered by the devastation of two world wars. Its establishment was not just an attempt to prevent another global conflict, but an acknowledgement of the catastrophic consequences of an international order unable to restrain aggression, reconcile competing interests or uphold collective security. The organisation had an ambitious proposition: that international relations need not remain governed solely by the pursuit of national interests and the balance of power, but could instead be shaped by shared principles, collective responsibility and institutional cooperation. 

Eighty years later, the contemporary world in which the United Nations operates is one in which power continues to dictate the terms of international order. Economic interests, political alliances and geopolitical influence often determine whose actions are condemned, whose suffering receives attention and whose violations go unpunished. Against this reality, the principles of sovereign equality, collective security and international justice upon which the UN was founded appear increasingly difficult to uphold. 

Yet these inequalities extend beyond the international system at large. They are reproduced within the UN itself, where institutional arrangements afford certain states privileges that fundamentally challenge the principle of sovereign equality.

The Privilege of Power

At the heart of the United Nations lies a fundamental contradiction: an organisation founded on the principle of sovereign equality grants extraordinary privileges to certain states. Its five permanent members —China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—were granted veto powers. This arrangement was largely a political compromise. The organisation's founders understood that without the cooperation of the world's major powers, any attempt at collective security would be difficult to sustain. The result is an international system in which the protection of some interests continues to come at the expense of others. The compromises made continue to shape whose interests are prioritised and whose are sacrificed within the international system.

Compromises have consequences and these consequences are most visible in the Council's decision-making. A single permanent member can prevent a substantive resolution from passing, even when the remaining fourteen members support it. This is particularly troubling when a permanent member is itself involved in the conflict under discussion. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed this contradiction. As a party to the conflict, Russia was able to use its veto to block a Security Council draft resolution condemning its invasion. The state whose conduct the Council sought to address could therefore prevent the Council from acting against it.

The problem, however, extends beyond Russia. The same structure allows permanent members to shield their own interests and, at times, those of their allies from collective scrutiny. This creates an uncomfortable distinction between the rules that govern international relations and law and the political realities that determine whether those rules are enforced. International law may establish obligations for all states, but responding to violations remains deeply influenced by the distribution of power within the Security Council.

This is where the original compromise becomes particularly difficult to defend. The veto was intended to prevent the major powers from abandoning the organisation, yet it has also made the Council dependent on the very states that it is expected to hold accountable. That privilege sits uneasily beside Article 2(1) of the Charter, which states that the UN is based on the sovereign equality of all its members. Article 24, meanwhile, gives the Security Council primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. The tension is therefore built into the Charter itself: all states are formally sovereign equals, but five have a special power over the Council’s most consequential decisions. For countries without permanent seats and particularly for populations whose security depends on international intervention, this means that collective action can be obstructed by foreign interests. 

An organisation cannot claim to uphold international peace and security while allowing a handful of powerful states to determine when, and against whom, those principles are applied.

The Selective Application of Justice

To say that the problems start and end with the Security Council is too simplistic. The structure of the UN is an expression of a wider difficulty within the international system. There is a vast distance between the principles that states publicly endorse and the willingness to uphold them when doing so becomes politically or economically inconvenient. 

We look back at some of the darkest moments in history with the reassurance that the world would never allow them to happen again. The Armenian genocide, the destruction of Indigenous communities across North America and the atrocities of the Second World War are now remembered as some of humanity's greatest failures. They are studied, commemorated and condemned. Yet at the time, the suffering of those populations did not produce the international outrage deserved. The distance between how history remembers those events and how the world responded while they were unfolding raises an uncomfortable question: have we actually learned from them? 

Gaza is a prime example of this. Since October 2023, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with entire neighbourhoods destroyed and much of the population displaced. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful, identifying violations of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and the prohibition on acquiring territory by force. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry went further, concluding that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. These are not simply political accusations: they are findings made by international legal institutions, although the ICJ's separate proceedings under the Genocide Convention have not yet reached a final judgment.

The difficulty of translating these obligations into political action was also evident in September 2025, when fourteen members of the Security Council voted in favour of a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. One voted against. The resolution failed, following a veto by the United States. There is something unsettling about this arithmetic. Fourteen countries supported the resolution, yet their collective position was not enough to secure its adoption. The vote brought the contradiction into focus once again: the principles of international law may be shared, but the willingness to act on them remains far from universal.

There is a particular irony in this. The language of 'never again' emerged from the recognition that the international community had failed to protect populations from mass atrocities. The Genocide Convention was adopted in 1948 precisely because the destruction of an entire group should never be treated as an exclusively domestic matter.  Yet, decades later, the existence of these legal obligations has not guaranteed the political will to uphold them.

The Economics of Influence

Power within the UN is not only exercised through vetoes. It is also exercised through funding. While every member state formally has a place in the organisation, not every state has the same financial influence over its work. Much of the UN system depends on contributions from member states, and a significant proportion of this funding is voluntary. In 2024, voluntary contributions accounted for approximately 67 per cent of the combined funding of the UN and its agencies, compared with 25 per cent from assessed contributions. This means that much of the organisation's work depends not on guaranteed financial commitments, but on what individual governments are willing to provide.

Donors can earmark contributions for particular programmes, countries or objectives, rather than allowing UN agencies to decide independently where resources are most urgently needed. The UN's own financing reports have identified a growing reliance on this type of funding. Earmarked contributions to the UN development system increased from approximately $20.3 billion in 2010 to $41 billion in 2023. Although this funding supports important work, it also gives the donors greater influence over which priorities receive financial support and thus, attention. An organisation intended to respond to global needs can therefore find its priorities shaped, in part, by the preferences of the countries financing it.

The consequences are particularly visible during humanitarian emergencies. In 2025, the United Nations appealed for approximately $47 billion to respond to humanitarian crises across the world. Yet, by August, it had received less than 17 per cent of the amount required. This was not simply a matter of administrative difficulty. It meant that humanitarian organisations were being forced to reduce programmes, prioritise some needs over others and make decisions about who could receive assistance. UNICEF's 2025 appeal, which sought to support 109 million children affected by humanitarian crises, was only 42 per cent funded by the end of October. Behind these figures are children without reliable access to food, healthcare, education and protection.

The figures point to a deeper contradiction in the organisation of international assistance. Humanitarian needs should be determined by the urgency of a crisis, not by political interests, yet the resources available to address those needs depend heavily on the priorities of the states providing the funding. The United Nations cannot entirely escape this dependence. It relies on member states for funding, cooperation and political support. Without these contributions, its agencies would be unable to carry out much of their work. Nevertheless, this dependence creates a difficult tension. The organisation is expected to respond to the needs of the international community as a whole. However, when the survival of communities depends on voluntary contributions, the priorities of those providing the money inevitably become a part of the equation.

The World We Allow

There is something paradoxical about the United Nations: its continued necessity is demonstrated, in part, by the very crises that expose its limitations. The world still needs places where governments can negotiate, where humanitarian assistance can be coordinated, where international standards can be articulated and where the conduct of powerful states can be challenged. However, the need for such an institution does not justify treating its failures as inevitable or its structure as untouchable.

The UN was founded on the belief that peace, dignity and cooperation should not depend entirely on the strength of individual states. Its Charter gave institutional form to the hope that countries could establish common obligations and reduce the likelihood of another global catastrophe. That belief remains worth defending. The question is whether the political system built around it is capable of giving it meaning.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that the United Nations is not simply failing to live up to the world imagined in 1945. Perhaps it is revealing something about the world that we have been willing to overlook. One in which states endorse universal principles but hesitate when those principles threaten their interests; one in which collective responsibility is proclaimed while individual privilege is preserved.

The answer cannot be to abandon international law because it is imperfectly enforced nor can it be to defend existing institutions simply because the alternative is uncertain. The harder task is to insist that the institutions created in the name of a shared humanity remain answerable to the people whose lives their decisions affect. The United Nations cannot guarantee a just world, no institution could. But there is a difference between acknowledging the limits of an institution and accepting that those limits should define the boundaries of our ambition.

Perhaps the responsibility extends beyond the United Nations itself. We must also consider our own role in sustaining the distance between the principles we claim to uphold and the realities we have learned to accept.We speak of equality between states, of peace as a responsibility shared by all. Yet what does universality mean if it stops at the borders of political convenience? What is equality worth if some lives are defended more fiercely than others?

If we continue to accept these contradictions as an inevitable feature of international politics, then we become complicit in preserving them. The greatest failure may not be that the United Nations has fallen short of its promises, but that we have grown comfortable with the gap between those promises and reality. 

And if the world is still willing to speak the language of universal principles, it must eventually confront a more difficult question: What are those principles worth when upholding them comes at a cost?