The UN General Assembly convened its 81st session under the title “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations That Delivers for All”, which is less of a diplomatic slogan than an acknowledgment of crisis.
The world body faces a growing dilemma: a declining confidence in the international order and the UN’s ability to uphold the rules it spent eight decades establishing. This reflects a moment the body has described as a “historic crossroads” for the multilateral system, marked by a growing chasm between its declared principles and its capacity to enforce them.
The annual UNGA meeting has become something of a diplomatic pilgrimage, where nations and institutions air their grievances before the world, broadcast live in every language—only to return home with little having changed. Clearly, the UN’s problem does not lie in a lack of meetings or speeches.
While the UNGA serves as a platform for official statements, the actual decision-making is held captive by the Security Council. While the Council is supposedly responsible for maintaining international peace and security, charged with identifying threats to peace or acts of aggression, it has become a reflection of the very conflicts it was intended to settle.
A Dysfunctional System
The crisis of trust in the international order is starkly evident at the Security Council, where the gap between a mandate to maintain international peace and security and the actual capacity to fulfil that role continues to widen. The Council remains plagued by rifts among its five permanent members—the P5—and constrained by the vetoes they each hold, whether over imposing sanctions or authorizing the use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security.
As great-power rivalry intensifies, these divisions increasingly mirror the crises of the international order, even as they limit the Security Council’s ability to contain them. Great powers’ interests often take precedence over collective security, while international law is interpreted through double standards and flexibility, contrasting sharply with the strict enforcement of these same rules against smaller states. This demonstrates that the problem lies not in any specific decision or isolated crisis, but in confidence in the system itself.
Since its inception, the P5 have wielded vetoes to block the Council’s will whenever it conflicts with their own interests or strategic calculations. Consequently, the very body charged with upholding international peace and security becomes paralyzed when the world needs it most.
This contradiction is starkly demonstrated in today’s crises. The U.S. has repeatedly exercised its veto against draft resolutions on Gaza that were broadly supported by the rest of the Council—including a June 2025 text, backed by 14 UNSC members, which called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Washington was alone in opposing it. Similarly, Russia wages war on Ukraine while retaining its permanent seat and veto power within the very institution charged with maintaining international security.
The fundamental problem, then, is that an organization established after World War II to prevent the world reverting to a logic of force unconstrained by international mandates, now appears powerless whenever a major power is a direct party to a conflict or a key ally of one of the belligerents.
This raises the question: How can the Security Council hold a major power accountable if that very power holds the key to blocking such accountability? The veto has transformed from a political privilege into one of the most glaring weaknesses of the contemporary international order; a mechanism for violating international law, stripping it of its value, entrenching selectivity in its application and sowing doubt over its efficacy, which depends on a state’s identity, power and allies.
This double standard will likely prove unsustainable in the face of looming global transformations, including new power dynamics linked to technology, economics and the intensifying, accelerating nature of regional conflicts. This heralds a far more complex global landscape—and further turbulence at the UN, which like other international institutions, will struggle to keep pace with these changes or to “protect the world from itself.”
Gap Between Rhetoric and Response
Speeches from the podium and on the sidelines of the UNGA reveal that many world leaders limit themselves to symbolic messaging, recycling familiar slogans of peace, stability and respect for international law, in the absence of the political will or implementation mechanisms that could translate words into action.
This weakness contrasts with profound crises in the international order. Yet the international community is accustomed to idealistic UN language, devoid of clear enforcement mechanisms, to the point where rhetoric often substitutes for policy. Speeches become media exercises designed to manage political reputations rather than convey actionable policies. This has widened the gap between the good intentions proclaimed at the UNGA and what is actually implemented outside.
Evidence lies everywhere. The war in Ukraine drags on. Gaza remains an open theater of conflict, witnessing unprecedented levels of death and destruction. Sudan is gripped by a catastrophic war. Tensions stretch from the Gulf to Yemen. The challenges of climate change, AI, food security and the global economy are intensifying. The world today faces neither a single crisis demanding resolution, nor a single war with a negotiable end, but rather an interconnected web of conflicts, crises and technological and economic transformations—all with intertwined repercussions, compounding their collective impact. Crises no longer unfold along isolated tracks, but intersect and feed into one another, creating an increasingly fragile and complex global landscape.
Most critically, these crises are not geographically isolated. For years, major powers treated conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, as peripheral issues that could be managed militarily or contained diplomatically without directly affecting individuals in New York, Washington or Paris.
However, today’s crises in the straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab have discredited this notion. When maritime corridors are disrupted, war does not remain confined to military maps, but immediately spills over into higher energy prices, insurance and shipping costs, and supply chain disruption and inflation. This dissolves the boundary between the battlefront and the marketplace—and between geographically distant conflicts and people’s daily lives. Events in the Gulf or the Red Sea thus become integral to the economic and political calculations of Western capitals.
Adapting to a Changing System
As the UN bids farewell to Secretary-General António Guterres, it faces a test perhaps tougher than the Cold War. The system established in 1945 was built around the nation-state, conventional warfare, geographical borders and clear military balances of power. By contrast, today’s world operates through cyberspace, supply chains, AI, transnational technology firms and maritime corridors whose disruption can shake distant economies within days—all alongside fundamental shifts in the nature of power itself.
Yet international institutions continue to operate with a mindset designed for a vastly different world. This raises questions over the UN’s relevance. The UNGA brings 193 nations together under one roof and is unrivaled as an international forum, being virtually the only such space where major powers and small states each have an equal footing and a single vote. Yet the enduring need for the UN does not necessarily mean that its current format remains suited to a rapidly changing world.
The question is whether today’s UN can manage a world that no longer resembles the one that created it. The distribution of power, the global economy, and the nature of warfare have all evolved; new powers have emerged. The primary structure for international security decision-making remains governed by power balances dating back to the aftermath of World War II. Therefore, “restoring trust” cannot be merely a slogan; it requires confronting a long-deferred crisis. How can an institution supposed to reflect the current international order persist with a structure that mirrors the world of over 80 years ago?
On the eve of the UNGA’s 81st session, Guterres remarked that the world faces an “era of deep uncertainty.” He noted that power is shifting and institutions must adapt accordingly—without abandoning their principles. This is the complex equation facing the UN: the chasm between an old international order that is losing its persuasive power and a new order whose rules remain undefined. Between the two, wars proliferate, maritime corridors are disrupted, energy prices rise and institutional trust erodes, while technology evolves faster than governments can regulate it.
Yet perhaps the greatest risk today is not an overt collapse of the international order, but rather that it endures—while its actual capacity to enforce rules and uphold its legitimacy is hollowed out. The world needs to restore trust not only in the UN, but also in the principle that a single set of rules applies to all states, regardless of their size, power or allies. Absent this, the crisis will extend beyond the ineffectiveness of the UN to a crisis of the international order itself: the very order the UN was established to protect and imbue with meaning that transcends mere balances of power.
