The United Nations is useless

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed a terrible truth his UN speech Tuesday: The United Nations is a total failure.

If the organization doesn’t actually work to end Russia’s Ukraine war, he said, it should disband itself.

“Are you ready to close?” he asked the assembled dignitaries after pointing out that the brutal war violated the first article of the UN charter.

He’s right to ask. Long fetishized by progressives around the world as civilization’s last bulwark against endless war, the United Nations has proven uniquely incapable of actually preventing violence and isolating dangerous regimes. In fact, it often empowers them.

As Zelensky put it, “Where is the security that the Security Council is supposed to guarantee?”

Russia’s presence as a permanent member at the Security Council table – especially now, given the off-putting images of Russia War crimes in Bucha – ridicules both the UN as an organization and the principles it claims to stand for. Zelenskyy has rightly described Russia’s behavior as “no different” from that of ISIS.

The same applies to China’s permanent membership. Beijing has waged a brutal internal war against them Uyghurs for yearswhile facing no real repercussions from a global organization ostensibly dedicated to safeguarding all human rights everywhere.

US liberals have rightly seized upon Ukraine as a cause célèbre. But they have failed in the conventional wisdom to equalize with the toothless, autocrat-coddling institutions ostensibly responsible for maintaining the post-war order.

Most Washington seems ready to do in Turtle Bay To attempt to call a vote to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council — a committee that is itself an utter farce, packed with member states that themselves are violating rights left and right.

This lame bit of theatrics proves Zelensky’s argument once more. Where was the HRC when one of its member states was bombing maternity hospitals and murdering families? (Most likely, they are preparing to bash Israel some more.)

Sovereign states can no longer rely on the norms of international law for defense, but only on the strength of their own weapons, the Ukrainian president emphasized when he called for a comprehensive redesign of the UN.

Russia’s crimes in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv and beyond (back to Aleppo and Grozny) lends ferocious weight to his argument – ​​and exposes the hypocrisy that underlies so many groups that claim to defend human rights.

The United Nations is totally incapable of fulfilling its mission. Those who believe in its principles should look for something better to replace it.