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The venue for the high-level meeting of the General Assembly, September 23-30, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations. The list of speakers includes 89 Heads of State, 5 Vice-Presidents, one Crown Prince and 43 Heads of Government. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 23 2025 (IPS) – As the UN commemorates its 80th anniversary, at a high-level meeting of 138 world political leaders, one lingering question remains: is there any reason for a celebration– judging by the UN’s mostly failed political performances over the last eight decades?
When he remotely addressed the Security Council in April 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was dead on target: “Where is the peace that the United Nations was created to guarantee? And “where is the security that the Security Council was supposed to guarantee?”
The UN apparently failed on both counts.
But the UN’s declining role in geo-politics, however, has been compensated for, by its increasingly significant performance as a massive global relief organization, providing humanitarian aid to millions of people caught in military conflicts worldwide.
Still, politics, seems to be the primary focus of the 80th anniversary.
Dr. Stephen Zunes, a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, who has written extensively about the United Nations, told IPS: “As someone who has defended the United Nations and emphasized its successes ever since I first visited the UN Headquarters in 1964 at age 8, I have never been more pessimistic.”
The United Nations is no more effective than its member states, particularly the more powerful ones, allow it to be, he pointed out.
“Things have steadily gotten worse since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have demonstrated the failure of the UN’s most fundamental mission of preventing aggressive wars”.
During these past two years, he argued, the United States has been the sole negative vote on no less than six UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, thereby vetoing the measure. And, given that four of these were under the Biden administration, it underscores how efforts to undermine the UN’s authority in ending armed conflict is bipartisan.
Even one of the UN’s greatest successes, overseeing decolonization, said Dr Zunes, has been compromised by its inability to force Morocco to allow the people of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara their right to self-determination, with the United States and an increasing number of European countries backing the Moroccans’ illegal takeover.
“The United States played a disproportionate role in the writing of the UN Charter and subsequent treaties, such as the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United Nations is expected to uphold.”
Yet in recent years,