UN cooperation fails, Ukraine war has made it too fragmented

A global organisation like the United Nations (UN) reflects the seminal challenges and achievements of its times. In 2020, on the organisation’s 75th anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres identified some of the challenges and achievements that currently confront the organisation. Averring that the world had a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions, he regretted that the UN lacked scale, ambition, and teeth. He noted that institutions with authority, such as the UN Security Council (UNSC), do not have the appetite to bite, indicating a lack of political will and unity of purpose among the member states. Additionally, he urged the member states to strive to preserve the great achievement of having gone so many years without a nuclear conflict or a military confrontation between the major powers.[1] As it attempted to recover from the systemic hammer blows caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the lightning takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the end of the much-vaunted ‘War on Terror’ in August 2021 left the UN picking up the pieces of human rights and humanitarian crisis. Now, the ongoing Ukraine war—the first real European conflict since the Second World War that has put the major Western powers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia on the path of direct confrontation—is proving to be a new litmus test for the UN. As an organisation created after the Second World War by the victors and charged with the task “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,”[2] will this be the crisis that breaks the proverbial camel’s back? The UN is a little more than the sum of its member-states’ volition and power dynamics, especially of the ones that matter most—the largest budget contributors and the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC; the US, the UK, and France are the Western group and are counterbalanced by Russia and China. But Russia’s war in Ukraine has deepened the divide even further. Indeed, Russia sees the US and Europe drawing the fight out “to the last Ukrainian,” with a view “to suppress Russia” and “create an antipode” of it.[3] It is no secret that the West and NATO want to make Russia bleed, deplete, and pay for its misadventure. Some see this as the West’s quest for a ‘End of History 2.0’ (as first conceptualised by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama) with Russia and a possible ‘Cold War 1.5’—if not 2.0—with China. These new geopolitical and geoeconomic chasms make it ever more difficult for the UN to hold together and drive a viable and effective global governance and crisis response system in its four projects of peace and security, sustainable development, human rights, and humanitarian response.