June 26, 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter. However, any celebrations will be overshadowed by an unfolding military crisis. On June 13, 2025, Israel launched devastating strikes against military targets in Iran and assassinated several of the country's top nuclear physicists.
On June 21, the Trump Administration escalated the crisis further by striking Iran's nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; with these strikes the United States joined what amounts to an unprovoked and unlawful assault on a sovereign nation.
Supporters will view these actions as justified by the goal of ensuring that Iran does not gain nuclear weapons, capabilities which the United States and Israel already possess. Indeed, this view is so dominant that the illegality of American and Israeli actions is scarcely acknowledged in the Western press. However, since the strikes against Iran were not authorised by the UN Security Council and fall outside any reasonable interpretation of self-defense, they are clearly unlawful under the UN Charter
Triumphs and failures: As the UN turns 80 this week, Dr Jonathan Symons says while there have been many successes in peacekeeping, human rights, and global cooperation, the UN is once again showing how it fails in constraining great power aggression. Image: Tim Robinson
These attacks, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's continuing occupation of Palestinian territories, represent a breakdown of the international legal order that the UN was intended to support. In its 80th year, the UN's enduring relevance and structural impotence are as apparent as ever. The Security Council remains paralysed by great power vetoes while some of its most powerful members openly flout international law. The current crisis once again strips away any illusion that international law applies equally to all nations. Instead, we are reminded that the UN's noble aspirations remain hostage to the political interests of its most powerful members.
This is the context in which we must examine the United Nations' complex legacy. While the organization has achieved remarkable successes in peacekeeping, human rights, and global cooperation, the world is once again focused on its failures – particularly its inability to constrain great power aggression.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted, including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race.
Even before the present crisis, the UN was facing a number of intractable conflicts, humanitarian crises, trade disputes, great power competition and climate breakdown. These challenges were compounded because the United States is withdrawing from many forms of co-operation - for example, exiting the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, many achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to take decisive action in respect of conflicts in Gaza or Ukraine - in these cases the United States and Russia have repeatedly vetoed Security Council resolutions. In other cases, such as Myanmar and Sudan, great power disagreement is compounded by a lack of engagement. Here, even when UN resolutions are agreed on, their practical impacts are inadequate.
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The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is powerful states prioritising their and their allies’ interests over international law or co-operation.
The UN Security Council is powerless to address threats to security if just one great power disagrees.
In some rare cases the United Nations General Assembly has passed “Uniting For Peace” resolutions that express the international community’s frustration with Security Council inaction. For example, in 2022, 141 countries voted to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Resolution ES-11/1); a year later 153 states called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza in defiance of the United States’ unwavering support for Israel’s military campaign (Resolution ES-10/22).
Marking the 80th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. "The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures (see below).
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep seabed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has failed to address comprehensively.
In March 2023 a new agreement on ‘Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction’ was reached after nearly two decades of negotiations. This new treaty creates a framework for establishing marine protected areas in international waters, in line with a global goal of protecting 30% of the world's oceans by 2030.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world."
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts. On some topics - such as efforts to promote gender equality, access to reproductive healthcare or the rights of sexual minorities - there are very deep disagreements in the international community.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Economy and free trade
One of the UN's founding purposes is the “economic and social advancement of all peoples.” The UN Economic and Social Council works toward this goal, and since 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals have served as the UN’s flagship development initiative. In a major achievement of international consensus-building, 193 countries agreed to specific, measurable targets linked to 17 goals, including ending poverty, eliminating hunger, ensuring healthy lives, and providing access to quality education by 2030. However, progress toward achieving most goals has been insufficient.
By contrast, the organization with the greatest impact on global economic cooperation - the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is not part of the UN system, despite coordinating with UN agencies. Recent upheavals in global trade thus reflect the extent to which the current breakdown in international co-operation is not simply a problem within the UN.
When the WTO was established in 1995, the world agreed on a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process. This system is generally viewed favourably in Australia, possibly because it has benefited Australian farmers through its winding back of agricultural subsidies and tariffs around the world.
However, creation of the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial, especially in the United States.
Since 2019, the Trump and Biden Administrations have refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body. This has crippled the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism. These measures were initially justified with reference to China’s trade strategies, which include support for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access. However, the second Trump Administration’s unilateral increases in tariffs suggest a wider agenda of upending the rules-based system of trade.
The simultaneous challenges facing both UN development efforts and WTO trade governance suggests that the current breakdown in international cooperation threatens multiple pillars of the global economic order established after World War II.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global co-operation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests.
Where success collides with failure: Climate change
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and near-universal membership in the UNFCCC, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Although the Paris Agreement sets a goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels - aspiring to no more than 1.5 degrees C, no major country’s emissions are on a track that is consistent with this goal. While global emissions of greenhouse gases may soon stabilise, it will only be once the total emissions reach ‘net zero’ that human activities will no longer be warming the planet.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global co-operation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasions of Iraq and Ukraine
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, and Russia’s invasions of Ukraine (2014 and 2022) were all unlawful and without Security Council authorisation. These illegal wars reflect the fact that the UN has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. If the UN had followed the idea of collective security, it should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State. Tens of thousands of lives have also been lost in the Ukraine conflict.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, the UN High Commission for Refugees estimates there are over 120 million displaced people in the world today. Around 68 million people are displaced within their own countries, and around 38 million are recognised refugees who have been forced to leave their country. In some cases, such as many Palestinians, refugees live for many decades outside their homelands.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by events in Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine and Afghanistan, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Kashmir and Palestine are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. Other major ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria, the Maghreb, Sudan and Ethiopia.
Common denominators among unresolved conflicts include either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the Israel can ignore the International Court of Justice’s decisions concerning occupation and illegal settlements as it enjoys the support of the United States; inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, demonstrates its failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created alternative institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility in some parts of the world; while these same institutions are increasingly critiqued by the Trump Administration for a lack of deference to US interests. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – such as climate change, aligning AI with human values and extreme inequality – that we face today.
Jonathan Symons is an Associate Professor in Macquarie University’s School of International Studies.
An earlier version of this story was published on the UN's 75th anniversary in June 2020.
