Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave voice to a terrible truth in
his UN speech Tuesday: The United Nations is an utter failure.
If the organization won’t actually work to end Russia’s Ukraine war, he
said, it should dissolve itself.
“Are you ready to close?” he asked the assembled dignitaries, after
pointing out that the brutal war violates the UN Charter’s first article.
He’s right to ask. Long fetishized by progressives around the globe as the
last bulwark of civilization against unending war, the United Nations has
proven singularly inept at actually preventing violence and isolating
dangerous regimes. In fact, it often empowers them.
As Zelensky put it: “Where is the security that the Security Council is
supposed to guarantee?”
Russia’s presence as a permanent member at the Security Council’s table —
especially now, in the face of the sickening images of its war crimes in
Bucha — makes a mockery both of the UN as an organization and the
principles it claims to stand for. Zelensky correctly characterized
Russia’s behavior as “no different” from that of ISIS.
The same might be said of China’s permanent membership. Beijing has been
waging a brutal internal war against the Uyghurs for years, while facing
no real repercussions from a global body ostensibly dedicated to securing
all human rights, everywhere.
Liberals in the US have rightly taken up Ukraine as a cause célèbre. But
they’ve made no corresponding alignment in conventional wisdom around the
toothless, autocrat-coddling institutions allegedly responsible for
maintaining the postwar order.
The most Washington seems willing to do in Turtle Bay is try to call a
vote suspending Russia from the UN’s Human Rights Council — a committee
that is itself an utter farce, packed with member nations that themselves
violate rights left and right.
This lame bit of theatrics proves Zelensky’s point all over again. Where
has the HRC been as one of its member states bombs maternity hospitals and
murders families? (Most likely preparing to bash Israel some more.)
Sovereign states can no longer rely for defense on the norms of
international law, but only on the strength of their own arms, the
Ukrainian president pointed out as he called for a wholesale reimagining
of the UN.
Russia’s crimes in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv and beyond (back to Aleppo and
Grozny) provide grim weight to his argument — and expose the hypocrisy
that underlies so many groups claiming to defend human rights.
The United Nations is utterly incapable of succeeding in its mission.
Believers in its principles should be seeking something better to replace
it.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/05/zelensky-is-right-the-united-nations-is-
useless/