The United Nations turned 80 last October — a venerable age for the most ambitious international organisation the world has known.
Yet recent events from last weekend’s Trumpian military action aimed at seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, to Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza — pose profound challenges to the UN system.
Many now ask whether the UN has any future at all if it cannot fulfil its core purpose: maintaining international peace and security.
Has the UN reached the end of its lifespan?
The UN Security Council
Responsibility for maintaining peace and security rests primarily with the UN Security Council.
Under the UN Charter, military force is lawful only if authorised by a Security Council resolution (Article 42), or if a state acts in self-defence.
Self-defence is governed by strict rules. It must respond to an armed attack (Article 51), and even then is lawful only until the Security Council intervenes to restore peace.
The Security Council has 15 members:
* five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States (the P5)
* ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms.
Resolutions require nine affirmative votes and no veto from any permanent member, giving the P5 decisive control over peace and security decisions.
This structure was deliberately designed to prevent action against the major powers — the “winners” of the second world war — while also forcing them to balance one another’s ambitions.
The system works only when those powers are willing to follow the rules.
Can the veto be reformed?
As Russia and the United States have repeatedly demonstrated, the veto can render the Security Council impotent, regardless of how serious a breach of international law may be.
For this reason, the veto attracts fierce criticism. Yet, as one of us (Tamsin Paige) has previously explained, self-interested use of the veto may be politically objectionable, but it is not illegal.
The UN Charter places no enforceable limits on veto use. Nor is there any mechanism for judicial review of Security Council decisions.
This is not an accident. It is a central design flaw.
The Charter places the P5 above the law, granting them not only the power to block collective action, but also the power to block reform. Articles 108 and 109 allow for amendments, but any meaningful reform requires P5 consent — including consent to limit their own privileges.
In theory, the veto could be reformed. In practice, it is impossible.
The only structural alternative would be dissolving and reconstituting the UN under a new charter. That would require a level of global cooperation that simply does not exist. Any reform threatening the veto would almost certainly be blocked by one or more permanent members.
An uncomfortable truth
It increasingly appears we are watching the collapse of the UN-led peace and security system in real time.
By design, the Security Council cannot act when the P5 themselves are the aggressors.
But focusing solely on the Security Council misses much of what the UN actually does.
Despite its paralysis in great-power conflicts, the UN is not an empty shell.
The Secretariat supports peacekeeping and political missions and facilitates international negotiations. The Human Rights Council monitors and reports on rights violations. UN agencies coordinate humanitarian relief and deliver life-saving aid.
The organisation works across health, development, climate, refugees and human rights — functions no single state can perform alone.
None of this work requires Security Council authorisation. All of it relies on the UN’s institutional infrastructure — of which the Security Council remains a central, if deeply flawed, component.
The uncomfortable truth is that we currently face only one real choice: a broken global institution, or none at all.
The UN’s future may be one of endurance rather than transformation — holding together what still functions and waiting for political conditions to change.
We support it not because it works well, but because losing it would be far worse.
Should we work toward a fairer system that does not reward power with impunity? Absolutely.
But we should not discard the vast, often invisible good the UN does beyond the Security Council’s chambers because of the hypocrisy and misconduct of the powerful few.
The Conversation