The United Nations General Assembly exposed the fractures running through the international community. Eighty years after its creation, the organization seems depleted in its founding promise: to maintain peace and contain the escalation of conflicts. The paradox of this session was evident — the only possible consensus lay in the recognition that the UN can no longer prevent wars, much less stop them.
Donald Trump’s intervention reaffirmed his solipsistic view of the world. Benjamin Netanyahu, true to his political grammar, reduced the podium to an instrument of legitimizing force, insisting on a security-based rhetoric that deliberately erases Palestinian suffering. China, for its part, rehearsed a discourse of stability and cooperation, hardly convincing a world that watched Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong-un share the stage at the Chinese military parade.
Thus, the United Nations no longer functions as a house of mediation, but as a theater of rivalries. The problem is not merely one of paralysis; it is structural. The Security Council has become hostage to the power of veto, a geopolitical legacy of 1945 that, instead of ensuring stability, crystallizes hegemonies and blocks urgent solutions. Syria, Ukraine, Gaza: each veto cast is another brick in the wall of impotence.
It is therefore unsurprising that reformist voices are gaining momentum. The President of Finland proposed the end of the veto, and the suspension of voting rights when international law is violated. African nations are demanding what is owed to them: a seat at the decision-making table. Africa is the youngest, most populous continent, with the greatest growth potential of the 21st century — yet it remains absent from the permanent structure of the Council. This is not moral rhetoric, but a historical demand for representation.
The truth is harsh: international law has been reduced to a compendium of diplomatic etiquette, with few consequences for those who violate it. The only truly effective law is the law of the strongest — one also upheld by the UN. Conflicts multiply, balances grow fragile, and the price of the UN’s irrelevance continues to rise, with the risk of bursting alongside escalating tensions between NATO and Russia.
We live in a time of transition in which the post-war liberal order is collapsing without another equally representative one to replace it. The UN faces its most severe test: either it reinvents itself, or it risks becoming a stone monument, a memory of a lost hope. The void it leaves will not be filled by diplomats, but by armies.
*Executive Director of Plataforma
