The United Nations: What’s the Point?

I asked Rudd whether the remaining secretary-general candidates were advocating the kinds of reforms he’d like implemented at the United Nations. “I … understand that in a competitive selection process such as this, many candidates are going to choose to be publicly diplomatic about the sort of problems the UN faces,” he responded. Presumably he himself can be less diplomatic, now that he is no longer auditioning to be the world’s chief diplomat.

“We are facing the biggest set of external changes and challenges to the global order since 1991,” following the fall of the Soviet Union, Rudd told me. “Over the last 25 years, we haven’t seen anything comparable to the current state of great-power relations. We haven’t seen anything comparable to the current intensity of the globalization process. We haven’t seen anything comparable to the emergence, for example, of terrorism as a mainstream threat to many societies across the world. These are new phenomen[a]. Each age has had its own new phenomenon. But in a quarter of a century, which is a long time [for] an institution that only has a 70-year history, it’s a set of circumstances which should cause us to act.”

Rudd’s report includes numerous prescriptions for reinventing the institution, from striking a new international agreement on resettling refugees to more rigorously measuring the results of UN initiatives. The United Nations, Rudd told me, is much better at reacting to crises than anticipating and preventing them. He proposes investing in a policy-planning staff that can analyze global trends several years into the future, and in what he calls “preventive diplomacy.” As an example, he cited the UN’s appointment in 2013 of the former president of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta, as a special representative to the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, which had just experienced a military coup; within roughly a year, Ramos-Horta had helped forge enough political consensus for elections to be held. Prevention could also mean, for instance, prepositioning food aid in countries at the earliest warnings of famine, or tracking unemployment patterns to predict where violent extremism could emerge.

This is an urgent problem, Rudd argues in the report, because despite its many failings, the United Nations “is the worst system of international governance except for all the others.” Among other things, he writes, the UN has helped avert another world war; played a role in drastically reducing the share of the global population living in extreme poverty; created a system of dispute-settlement institutions to counteract the “long and malignant history of territorial and trade disputes” sparking international conflict; staved off the “all-out proliferation of nuclear weapons” that looked so likely in the early 1960s; and provided humanitarian relief to vulnerable populations that, before the advent of the UN, were often “simply left to die.”

But recent years have brought worrying signs of weakness, according to Rudd. The UN wasn’t a participant in international talks to restrict Iran’s nuclear program, he points out, even though one of its institutions, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was tasked with helping implement the resulting agreement. The UN has been similarly absent from efforts to address other major security challenges like the war in Ukraine and the acceleration of North Korea’s nuclear program. It sluggishly responded to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and has bungled the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. And it has failed to prevent mass atrocities and resolve chronic conflict in countries like South Sudan and Syria. The UN’s role in spreading a cholera epidemic in Haiti through the unsanitary practices of its peacekeepers—a role the organization only recently acknowledged, after years of denials—has further tarnished the institution’s image.

This crisis of legitimacy has direct bearing on the future of the United Nations. Countries, Rudd writes, are increasingly split between “globalists” and “localists,” particularly amid feeble economic growth following the 2008 financial crisis:

This, in turn, is beginning to create a fertile political space for more extreme political movements, either of the far left or the far right, driven by populist protest against the broad, globalizing consensus of the mainstream political center that has by and large prevailed over the last few decades.

Protectionist sympathies are therefore on the rise, as are xenophobic approaches to migration and, more broadly, a political impetus to “throw up the walls” against the forces of continuing globalization. This, in turn, is breeding new nationalist and mercantilist movements, which vilify not only their own governments, but also the regional and global institutions of which their governments are members and to which too much sovereignty, in their view, has already been ceded.

The net result is a fracturing and failure of national politics. We are seeing weakening national support for regional institutions such as the European Union. Global institutions such as the UN are seen as even more remote from local concerns.

On a daily basis, we hear reports of the United Nations succeeding with this or that, or failing to do this or that. But we rarely pause to consider what these successes and failures say about the relevance of the UN in the world today—and what the world would look like without it. Rudd’s report can ultimately be read as a plea for something pretty basic: to not take the United Nations for granted.