The United Nations: Global Security vs Structural Failure
I often wonder, when on April 28, 1945, Benito Mussolini’s execution was announced, what hope and restlessness it must have kindled. But, no: it had been six years since the war began; people must have held themselves back; it must have felt too soon and too good to hope. Until April 30, 1945, yes, Adolf Hitler’s suicide would have confirmed it: they could.
The events soon transformed into a domino effect, culminating in the end of World War II. This effect eventually led to three unprecedented historical events:
August 8, 1945: establishment of the International Military Tribunal (IMT)
October 24, 1945: establishment of the United Nations
November 20, 1945: commencement of the Nuremberg Trials
Welcoming VE Day, the Allied Powers were resolute: the Axis Powers had to be prosecuted for all the crimes and atrocities committed by them. While the war waged on in Asia, the UK, the USA, the Soviet Union, and France were already making arrangements to bring to trial the German, Italian, and Japanese leaders. The Holocaust and several other heinous war crimes inspired the motive of charging the accused with crimes against humanity. However, the international laws of the time didn’t support the notion. Even though on the occasion of VJ Day, the IMT was already established and prepped, the Nuremberg Trials commenced only after the establishment of the United Nations.
At the time of its foundation, the United Nations was introduced as a global intergovernmental organization that shall endeavor to maintain international peace and security, protect human rights, and deliver humanitarian aid. Its role in the Nuremberg Trials became the UN’s first act of legitimate authority and one of its last unambiguous ones.
In 1945, fifty-one nations signed the UN Charter: with its major portion enslaved, colonized, and/or ravaged by the various conflicts and the great war itself, the world of that time had truly spoken: we don’t want war; we want to live, grow, and develop in peace, respect, and dignity. The charter was to establish, on a global scale, a collective security effort, supported by the stability and authority of its permanent UN members, the P5: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and China.
Humanitarian Crises: Not Crimes Against Humanity
At the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a direct result of persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations. The four largest displacement crises in the world today—Sudan (14.3 million displaced), Syria (13.5 million), Afghanistan (10.3 million), and Ukraine (8.8 million)—carry fingerprints of one or more permanent Security Council members, the P5, as arms suppliers, military actors, diplomatic shields, or direct aggressors. According to The Brown University Costs of War Project, the wars post 9/11 resulted in the displacement of 38 million people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines.
The key point: the P5 wield the powers in the best diplomatic, smart, and tactical ways to handle the issues at hand, but they used them to perpetrate wars and conflicts that razed culture, social fabric, and the very hope of these regions. Furthermore, the atrocities of Axis powers were termed as “crimes against humanity”, a singular move that assured that the acts could be prosecuted—they were crimes; but, the consequences of conflicts, disruption, and imbalance caused by the P5 are termed as “humanitarian crises”—problems that need to be resolved. The former term was given by the victorious faction of the Great War, and the latter by the perpetrators of the “humanitarian crises”.
Iraq
The 2003 US-UK invasion was not authorized by the UN Security Council. France and Russia threatened vetoes, so no resolution was even tabled; the system designed to prevent unilateral war was not defeated but bypassed. The result: more than seven million Iraqis and Syrians are currently refugees; nearly eight million more are internally displaced in the two countries. Between 550,000 and 580,000 people have been killed; several times as many died from disease, displacement, and loss of access to clean water and food.
Brown University Costs of War Project, 2023
Libya
UN Security Council Resolution 1973 authorized a no-fly zone. The US, UK, and France used it to conduct regime change. Russia and China abstained but subsequently argued the mandate had been illegally exceeded. No reconstruction framework followed. No arms embargo was enforced. A relatively stable state was transformed into a prolonged conflict zone, becoming the primary Mediterranean migration corridor, with nearly 147,000 internally displaced and close to one million migrants trapped within its borders.
IOM Libya Crisis Response Plan 2025–2026; IOM DTM Libya, 2025
Syria
Russia backed Assad militarily from 2015; the US armed opposition factions. Both used Security Council vetoes to block ceasefire resolutions during peak civilian casualty periods. Assad fell in December 2024, but 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced; the war did not end when the guns quieted.
UNHCR 2025; UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria
Sudan
In 2025, more than 15,000 children under five were admitted to MSF’s inpatient feeding programs due to suffering acute malnutrition, which is on the rise, compounding the risk of death from otherwise treatable illnesses. Parts of Darfur are in famine. UN officials describe rates of sexual violence as staggering; MSF carried out 4,200 consultations for sexual violence in 2025. Meanwhile, arms flows from the UAE to the RSF have been documented; Egypt, Turkey, and Iran escalated sales to the Sudanese army; Saudi Arabia provided additional backing. Since April 2023, nearly 14 million people have been forced from their homes, and many have had to flee multiple times, losing everything. The Security Council, divided by competing P5 alignments, has been unable to impose an arms embargo or broker a ceasefire.
International Crisis Group, 2026; UNHCR 2025
Sudan: Three Years of War Have Shattered Lifelines, April 2026; MSF South Asia
Ukraine
Russia, a permanent Security Council member, is the direct aggressor. 8.8 million Ukrainians are displaced. The Council is structurally paralyzed because the party responsible for the displacement holds a permanent veto over any resolution to stop it.
UNHCR 2025; Security Council Report
The Sahel
France conducted Operation Barkhane across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger for over a decade, not under the Security Council’s mandate, but under bilateral agreements, meaning no oversight and no accountability mechanism. The operation resulted in more than 2.5 million displaced and thousands of casualties, while failing to defeat the jihadist threat it was deployed to contain. France was ultimately expelled, not withdrawn. Military juntas, whose populations had watched a decade of foreign military presence achieve nothing except entrenching neo-colonial economic relationships, rebelled aggressively to drive them out. Four million people are now displaced across Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and neighboring countries: two-thirds more than five years ago.
Harvard International Review; UNHCR Sahel Emergency Overview, October 2025
These figures denote systematic degradation of human lives. Conflict-related sexual violence increased by 50 per cent in 2024: women and girls accounted for 95 per cent of verified cases. Humanitarian estimates suggest that 90 per cent of women and girls moving along the Mediterranean route are raped. 47 million displaced children are exposed to violence, trafficking, and arbitrary detention. The Central Mediterranean Route—running through the Libya that NATO unmade—remains the deadliest migration route in the world, with an increase of 76 per cent in year-on-year death rate in 2023.
All of these, owing to narrative and veto privileges of the P5, are our era’s humanitarian crises. Britannica estimates that WWII killed 70–85 million people. No equivalent accounting exists for the cumulative dead of post-1945 P5-linked conflicts. It is not because the numbers are smaller, but because the body that would commission such an accounting is controlled by the same permanent members whose conduct would be under scrutiny.
P5 & the UN: A Paradox
Was the UN truly intended as an organ to protect world peace?
UNHCR has advocated for Palestinians in Gaza since 2020. The Security Council has been constitutionally incapable of acting. On June 4, 2025, the United States cast its 93rd veto—blocking a resolution calling for a ceasefire and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. It was the 46th US veto deployed specifically to shield Israel from Security Council decisions. The US government spent USD 21.7 billion in military aid to Israel in the two years following October 7, 2023. Israel, the beneficiary of that aid and the perpetrator of the ongoing military campaign in Gaza, is simultaneously Washington's hyphenated partner in the broader conflict that has now engulfed Iran, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and produced what the IEA has called the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global market.
European nations have expressed concern. But what of it? Analysis of P5 behavior over the last decade has been primarily driven by self-interest, geopolitical competition, and support for allies—factors that directly contradict the Council's founding mandate. The veto, designed to ensure great power buy-in for collective security, has become the mechanism by which great powers immunize their own conflicts from accountability. The Security Council passed only 41 resolutions in 2024—the fewest since 1991, when the brief post-Cold War consensus briefly aligned P5 interests in the Gulf War and made collective action possible. That window closed quickly and hasn’t been reopened since. Russia has blocked 159 resolutions in total, and the United States has blocked 93. Between 2015 and 2024, the veto was used 47 times on Syria, Palestine, and Ukraine alone. The UNSC exercises no control over the current war, simply because the US has a direct interest and a veto to safeguard the same.
Last October, the United Nations celebrated its 80th anniversary. These eighty years are a testament to the work done by the establishment. There is no contest that UNHCR is always at the forefront, advocating against the humanitarian impact of conflicts and regional volatility. Nevertheless, the lack of control or real authority of the UN and its organs, when it comes to its own founding members, is of utmost concern. However noble the intent behind the establishment of the UN had been, it fails to replicate it in practice. As long as at least one of them has a vested interest—however remote—in the chaos, the P5 cannot be persuaded to agree on the protection of human rights. At the same time, none of the founding members can be stopped or called to reconsider or rethink direct aggression or support for it, for each of them has a veto.
At the time of its establishment, three of the five UN founding members—the UK, France, and the USSR—together controlled 30-32% of the total landmass of the Earth, with foreign colonies in Asia, Africa, and South America. The UK, with the least per cent share in global landmass—0.16%—controlled nearly 24% of it. A worldwide vote didn’t establish the UN, of course, but the intention was acknowledged. Even though a global vote was missing, a global hope rested on the UN's shoulders. With the systematic lack of accountability displayed by the P5, how does the UN plan to honor its founding promise and responsibility? I can well imagine that across the globe, when the newspapers must have been unfolded every morning, and contribution of UN, its ideals, its impact, must have been glorified on front pages, what the world must have hoped for: no more World Wars, no more night raids, no more sirens, no more gas chambers, no more Pearl Harbor, no more Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no more separation from beloveds.
US-Israel and Iran War
February 28, 2026: The United States of America and Israel jointly launch coordinated airstrikes on Iranian military and leadership targets; to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, to stop an imminent security threat, to protect Israel and US regional forces, and to degrade Iran’s missile and proxy warfare capabilities.
“In a bold and necessary exercise of American strength, President Donald J. Trump authorized Operation Epic Fury — a precise, overwhelming military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, destroy its ballistic missile arsenal, degrade its proxy terror networks, and cripple its naval forces. This operation, executed in partnership with regional allies, follows exhaustive diplomatic efforts and comes after 47 years of Iranian aggression—including attacks on U.S. citizens, sponsorship of global terrorism, and brutal oppression of its own people.”
-The White House | March 1, 2026
It was expected that with the assassination of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the aggression might soon end; however, subsequent events have proved that the Iranian government was prepared for such elimination. Taking years of strained and sanctioned diplomatic relationships with the US seriously, Iran had been prepared to ensure that even the dissolution of its top leaders would not maim the self-defense, military, and strategic stands in case of war. Thus far, Iran has retaliated with its own ballistic missiles, drone swarms, cyberattacks, and attacks on Gulf-region military assets. Along with civilian casualties in Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and the Gulf areas, displacement has already begun across the region, and can be expected to surge depending on the final terms of the agreement.
As of May, a negotiated exit is desired by Iran and the US, while Israel supports continued aggression. In Israel's defense, the US can retreat home safely, but the former shall be left to fend with the immediate and tangible consequences. Geography grants the US a physical retreat and safety in the active war; Iran has been retaliating to it by attacking US military and tactical hubs in its neighboring countries, which are not even part of this war. The choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran proves that it is aware it cannot physically return the harm to the US, so it is ready to exploit every opportunity to create diplomatic pressure.
Consequently, even if the war were to end tomorrow, not just Iran and Israel but the entire Middle East region would have to grapple with the humanitarian and economic consequences regardless.
The Middle East, especially the Gulf region, is the hub of oil production and exports. The supply has been gravely hit due to Strait of Hormuz instability, with oil prices surging above USD 100/barrel. The resultant energy and trade crisis has the world within its grip, threatening a surge in inflation across several economies.
The US, a P5 member, is again a direct aggressor. The UN reaction: António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, condemned the escalation on grounds of undermining international peace and security. He urged for an immediate ceasefire and respect for the UN Charter, which stands against the aggression.
“I condemn today’s military escalation in the Middle East. The use of force by the United States & Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliation by Iran across the region, undermine international peace & security.”
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General
-The United Nations Office at Geneva | February 28, 2026
The other P4 members, in varied words and stances, condemned aggression on both sides and urged de-escalation. An emergency UNSC meeting was immediately held. The result: nothing.
The US stated Iran’s oppressive history—domestic and global—as its reason to initiate the attacks. This vocabulary is interchangeable. Replace the country names, and this statement could have been issued from Moscow in 2022, from Paris in 1956, or from Washington again in 2003. Every P5 intervention in this essay arrived wearing the same costume: imminent threat, exhausted diplomacy, reluctant necessity, and it was followed by similar diplomatic condemnations by the UN and the other P5 members. Only, diplomatically correct statements do not mean much to the suffering people; they can’t build houses, security, and a future within these smart and intelligent stances.
