United Nations

• 1. Introduction

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  At 20:07 UTC on the 24th of October 1945, the United Nations officially came into existence. The moment came when the five permanent members of the Security Council ratified the UN Charter, along with a majority of the other 46 nations who had signed it in San Francisco. The Charter itself had been signed months earlier, on the 26th of June 1945, by representatives of 50 countries. From that paperwork grew a body that now counts 193 member states, representing nearly all of the world's sovereign states. It has been praised as a leader of peace and human development. It has also been condemned as ineffective, biased, and corrupt. How does one organization hold both reputations at once? Who decides when peacekeepers deploy, and why does a single vote sometimes stop everything? And what happens when the world's largest contributor refuses to pay its bills?

• 2. A Failed Predecessor

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  On the 10th of January 1920, the League of Nations formally came into being when the Covenant of the League, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect. U.S. president Woodrow Wilson had advocated for such a world body to guarantee peace, yet the United States never joined. The League Council began with four permanent members: the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan.

  In 1933, the League failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Forty nations voted for Japan to withdraw, but Japan voted against and walked out of the League instead. The body also failed to act against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The appeal for international intervention by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I at Geneva in 1936 went with no avail, and calls for economic sanctions against Italy failed. Italy and other nations left.

  When World War II broke out in 1939, the League effectively closed down. Its collapse left a question for the war's eventual winners. Could a second attempt at collective security succeed where the first had dissolved?

• 3. Coining A Name

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  Franklin Roosevelt is considered a founder of the UN, and he coined the term United Nations to describe the Allied countries. Churchill accepted the phrase, noting its earlier use by Lord Byron. The text of the Declaration by United Nations was drafted on the 29th of December 1941 by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry Hopkins. It incorporated Soviet suggestions but included no role for France. One change from the Atlantic Charter was a provision for religious freedom, which Stalin approved after Roosevelt insisted.

  On New Year's Day 1942, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Soviet Union's former Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and the Chinese Premier T. V. Soong signed the Declaration. The next day, representatives of twenty-two other nations added their signatures. To join, countries had to sign the Declaration and declare war on the Axis powers. During the war, United Nations became the official term for the Allies.

  Roosevelt's idea of the Four Powers referred to the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The October 1943 Moscow Conference produced the first public announcement that a new organization would replace the League. The shape of that body would be hammered out at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, held from the 21st of September to the 7th of October 1944.

• 4. The Cold War Freeze

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  The division between the United States and the Soviet Union often paralysed the UN, generally allowing it to intervene only in conflicts distant from the Cold War. Two exceptions stand out. On the 7th of July 1950, a Security Council resolution authorized a US-led coalition to repel the North Korean invasion of South Korea, passed in the absence of the Soviet Union. The Korean Armistice Agreement followed on the 27th of July 1953.

  On the 29th of November 1947, the General Assembly approved Resolution 181, partitioning British Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international status. The plan passed 33-13 with 10 abstentions and one absent. The Jews accepted it and the Arabs rejected it, leading to civil war. Following the declaration of the State of Israel on the 15th of May 1948, surrounding Arab armies invaded. Two years later, Ralph Bunche, a UN official, negotiated an armistice.

  On the 14th of July 1960, the UN established the Operation in the Congo, the largest military force of its early decades. While travelling to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe, Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash. Often named one of the UN's most effective secretaries-general, he was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize months later.

  Decolonization reshaped the membership. In 1960 alone, 17 new states joined, 16 of them from Africa. On the 25th of October 1971, with opposition from the United States, the People's Republic of China was given the Chinese seat in place of the Republic of China. On the 10th of November 1975, a bloc of the Soviet Union and Third World nations passed a resolution declaring Zionism to be a form of racism. It was repealed on the 16th of December 1991, shortly after the Cold War ended.

• 5. False Renaissance

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  After the Cold War, the UN took on more missions in five years than it had in the previous four decades. Between 1988 and 2000, adopted Security Council resolutions more than doubled, and the peacekeeping budget increased more than tenfold. The UN negotiated an end to the Salvadoran Civil War, ran a successful mission in Namibia, and oversaw democratic elections in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In 1991, it authorized a US-led coalition that repulsed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

  Brian Urquhart, the under-secretary-general from 1971 to 1985, later described the hopes raised by these successes as a false renaissance, given the troubled missions that followed. The UN mission in Somalia was widely viewed as a failure after the United States withdrew following casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu. The mission to Bosnia faced worldwide ridicule for its indecisive response to ethnic cleansing. In 1994, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide amidst indecision in the Security Council.

  In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq despite failing to pass a Security Council resolution for authorization. In 2010, the organization suffered the worst loss of life in its history, when 101 personnel died in the Haiti earthquake. In 2013, an internal review of UN actions in the final battles of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009 concluded that the organization had suffered a systemic failure.

• 6. How The Machine Works

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  Five principal organs were established by the UN Charter: the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Secretariat. A sixth, the Trusteeship Council, suspended its operations on the 1st of November 1994 upon the independence of Palau, the last remaining UN trustee territory. The International Court of Justice sits in The Hague, the only principal organ not based in New York City.

  The Security Council carries primary authority for maintaining peace and security. It is made up of fifteen member states: five permanent members and ten elected members serving two-year terms. The five permanent members hold veto power, allowing any one of them to block a resolution. To pass, a substantive resolution must receive support from all permanent members and at least 4 elected members, for a total of 9 votes.

  The General Assembly is the only UN organ in which all member states have the right to be represented and vote. Each member has one vote. On seminal questions of peace, new members, and budgets, a two-thirds majority is required. Apart from budgetary matters, its resolutions are not binding on members.

  The secretary-general acts as the spokesperson and leader of the UN, defined in the Charter as its chief administrative officer. Article 99 lets the secretary-general bring to the Security Council any matter that may threaten international peace and security. The first elected secretary-general was the Norwegian Foreign Minister Trygve Lie. The current one is António Guterres of Portugal, who replaced Ban Ki-moon in 2017.

• 7. Blue Helmets And Their Critics

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  Peacekeeping forces are sometimes nicknamed Blue Helmets because they wear distinctive blue helmets. Since the UN maintains no military of its own, these soldiers are voluntarily provided by member states. The UN has carried out 71 peacekeeping operations since 1947, with over 88,000 personnel from 121 nations deployed on missions. The largest is the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, with close to 19,200 uniformed personnel. The smallest, monitoring the ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir, consists of 113 civilians and experts. Peacekeeping forces as a whole received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988.

  A 2005 RAND Corporation study found the UN successful in two-thirds of its peacekeeping efforts, with 87.5% of UN nation-building cases at peace, compared with 50% of U.S. cases. Virginia Page Fortna of Columbia University studied 47 peace operations and found UN-led conflict resolution usually resulted in long-term peace. Lise Howard of Georgetown University attributes this to an emphasis on verbal persuasion, financial inducements, and coercion short of offensive force.

  The failures are severe. Disagreements in the Security Council are seen as having failed to prevent the Bangladesh genocide in 1971, the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, and the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Peacekeepers have been accused of child rape, soliciting prostitutes, and sexual abuse in missions across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Liberia, and elsewhere. Scientists cited UN peacekeepers from Nepal as the source of the 2010s Haiti cholera outbreak, which killed more than 8,000 people.

• 8. The Bills Come Due

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  The UN budget for 2026 was $3.45 billion, not including donated resources such as peacekeeping forces. Including specialized agencies, total expenses reached $67.4 billion in 2022 across 43 United Nations entities. Funding comes from assessed and voluntary contributions, broadly based on each nation's capacity to pay. In December 2000, under pressure from the United States, the Assembly reduced the regular budget ceiling from 25% to 22%.

  The peacekeeping budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year is $5.38 billion, supporting 66,839 personnel in 12 missions worldwide. The largest contributors to that budget are the United States at 26.158% and China at 23.785%, followed by Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Russia, and South Korea. Since 1994, a U.S. law caps its peacekeeping payments at 25% of the total, though as of 2024 it was paying 27%.

  Funding troubles became severe after 2020. The US and China often delay their payments to influence the UN on topics such as the Gaza war and the persecution of Uyghurs in China. On the 19th of May 2025, only 61 countries paid their dues on time and in full. In January 2026, Guterres sent a letter to all members warning of an imminent financial collapse of the UN, with the organization cautioning that millions of lives are being put at risk.