The League of Nations was created in 1920 after WWI with a mission to maintain world peace. Its failed mission resulted in WWII. The victor nations of the WWII cobbled together the present UN in 1945 with similar mission but preserving their superiority by veto power with the exception of then called Formosa, in the Security Council. That veto power of Formosa, now called Taiwan, was transferred to China in 1971 for obvious reasons.
Trump on 28th December said about the UN “There is such tremendous potential, but it is not living up”. Antonio Guterres on 10 January said “We must rebalance our approach to peace and security. For decades, this has been dominated by responding to conflict”. These two gentlemen have summed up the situation correctly. The UN is disunited and that disunity has produced Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and many other conflicts and hence, it has failed in the mission. The myriad of their agencies are doing good humanitarian work at the field level but they unwittingly have prolonged the conflicts which would have ended much earlier by natural death.
The UN is undemocratic, unrepresentative of massive chunk of humanity and hostage to funders and veto power holders. It is not fit for purpose and cannot be reformed. Let us have a new world body with reformed current agencies, representing every human, democratically run, funded by a capability formula, humanistic and fair to every one without veto and special interests.
Narsibhai Patel
New Malden
