Scandals and hope at the UN: Is it worth it?

What good is the United Nations in 2024?

With wars raging, AI disrupting, inequality growing, and climate change accelerating, UN Secretary-General António Guterres says that “a powder keg risks engulfing the world.”

That’s one reason why the GZERO team is paying close attention to a giant gabfest, where leaders like President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, policymakers, diplomats, and influencers from 193 countries have gathered this week to try to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.

It’s why you saw Ian Bremmer’sexclusive interview with Guterres on our PBS TV program GZERO World or, as we reported today in our morning newsletter, we have Iran’s Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif on the show denying that Iran was involved in the assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump, while admitting that US election hacking came from someone in his country. Watch the clip here and tune in next week for the full interview on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.

It’s also why we hosted and broadcast a series of key livestreams with world leaders covering everything from governing AI to the conflicts in Europe, Lebanon, Gaza, and Ukraine.

I have been incredibly proud of the work the team has done sorting through the global noise to get at the clear political signals while highlighting the issues in an insightful, nonpartisan way.

But the question remains: Why bother paying attention to the UN?

It’s easy to be cynical about the UN. As Brett Stephens once described it, “The U.N. is a never-ending scandal disguised as an everlasting hope. The hope is that dialogue can overcome distrust, and collective security can be made to work in the interests of humanity. Reality says otherwise.”

Scandals, failures, hypocrisies, and disappointments fly around the UN as prominently as the flags around its New York City headquarters, and Stephens waved many of them, from the failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre in Srebrenica, to corruption in the oil-for-food program in Iraq. That was back in 2018.

Today there are even more, from the outrage surrounding allegations that some UNRWA workers worked with Hamas during the Oct. 7 massacres, to the obstructive dysfunctions of the five permanent members that have veto powers, which has proven to be a tragic obstacle to real global action in key conflicts, like Sudan. It’s hard to take the UN seriously when Iran gets a turn chairing its Human Rights Council Social Forum.

Even reading through the main agenda of the 79th General Assembly session, it’s understandable why some critics experience high-speed eye-rolling that rivals the backspin on a Roger Federer backhand. For example, one goal says: “Achieving global nuclear disarmament is the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.” How’s that going? Just yesterday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced that he was alerting his nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold needed to justify the use of nuclear weapons, a major escalation in the war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, less than 20% of the famed 17 Sustainable Development Goals are on track to be completed by 2030.

“The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” quipped John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN under former President George W. Bush. Many critics today still think he’s right.

But is he?

Only pointing out the UN’s failures to solve complex global problems is like describing Ted Williams as a guy who failed to get a hit 60% of the time, instead of noting that a baseball player hitting .400 is one of the greatest feats in sports. It’s like dismissing venture capital investors as losers because at least 80% of their investments go bust, instead of focusing on the ones that succeed and more than make up for the other losses. In very hard challenges, a low success rate can still be a major victory.

Back in 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problem” to describe political, environmental, or security challenges that are uniquely difficult to solve and may have no single right answer. That’s where the UN is needed most, to pull in global voices that often disagree or are at war with each other and make a genuine attempt to solve wicked problems. That takes time.

The fact is, there are many UN successes, notably the World Food Programme, which helps over 80 million people, delivering food, medicines, and vaccines to countries in crisis. There are peace treaties and accords establishing norms and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its most famous document.

This past week, there was a major success in global governance on AI with the Global Digital Compact, which was signed by most major countries except Russia. They agreed to everything from global standards on accessibility, use, and design, to the establishment of an international scientific panel, which will — like the IPCC does for climate — create a measuring tool and a road map for how AI governance might unfold. There is literally no other place in the world where this could happen.

Is there a need for UN reform? Of course. That is why, for example, there is a strong push to create two permanent seats for Africa on the Security Council. In this video that I urge you to check out, Ian Bremmer argues that despite the challenges facing the world’s largest multilateral organization, the UN is more relevant than ever.

But the institution is only as good as the members make it through their financial contributions, attendance, and support. One of the key challenges is making all the work that is happening — and there is a lot — understandable and relevant to the wider public in order to overcome the massive trust deficit the UN faces.

Reestablishing trust takes radical transparency, and that’s why GZERO has made such an effort to pull back the curtain and give people a chance to see, hear, and debate the real policies and ideas that are being pitched. You should be able to judge for yourself if the UN is useful or not. We hope our coverage gives you the tools to do just that.