Debate: Has the United Nations Become Outdated?

This article is a part of our debate series, where we bring together two writers with differing opinions on a contentious subject to argue their case in a short-form essay. You can vote on who won the debate by visiting our Instagram page @thenewfederalist and answering the question in the description of its post.

The UN Is Outdated by Konstantin Petry

At the very beginning of its charter, the UN declared that its goal is to prevent wars from happening. Objectively speaking, it fails miserably at this goal - and it has failed at it for a long time. In 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda happened directly under the eyes of 5,500 of its peacekeeping soldiers. Why did this happen? Because the UN failed to reach any kind of consensus. Exactly the same can be said about the reactions of the UN to the wars of the present day.

The roots of this evil are located in the structure of the UN itself, which gives the permanent members of its Security Council a veto. These members owe this privilege to no more than the fact that they owned nuclear weapons when it was created. The veto prevents the General Assembly and its other bodies, despite its claim to represent the people of the world and not its super powers, to take a clear stance against unjust wars and genocides.

To make matters worse, among the members of this illustrious club of states with permanent membership in the Security Council, more are currently engaging in active war efforts than recognise the UN’s own court in The Hague. The idea of the UN is a good one, but in its current form, it only functions as a final storage facility for failed career politicians, such as Portuguese ex-Prime Minister António Guterres and former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock.

Besides the advantage its charter gives the existing super powers and its mediocre politicians, it is currently mainly occupied with being deeply concerned and monitoring the situation very carefully. We already have the EU to do that for us. So, the UN is at a point where its predecessor, the League of Nations, once was: the formerly living representation of a good idea. A reestablishment is necessary, but preserving the UN in its current form would be like living with a corpse.

The UN Is Not Outdated by Benedikte Svendsen

Declaring the UN as “outdated” has become fashionable. The argument usually assumes the UN was supposed to eliminate war entirely on its own. It was not. Critics expect the UN to behave like a world government while refusing to create one. Yet, it was designed as something far more realistic: a permanent, diplomatic arena where nearly every sovereign state can talk, negotiate, and manage conflicts. The UN was never meant to replace power politics. It is a forum for coordination between sovereign states, not a global police force.

International politics did not magically become peaceful in 1945. Power rivalries still exist and always will. What the UN created was a structure that makes large-scale conflict more diplomatically and politically complicated. In other words, it forces states to argue in conference rooms before they escalate on battlefields. The alternative to imperfect multilateralism is not perfect cooperation – it is unmanaged power politics. If the UN disappeared tomorrow, conflict would remain.

The veto in the UN Security Council is often treated as proof of its dysfunction. In reality, it is the price of participation. Without it, major powers like the US, China, or Russia would never accept binding decisions against themselves. The UN does not fail because powerful states exist; it exists precisely because powerful states do. A powerless but inclusive forum is still more useful than a perfectly designed institution that powerful states simply ignore.

Imperfect institutions are not useless institutions. Through peacekeeping, humanitarian coordination, and global norm-setting, the UN quietly structures cooperation every day. That may not look dramatic, but diplomacy rarely does. The real question is a very simple one: if the UN disappeared tomorrow, would geopolitics suddenly become cooperative? Of course not. The same conflicts would still exist. Calling the UN pointless is easy. Designing a better system that 193 countries would actually join is harder.