I’ve leveled some criticisms at the UN in the past. I’m going to do it again. (It’s just so easy… I can’t help myself.)
From Antiquity, through the Dark and Middle Ages, through even the Enlightenment, and all the way until the Industrial Revolution, “humorism” was a prominent theory of disease. It didn’t pass into the dustbin of history until germ theory replaced it.
Humorism holds that there are four (or more, depending on the specific theory) “humors” in the body. The Big Four are blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile; they correspond to the four seasons, the four elements, etc. An imbalance in the humors—an overabundance of one—is what creates a given disease state.
From this, leechcraft and bloodletting, in their most literal sense. A person might be too “sanguine”—too full of blood—and this would lead to certain symptoms. The learned doctor would then prescribe a treatment of leeches (to drain off that pesky extra blood) or would just open up a vein and let ‘er rip. Ditto for patients who were “choleric” (yellow bile), “phlegmatic” (phlegm), and “melancholy” (black bile).
Over time, “leechcraft” has come to mean “quackery”; “bloodletting” now means violence, especially indiscriminate and wholesale violence.
How far we’ve come.
We ditched the leechcraft (although it’s making a comeback as a legitimate medical procedure).
The bloodletting—now, that’s much harder to phase out.
The United Nations was created in 1945, following the devastation of the Second World War, with one central mission: the maintenance of international peace and security.1
The same site that offers the lofty statement quoted above, also lists the UN’s current peacekeeping operations (I helpfully added the year a given operation began):
AFRICA
United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) (1991)
United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo (MONUSCO) (2010)
United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) (2011)
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
EUROPE AND CENTRAL ASIA
United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) (1999)
United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) (1964)
THE MIDDLE EAST
Remember how peaceful and stable the Balkans became after the UN declared that a piece of a sovereign nation-state (Serbia) was now a new nation-state (Kosovo) by UN fiat? Without agreement from Serbia itself?
And remember how the UN solved the ethnic tensions in Cyprus? After Turkey, not content with its ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Anatolia, invaded Cyprus in 1974 and established a Turkish Cypriot quasi-state? And then the UN completely resolved that situation and Cyprus is now at peace, united and whole once again?
And how about that whole India vs. Pakistan question? The UN has sure brought those two nuclear-armed neighbors back together. Good thing they have fully reconciled and can coexist peacefully, now that armed conflict has been outlawed.
The thing is, prohibition doesn’t work.
It didn’t work for the US during Prohibition; it just led to the rise of organized crime. People kept on drinking, which meant that they needed criminals to supply them with booze.
It isn’t working now during the War on Drugs; it’s once again leading to the rise of organized crime: fentanyl precursor suppliers in China, cocaine producers in Colombia, manufacturers and distributors in Mexico.
It’s not working for gun control; the best illustration is through the tautology “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns”. The guns are here, whether you like it or not; the question is who—and how—will use them.
And it isn’t working for war—organized violence on the scale of nation-states. Making it illegal didn’t stop it from happening; wars are still very much taking place all around the world, even if we don’t always use the technical term “war” to describe them anymore.2
What the UN has actually stopped is not war, but peace. Yes, war is more or less the worst thing that humans do to one another. However, it is (for now, at least) a fact of life. What the UN has done, is ensure that no war ever ends.
Before, nations would make war and then they’d make peace—a peace that recognizes the new reality and the changed balance of power. For example, a certain piece of land might be transferred from one nation to the other; or selling opium might be made legal.
Today, nations still fight wars, but so-called “international law” prohibits any peace deal that recognizes a new reality. The only acceptable outcome, from the UN’s perspective, is for things to return to status quo ante. Since this is generally not in the interest of whichever nation is winning, it means that wars never actually end but rather turn into protracted, “frozen” conflicts with no resolution in sight.
In fact, we are seeing the emergence of a new type of war: the intentional frozen conflict. Since wars can no longer be “won” in the traditional sense, aggressor states instigate wars that serve their purpose simply by existing—not by being “won”. For example, new NATO members generally need to have no unresolved territorial disputes (lest they automatically drag the entire alliance into those disputes). Transnistria (in Moldova), Georgia 2008, and Ukraine 2014-2022 are all “NATO insurance” by Russia.
To clarify: I’m not pro-war, any more than I am pro-drug abuse. But the War on Drugs and “just say no” are clearly not working. Like a wise man once said, “if someone wants to buy it, it’s for sale”. As long as someone is willing to go to war to achieve their goals, war will remain a reality.
The essence of existence is change. We are born, we mature, we grow old and die. Nations rise and fall. Science and technology advance. New diseases emerge. The climate changes. Species go extinct and new ones emerge to take their place, ones that are better adapted to survive and thrive in the new environment.
Because our environment is not static, and we ourselves are not static, we will always change; we will never attain some “perfect” configuration of humanity that will endure for the rest of time.
And yet, that’s exactly what the UN is trying to do: to freeze things as they are. Each nation-state is forever defined by its sovereign borders, and those borders are fixed and not subject to change.3
The UN has effectively outlawed inter-state violence. In its place, they offer diplomacy and votes as means to resolve conflict.
The problem is, if one nation is more powerful than another, and wants to do something that that weaker nation objects to, there’s only so much that diplomacy is going to be able to do. That’s a bit like expecting that a twelve-year-old and an armed mugger are going to be able to talk things out to everyone’s satisfaction. There will come a point when the mugger will just say “all right, enough talk, give me your iPhone or I’ll stab you”.
This means two things:
Those who follow the rules refrain from using force, and over time come to view all use of force as distasteful (even if it’s righteous and necessary). Case in point: old, toothless, tired Europe.
Those who choose not to follow the rules, or are able to bend the rules in their favor, are left as the only ones who are willing to use force to get their way. In other words, the outlaws have all the guns. Cases in point: Russia, Iran, China, and—debatably—the US.
As one of my favorite political commentators says: “In a world where the strong choose not to fight, the only ones who are still willing to fight are the hooligans.”
It also means that we have defeated (or at least paused) evolution. It used to be that if a nation-state allowed its technology to fall behind, its economy to stagnate, and its military to rot—it would be attacked and defeated by its stronger neighbors. This Darwinism on the scale of nations is what led to the enormous progress made by Europe over a brief few centuries. Conversely, the Qing Dynasty ruled its corner of the world and had no external threats; they became soft and decadent—easy prey for European powers in the 19th century during the First and Second Opium Wars, touching off the Century of Humiliation.
Just as natural selection improves populations over time by making them more fit to survive and thrive, so does national selection improve humanity by pruning economic and political systems that are unfit for the real world. Witness the rise of globalism (to the detriment of national economies) and self-indulgent, virtue-signaling nonsense in social and political discourse (to the detriment of solving actual problems). In a world where nations had to suffer the consequences of their choices, these self-destructive philosophies would quickly become extinct and would be replaced by ones that truly enrich (in all senses of the word) the nations that espouse them.
So, to sum up:
The UN forbids war. In lieu of war, the UN offers diplomacy and perpetual “peacekeeping” forces. There are now 11 such forces, some in place since the late 1940s.
Nations change over time; they rise and fall, grow and recede. Those that rise generate pressure against those that fall: military, economic, demographic.
When the pressure becomes sufficiently great, it can no longer be relieved through diplomacy. Has there, in recent memory, been a mutually accepted and stable diplomatic negotiation that resulted in a significant realignment to the advantage of one nation over another?
Absent a realistic mechanism to relieve these “rising power” pressures, an imbalance develops. The greater the imbalance, the more violent its manifestations and the longer they endure.
So I guess that what I’m saying is that the UN is causing an imbalance of humors on the scale of the entire world. They’re a little too sanguine4 about their ability to resolve all human conflict through diplomacy and negotiation. And since the cure for being sanguine is bloodletting, that’s exactly what we’re seeing all around the world today.
https://www.un.org/en/our-work/maintain-international-peace-and-security
For example, the Iraq War (a.k.a. Operation IRAQI FREEDOM) was not “officially” a declared war, even though it probably felt a lot like a war to the people participating.
Unless, of course, the UN decides that borders need to change—creating Israel, or Kosovo, or South Sudan. Cutting a new nation-state out of the living body of an existing one, no matter how the “donor” nation feels about it.
“Cheerfully confident; optimistic”, from https://www.wordnik.com/words/sanguine