There was a time when the UN Security Council, a grand international body forged in the aftermath of the Second World War, was seen to be the civilised world’s shield against tyranny, genocide, and war.
Today, it is little more than a stage set for the world’s worst actors to strut and preen while the audience pretends not to see the carnage unfolding behind the curtains.
Let us not mince words. The Security Council — once the beating heart of the UN — has become an elaborate diplomatic charade. A theatre of illusions where resolutions are proposed with full knowledge they will be vetoed, where moral outrage is carefully scripted, and where the world’s most dangerous regimes can veto judgement on their own atrocities. Russia and China wield that veto like saboteurs with a pair of bolt cutters, slicing through any attempt to restrain their ambitions or those of their proxies.
“Russia’s assumption of the Soviet Union’s seat was conditional on its acceptance of the Soviet Union’s responsibilities. By failing to honour these obligations, Russia has surely forfeited its claim to this privileged position.”
This is not simply a case of institutional drift or bureaucratic inertia. What we are witnessing is something far worse: the structural obsolescence of the very body entrusted with preserving international order. And like an antique clock still ticking long after it’s ceased to tell the right time, the UN today keeps up appearances while its purpose quietly dies.
Take Syria, that long-suffering land which has become the graveyard of modern diplomacy. Bashar al-Assad, a man who gassed his own people, faced no real consequences. Russia, his chief protector, has ensured that any attempt to hold him accountable is vetoed at birth. Moscow’s diplomats puff their chests in the Security Council chamber as if defending a misunderstood sovereign, while the world watches barrel bombs fall on hospitals and schools. The lesson? Murder enough civilians, and the international community will eventually lose interest.
Sudan, too, is descending into a form of tribal savagery that might have shocked 15th-century mercenaries. Factions roam the countryside with machetes and mobile phones, and ethnic cleansing is again carried out with bureaucratic efficiency. The United Nations? It issues press releases. It commissions reports. It sends envoys who return, inevitably, with stern warnings and furrowed brows. Meanwhile, villages burn and corpses pile up. Nothing changes.
And then there is Ukraine — the most grotesque farce of all. A permanent member of the Security Council has invaded a neighbouring sovereign state, committed war crimes on an industrial scale, and dared to lecture the West on the evils of “Western imperialism” while redrawing borders by brute force. Russia’s presence on the Council is no longer just an irony. It is an obscenity.
Putin’s Security Council Session: Rhetoric on “Traditional Values” Overshadows Strikes on Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage
The failure here is not just diplomatic. It is moral. The UN was meant to embody the high ideals of civilisation — a post-war consensus that genocide, conquest, and totalitarianism had no place in the modern world. Instead, it has become a clubhouse for precisely the sort of regimes it was designed to confront.
China, which has turned Xinjiang into a surveillance state and Hong Kong into a hollowed-out memory, now sits on the Human Rights Council where it vetoes any interjection critical of itself. Iran, which arms terrorists across the Middle East and stones women for imagined sins, delivers lectures on sovereignty. Theocratic despots and communist autocrats trade applause in the General Assembly like members of a cabal, confident that the West will continue playing along out of some lingering diplomatic etiquette.
Britain, it must be said, is complicit in this. Successive governments have clung to the myth that our place on the Security Council gives us global sway. In reality, it often forces us to lend credibility to an institution that consistently humiliates those who believe in liberal values. Our diplomats furrow their brows, write strongly worded statements, and remain seated next to war criminals masquerading as ambassadors. It is as though we fear that walking away would look uncivilised — as if participating in farce were somehow more honourable than calling it out.
So what is to be done? The polite answer is “reform.” But reforming the UN is a political impossibility. The veto is sacred to its current holders; prising it from their grip would require precisely the kind of unified global will that the UN’s dysfunction has so thoroughly destroyed.
The more honest answer is this: Britain and its allies must stop pretending. Stop pretending that the Security Council is a credible body for conflict resolution. Stop pretending that UN resolutions have weight when violators are shielded by the most powerful members. And stop pretending that the presence of a blue flag gives legitimacy to missions whose outcomes are decided not by law but by force.
This does not mean isolationism. Quite the contrary. It means returning to a more clear-eyed form of diplomacy — one rooted not in multilateralist theatre but in coalitions of like-minded states. NATO, AUKUS, the Quad, even new groupings built around democratic norms and real enforcement power — these are the tools the West must now wield.
If an institution cannot name evil, it cannot confront it. And the UN has become dangerously euphemistic. It talks of “alleged violations” when the evidence is on video. It speaks of “international concern” as though concern were a substitute for action. And it treats tyrants as peers when they should be pariahs.
We live in an age that demands moral clarity. The return of great power aggression, the use of mass surveillance, the erasure of civil liberties — these are not anomalies but symptoms of a world sliding backwards. To respond with platitudes and protocols is not noble. It is negligent.
The UN, in its current form, is not fit for purpose. That is not a call for its abolition, but for honesty. Its peacekeeping can still do good, its humanitarian arms still save lives. But the Security Council — the body meant to keep war at bay — has become the world’s most expensive debating society, where words replace will, and outrage is confined to the transcript.
We cannot confront the world’s rogues by sharing conference tables with them and pretending they respect the rules. When diplomacy becomes ritual, it loses its soul. And when institutions lose their integrity, they lose their right to lead.
Let the UN keep its marble halls. Let tyrants toast their vetoes. But let us no longer mistake the appearance of order for the real thing.
– originally posted to Flickr as UN Security Council via Wikipedia
