From its earliest days, the United Nations has inspired a mix of reverence and ridicule. It is at once history’s most ambitious experiment in multilateralism, and, to conservative proponents of realpolitik (particularly in the United States), enduring proof of the doctrine’s limits.

Exhibit A—for both camps—is the radically democratic nature of the UN General Assembly, whose 193 members all get the same (single) vote. This egalitarian ethos provides smaller nations with the same nominal stature as great powers at the General Assembly. But it also means that dictatorships such as North Korea and Belarus are treated on par with the world’s leading democracies.

Of course, the real power at the UN lies with the Security Council, and especially its five permanent veto-wielding members. But the General Assembly is still billed as the “chief deliberative, policymaking and representative organ of the United Nations,” and its votes carry symbolic weight. Throughout much of the UN’s eight-decade history, communist nations and autocratic client states often voted as a bloc in reflexive opposition to the United States and its allies. The “Parliament of Man” has also served as a mouthpiece for Arab nationalists, and then Islamists, to launch an endless stream of rhetorical attacks against Israel. “The United Nations,” a great wit once quipped, “is not so much a solution to international disorder as a permanent alibi for it.”

Yet the United Nations endures, not because its critics are wrong about its shortcomings, but because it’s better than nothing. This is faint praise, I realise. Still, it’s sobering to consider that, for all its flaws, the UN remains the only permanent standing forum where representatives of every nation can speak to their international counterparts—and, occasionally, even find ways to co-operate productively.

To give one example, it was in large part thanks to the World Health Organization, a specialised agency of the United Nations, that smallpox was eradicated in the 1970s. Other agencies and related organisations include the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Court of Justice, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the World Bank. All of these multilateral entities have fairly earned their own critics. However, it’s hard to argue that the world would be a safer, healthier, or more culturally enriched place if they did not exist.

But the United Nations now faces a crisis that threatens to impair its global work. On 30 January, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the body is on the brink of “imminent financial collapse,” citing record-high unpaid dues totalling nearly $1.6 billion (all figures US) and outdated budget rules. He cautioned that the UN could run out of cash by mid-2026, and urged member states to pay their assessed contributions in full and on time, or agree to fundamental financial reforms.

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QuilletteBrian Stewart