The UN is no longer fit for purpose: what is the alternative?

The veil has finally lifted on the UN. Over the last several decades, it has become clear that the UN is an inept institution, but more recently, especially since the war in Ukraine, its ability to do anything useful at all has been called into question.

The UN’s mission, according to Article 1 of the Charter of the UN:

To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

To that end, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, should be neutral in his stance and promote peace on all sides while condemning radical terrorists. However, a quick glance at Guterres’ tweets shows that he is overly focused only on the civilians in Gaza. The UN has a responsibility to protect civilians, including all those from any country killed by Hamas terrorists. What about the civilians in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and other places with ongoing war? What exactly is the UN doing in these cases? Instead, the UN and its secretary general seem determined to stoke the polarization in today’s world. He is not focusing on the terrorists or the aftermath of the Israelis caught up in the massacre. Rather he is focusing only on those in Gaza. This is anything but a neutral and peaceful stance.

Over the last few decades, the UN has had quite a number of instances of corruption and ineptitude that do not bolster its claims to be a steadfast and long-lasting institution. A documentary on those on the inside of the UN who have chosen to call out corruption, harassment, rape, and other illicit acts details several examples. The Whistleblowers: Inside the UN is well worth a viewing if one wants to dive deep into UN corruption and the subsequent harassment of those who choose to go public with it and, of course, lose their jobs.

However, a few examples are worth noting. In 2010, there was a major cholera outbreak in Haiti following a disastrous earthquake. This outbreak infected nearly 1 million people and killed over 9,000 of them. The infection was caused by a UN peacekeeping base on the Artibonite River into which human waste from the base was spilled. This infected the water in the river which was used by Haitians further downstream. Initially, the UN did not investigate the outbreak within their compound. The delay in doing so caused many more infections downstream from the compound. Eventually, the US Centers for Disease Control got involved and finally used DNA analysis to fingerprint the origins of the outbreak. It was traced back to the UN peacekeeping base. This means that the UN knew that their base was the source of infection but chose to resort to stalling tactics and political wrangling, which they continued for many months.

Speaking of investigation, the cause of Covid-19 may never be known, thanks in part to the slow response from the World Health Organisation (WHO), a UN agency, and thanks in another part to China’s refusal to play by international rules. It is well known that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ campaign to be elected as the head of the WHO was backed by China. In any case, the first investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in China resulted in little information because the Chinese government withheld data and prevented detailed inspections. And a phase two investigation has been shelved, according to an epidemiologist who said earlier this year that, “There is no phase two.” What is the point of this UN agency if it can’t even provide a basic response to the worst global pandemic in a century?

In April, the institution that was once held up as a saviour of post-WWII diplomacy allowed the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, to speak remotely at the Russian-chaired Security Council meeting. Just one month before, in March, she and Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had arrest warrants issued for them. In Lvova-Belova’s case, this was a response to the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Though she said she would allow Ukrainian children to return home, reports from an unstreamed UN special meeting suggested that she had shown a video of Ukrainian children living with adoptive families in Russia. It is astonishing to think about this happening in those hallowed halls.

The UN was set up for multilateral negotiation and discussion. The purpose of it is somewhat obsolete and very much outdated in the current global environment. Multilateral negotiation needs to be both effective and legitimate. Neither are productive in today’s world. The very idea that the UN can exist in a modern world is anathema to the foundation of the UN itself. At the time of the UN’s founding, there were no mobile phones, no TikTok, no open-source investigations, and no way to make micro-donations or participate in local capacity building. It was hard to think of ways to coordinate solutions to global problems without involving a top-down, global organisation. Today, we lead a life of abundance where we can communicate with friends and family abroad and travel with ease, barring any actions that government or multilateral organisations may take to prevent it. That means that we should be able to provide assistance and support programs in a decentralised and localised way, not from the top, as happens in the UN.

So what does classical liberalism offer as a way to change the system? Obviously getting rid of the entire institution and all of its entrenched and unaccountable programs and immune employees is nearly impossible to do. But we should have an ideal to strive towards while we slowly unpick years of waste and corruption.

F. A. Hayek provided some initial thoughts on this when faced with the issue of post-WW2 reconstruction. In his Road to Serfdom, he suggested a system of federations, even on an international level. These federations would be countries or territories with common goals, like economic growth, trade, freedom of movement, or other issues, which would band together on certain issues. We are, perhaps, seeing such coalitions today in the form of the G7 or BRICs group of countries. I would extend that idea to suggest that countries or territories in informal groupings could come together to negotiate trade or travel terms together or provide assistance in the case of humanitarian needs, instead of funneling these through a top-down organisation like the UN. 

These kinds of Ostrom-like polycentric, bottom-up collaborations are already happening on the world stage. Take, for example, the war against Ukraine unexpectedly, Ukraine to date is not just holding out, but pushing back against Russia, even taking back territory from the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The reason is, in part, because of a decentralised response approach. Chris Coyne and others have highlighted the polycentric resilience in the war response while others have noted that local civilians have provided local knowledge and local food to soldiers fighting in Ukraine in different regions. No response by the UN could match such expertise or much-needed home-cooked food.

Another example that I often talk about pertains to the Ebola outbreak in 2014–16. The mobile (cell phone) industry in West Africa collaborated to provide a free number for people to text when they discovered a case of Ebola. The result was an up-to-date and changing heat map of Ebola virus outbreaks that could be used by volunteers to target areas in need of medical support. As a result, over the two years, a comprehensive amount of data was compiled and people were treated. All of this was based on location incident reporting. The UN was not even involved until late in 2015. As with the Covid-19 situation, the UN seems to be relegated to a secondary role in responding to consequential pandemics in human history.

Voluntary organisations can often be effective at generating solutions, and sometimes they end up eclipsing the top-down institutions intended to do the same work. There are many examples of private, voluntary solutions being used to solve everything under the sun, but I am going to provide an intergalactic example. With the advent of satellite communications, disused satellites and other man-made space materials are becoming a bigger issue. Traditionally, satellite orbital and spectrum allotment is negotiated through a multilateral negotiation within the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). However, with the advent of SpaceX and other non-government actors in space, the idea of multilateral negotiation is untenable. These negotiations now need to be multi-stakeholder and include not just governments, but the private sector, academia, and others. Many countries in the UN do not support such a process and will not support the evolution of the UN to include such a process. Much good can be achieved, however, through the sharing of space data and space information through the Space Data Association, a multi-stakeholder organisation. The associate was set up to provide a space for commercial and some governmental entities to share information and data on the use of space. This is one of thousands of examples in many different areas that provide useful solutions without the need for top-down (mis)coordination.

A single global institution is not needed to provide a one-stop shop for the world’s problems. Of course, countries, individuals, and organisations need to talk, negotiate, have difficult conversations, and come up with solutions, but this could be done by coalition groups or regional groups engaging together and among themselves. The UN does not need to exist in today’s world, and an effort to dismantle it would free up time and human capacity to do other things and find other solutions to problems, in a decentralised and localised way.