Abstract:
The United Nations was not the first attempt to organize the world`s most powerful states into a framework for managing international order. It was the third. The Concert of Europe, established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, was the first: a system in which Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and France met periodically to prevent any challenge to the 1815 power distribution, suppress nationalist and revolutionary movements, and maintain the stability that served the established monarchies. It lasted ninety-nine years. The League of Nations, established in 1919 after the First World War, was the second: dominated by Britain and France as the victorious powers, used to carve the Ottoman Empire into British and French mandates under the Sykes-Picot framework, and structurally incapable of acting against any major European power`s interests, as Italy`s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and Japan`s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 both confirmed. The United Nations, established in 1945 after the Second World War, is the third and most sophisticated iteration: five permanent veto-wielding members who are the states that won the war, each possessing the absolute right to block any Security Council action that threatens their interests or those of their clients, governing an institution that has adopted 44 resolutions on Sudan without producing peace, vetoed every meaningful resolution on Gaza for over a decade, and in November 2025 passed Security Council Resolution 2803 creating the Board of Peace, a body for the external governance of Gaza chaired by the American president with Israel as a member and the authority to govern the population Israel is simultaneously bombing. The UN is not in crisis. An institution in crisis is one failing to achieve its design objectives. The UN is achieving its design objectives with precision. The crisis belongs to the populations who believed its declared purposes rather than studying its design.
Main Article:
Every system for managing international order begins with the same promise and serves the same purpose. The promise is peace. The purpose is preserving the power distribution of the moment in which the system was created.
The Concert of Europe, established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, made the promise explicitly. The five great powers who had defeated Napoleon, Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and France, agreed to meet periodically to manage crises, suppress threats to stability, and maintain the balance of power in Europe. They described this as the management of peace. What they were managing was the 1815 distribution of territory and authority, which happened to favor themselves. The Concert`s defining purpose, confirmed by historians of the period, was to maintain their power, oppose revolutionary movements, weaken the forces of nationalism, and uphold the balance of power. It was not designed to protect the weak from the strong. It was designed to keep the strong strong. It served that purpose for ninety-nine years, during which it successfully suppressed the Greek independence movement, backed monarchical restoration across Europe after 1848, and facilitated the growth of European colonial control in Africa and Asia while maintaining relative peace on the European continent. Peace in Europe was purchased with war everywhere else. The Concert`s ledger balanced by the standard its designers intended.(1)
The Concert failed when its internal contradictions became irresolvable: the rise of German nationalism, the Austro-Hungarian imperial structure`s incompatibility with the century`s political trends, and the alliance rigidities that turned a Balkan assassination into a world war. The League of Nations that emerged from Versailles in 1919 absorbed the Concert`s institutional logic into a permanent framework with a Covenant, a Secretariat, and declared universal membership.
A victors` organization, the League was dominated by France and Great Britain, with Japan and Italy as the other two permanent members of its Council, the rough equivalent of the UN Security Council. The United States, whose president Woodrow Wilson had championed the League`s creation, never joined because the Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty. Britain and France, who dominated the institution in the American absence, used it with precision to serve their interests. The Covenant was deliberately excluded from such great-power prerogatives as freedom of the seas, the Monroe Doctrine, and the internal affairs of the French and British empires. Britain and France carved the Ottoman Empire into their own mandated territories under Sykes-Picot arrangements that the League`s Mandates Commission administered and legitimized. The Mandates system was not humanitarian guardianship. It was colonial administration dressed in the language of tutelage, the temporary management of peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world. Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, whose populations had not been consulted about the arrangement, were told that their colonial administrators were preparing them for eventual self-governance while those administrators extracted resources, suppressed independence movements, and drew borders serving imperial rather than indigenous interests.(2)
The League`s failure mode was the same as the Concert`s: it could not act against the interests of its most powerful members. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, the League condemned it. Japan left the League. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the League condemned it. Britain and France quietly negotiated the Hoare-Laval Pact, which would have given Mussolini most of Ethiopia in exchange for an end to the embarrassment. The pact was abandoned only when it leaked to the press and caused a scandal in Britain. Mussolini invaded anyway. Benito Mussolini`s verdict on the League`s effectiveness has been confirmed by the subsequent eighty years of its successor institution`s record: it is very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out.
The United Nations was designed in 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks and finalized at San Francisco in 1945 with the explicit lesson of the League`s failure incorporated into its structure. The lesson was not that the powerful had abused the institution. The lesson was that the powerful needed a mechanism to ensure their interests would always be protected within the institution, so they would never need to leave it. The veto was that mechanism. Five permanent members, the states that had just won the war, each possessing the absolute right to block any substantive Security Council resolution, regardless of the support of every other member, regardless of the evidence, regardless of the magnitude of the humanitarian crisis at stake. The Mexican delegate at San Francisco argued in 1945 that the UN Charter nowhere uses the word veto. He was correct. The P5 gave themselves a power the founding document does not name, because naming it explicitly would have made its colonial and hegemonic character undeniable at a moment when the anti-colonial language of self-determination was being used simultaneously to justify the new order to the populations it was organizing.(3)
The declared objectives and the design objectives were therefore different from the institution`s founding moment. The declared objectives were peace, security, human rights, and self-determination. The design objectives were to maintain the 1945 power distribution, legitimize the nation-state system that fragmented potential challengers to that distribution, and give the most powerful states permanent legal immunity from accountability for their own actions and those of their clients. For the first two decades, the gap between these two sets of objectives was managed through the Cold War framework, in which the US and the Soviet Union each used their vetoes to protect their respective spheres and the UN became the arena in which their competition was conducted diplomatically rather than militarily. The institution maintained the appearance of contested multilateralism while the actual management of international order continued through bilateral arrangements, military alliances, and the implicit nuclear deterrence that kept the competition from becoming direct confrontation.
The Congo crisis of 1960 to 1961 is where the gap between declared and design objectives became briefly and catastrophically visible, in the form of one man who tried to close it.
Dag Hammarskjöld was the second Secretary General of the United Nations. He had been elected to the position in 1953 and was developing the institution as a genuine instrument of international peace and security, building the concept of preventive diplomacy, establishing the first UN peacekeeping force after the Suez crisis of 1956, and developing what would become the foundational doctrine of UN peacekeeping as an impartial buffer between belligerent parties. His handling of the Congo crisis did not begin as an attempt to challenge Western interests. The UN bureaucracy around him initially made common cause with Brussels and Washington in preventing Patrice Lumumba, the Congo`s first democratically elected prime minister, from consolidating power. Hammarskjöld ordered Ghanaian peacekeepers not to protect Lumumba when Lumumba fled Leopoldville. He lied to the Security Council about the circumstances of Lumumba`s arrest. He allowed the UN`s presence in Congo to function as a stabilizing force for a situation that Western interests required to be stable, specifically the Belgian mining companies` control of Katanga`s uranium and copper and the CIA`s determination that Lumumba`s nationalist government, which had reached toward Moscow for assistance, should not survive.(4)
It was only after Lumumba was assassinated on January 17, 1961, with CIA and Belgian intelligence involvement, that Hammarskjöld changed course. The nationalist threat having been eliminated, the Katanga secession that had been the instrument of Lumumba`s destabilization had become superfluous. Hammarskjöld began moving the UN toward reunification of the Congo under its central government, using peacekeeping forces to disarm Katangan secessionists and restore the territorial integrity that the great powers had claimed to support throughout the crisis. This was the moment at which Hammarskjöld tried to use the institution for its declared purpose rather than its design purpose.
On the night of September 17 to 18, 1961, Hammarskjöld`s DC-6 aircraft crashed near Ndola in what was then Northern Rhodesia. All sixteen people aboard were killed. Three official inquiries failed to conclusively determine the cause. A French intelligence death warrant against Hammarskjöld, dated July 1961, was found in the French National Archives, two months before the crash. CIA operatives had sought to retain agents for an execution squad in the Congo. The day after the crash, former US President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. The Congolese prime minister described him as the victim of certain financial circles for whom a human life is not equal to a gram of copper or uranium. The UN named a library after him and appointed a successor who would not make the same attempt.(5)
Every Secretary General since has operated within the structural limits that Hammarskjöld`s fate defined. They can write reports. They can issue statements. They can describe conflicts as unacceptable and call for ceasefires and express grave concern and brief the Security Council. What they cannot do is threaten the actual interests of the permanent members, because the moment they do, the institutional mechanism that ended Hammarskjöld`s intervention is available to the permanent members through more institutional and less violent means: the veto, the withholding of funding, the blocking of mandate renewal, and the appointment of a more cooperative successor.
The veto record of the decades since 1961 confirms this constraint in statistical form. The seven vetoed draft resolutions in 2024 were the most since 1986. Eight vetoes were cast on those seven resolutions: four by Russia, three by the United States, and one by China. In 2025, there were four vetoes: two by the United States on draft resolutions on the war in Gaza, and two by Russia on amendments related to Ukraine. The Security Council adopted 44 resolutions in 2025, the lowest number since 1991, and only 61.4 percent received unanimous support. In 2024, only 65 percent of resolutions were adopted with full Council agreement. The institution is producing fewer agreed outcomes precisely as the number of conflicts reaches its highest level since the post-Cold War period. When the declared purpose is peace and security, this trajectory represents failure. When the design purpose is management of great power interests, it represents the predictable consequence of great power disagreement rather than institutional failure.(6)
The specific cases confirm the pattern in detail that the statistics cannot convey. Gaza: the Security Council was unable to pass a ceasefire resolution for 171 days after October 7, 2023, during which over 10,000 people were killed, because the United States vetoed four proposals. When Resolution 2728 finally passed in March 2024, Israel announced immediately it would ignore it, secure in the knowledge that the United States would shield it from any consequence for doing so. The General Assembly has passed at least 77 resolutions over the past decade supporting Palestinian self-determination and an end to Israel`s occupation. Not one has produced a single day of compliance. Sudan: Russia vetoed a draft resolution calling for civilian protection in November 2024, leaving 30.4 million people in acute humanitarian need as the confirmed genocide against the Masalit continued. The Council has passed nearly 80 resolutions on Sudan and South Sudan combined. None have produced lasting peace. Ukraine: Russia vetoes every accountability mechanism for a war it started, which its own UN membership obligations should prohibit. The structure that was designed to prevent the powerful from acting above the law was designed simultaneously to give them permanent legal immunity for doing exactly that.(7)
France used the institution against American interests in February 2003, refusing to authorize the invasion of Iraq and threatening to veto any authorization resolution. This is the case that might appear to contradict the structural argument. It does not contradict it. It confirms the institution`s actual function from a different direction. France`s refusal was not motivated by concern for Iraqi civilians. France held oil contracts with Saddam Hussein`s Iraq under the Oil-for-Food Program whose value would be destroyed by regime change. French economic interests and American strategic interests diverged in Iraq in 2003. France used its veto power to protect French economic interests, which is precisely what the veto was designed to allow each permanent member to do. The United States invaded anyway, without Security Council authorization, declared the UN irrelevant for failing to authorize the invasion, and reconstructed the framing as the UN`s failure rather than American unilateralism. The lesson both sides absorbed from 2003 was not that the UN was a meaningful constraint on American military power. It was that the UN`s authorization is useful when it can be obtained and irrelevant when it cannot, and that the permanent member whose interests require military action will act regardless of what the other members decide.(8)
The Board of Peace is the institutional endpoint of this trajectory.
Security Council Resolution 2803, adopted in November 2025, created a body described as being for the external governance of Gaza. Trump chairs it with sole authority to appoint and dismiss members, veto decisions, issue resolutions, and determine agendas. The body`s membership includes Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Belarus, and Vietnam. France and the United Kingdom have declined invitations to join. The institution created to prevent any state from exercising arbitrary power over another population has produced, within its own framework, a body in which one individual exercises arbitrary power over the governance of a population his own military is simultaneously bombing, with the state conducting the bombing as a member of the body governing the bombed.(9)
This is not an aberration. It is the institution`s declared purpose and its design purpose finally arriving at the same point: the Board of Peace governing Gaza with Israel as a member and an American president as sole chair is the Concert of Europe governing Greece with the Ottoman Empire as a participant, in a more sophisticated institutional form, eighty years later. The form has evolved. The function is the same.
The institution will continue to exist. It will continue to hold meetings and adopt resolutions and brief the Secretary General and express grave concern and call for ceasefires that will be ignored and renew peacekeeping mandates in countries that have expelled the peacekeepers and convene the General Assembly to pass resolutions that produce no compliance and issue reports that are read by the researchers who document the atrocities they describe. All of this will continue because the institution serves the interests of the states that fund it, and those states` interests are served by having an institution that performs international order while the actual distribution of power is managed through bilateral arrangements, military alliances, economic dependencies, and the selective application of international law to adversaries but never to allies.
The Concert of Europe promised peace in Europe and delivered war in Africa and Asia. The League of Nations promised collective security and delivered colonial mandates. The United Nations promises peace, security, and human rights and has delivered the Board of Peace governing Gaza with Israel as a member.
The design has been consistent. Only the language has changed.
References:
(1) Wikipedia, "Concert of Europe," updated 2026; World History Encyclopedia, "Concert of Europe," 2023; Congress of Vienna Wikipedia, updated 2026.
(2) OUP Blog, "The League of Nations," October 2011; UN Geneva, "Historical Background," confirming League structure and mandates system; Wikipedia, "League of Nations," updated April 2026.
(3) CIVICUS Lens, "UN Security Council: Reform or Irrelevance," February 2026, confirming Mexican delegate`s 1945 veto objection; Security Council Report, "In Hindsight: Living with the Veto," April 2026.
(4) ROAPE, "Myth-Busting: Dag Hammarskjöld, Katanga, and the Coup Against the Lumumba Government," February 2024; Wikipedia, "Dag Hammarskjöld," updated May 2026; Declassified UK, "Did Britain Help Murder an African Leader and UN Secretary General?" May 2025.
(5) Wikipedia, "1961 Ndola Transair Sweden Douglas DC-6 crash," updated March 2026; Yale Review, "Susan Williams: Revisiting Dag Hammarskjöld`s Mysterious Death," December 2023; Black Agenda Report, "United Nations Releases New Report on the Death of Dag Hammarskjöld," October 2024; History Channel, "UN Leader Dag Hammarskjöld Died in Mysterious Circumstances," May 2025.
(6) Security Council Report, "In Hindsight: Living with the Veto," April 2026, confirming 2024 veto record; CIVICUS Lens, op. cit., confirming 2025 resolution count; UN Press, "Wars in Gaza, Ukraine Dominate Security Council`s 2023 Agenda," January 2024.
(7) Oxfam International, "UN Security Council Casts Nearly All Vetoes Last Decade on Syria, Palestine and Ukraine," September 2024; Security Council Report, "In Hindsight: The Security Council in 2024," December 2024; CIVICUS Lens, op. cit.
(8) Wikipedia, "Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction," updated 2026; BBC News archive, French veto threat, February 2003.
(9) CIVICUS Lens, op. cit., confirming Security Council Resolution 2803 and Board of Peace structure and membership; Security Council Report, April 2026, op. Cit.