United We Stand, Divided We...
- Michael Baker
- Sep 25
- 3 min read
As the United Nations assembles in New York this week, eight decades after its founding in 1945, all the signs are that the organisation is running out of steam, beset as it is by interlocking crises of funding and ineffectiveness, and paralysed by great power rivalries that are currently enabling ruinous wars in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in sub-Saharan Africa. The key factor in this UN malaise is the withdrawal of the United States, which has decimated USAID, a cornerstone of the international humanitarian system. and pulled hundreds of millions of dollars out of the UN's peacekeeping missions and refugee programmes. In a matter of months, Trump has taken America out of UNESCO (the UN's cultural agency), the UN's Human Rights Council, and the World Health Organisation, while abandoning the UN-brokered Paris climate accords of 2015. Some US Republicans are even calling for their country to stop participating in the UN altogether. What a far cry this is from those heady days in 1945 when Roosevelt's America - victorious after the worst war in history and claiming (somewhat belatedly) to have defeated the Axis tyranny in the name of democratic freedoms - pushed for a global organisation which, through collective agreement, would stop all future conflicts from starting. In October of that year, 50 countries signed up to the UN, including the Soviet Union which, before the Cold War got serious, seemed happy to partner the United States in policing the world - not, as Roosevelt hoped, to defend the sovereign rights of countries against external aggression but to protect the USSR's own chosen spheres of interest. In hindsight, we can see in that mismatch of high-flown principles and realpolitik that the UN was probably flawed from the start. The fact was that, even as the world body was being created, the Red Army, in occupation across eastern Europe, was consolidating a repressive Soviet power well beyond the USSR's own borders. Stalin, moreover, insisted that the 5 permanent members of the Security Council have an individual power of veto - a mechanism that over the decades has probably done more to undermine the UN's effectiveness than any other factor. Not that the Americans were unmindful that the veto could also protect their interests when it suited them - which meant that a battle over the issue was not worth the candle. It's worth noting that, for all its high-flown rhetoric, the UN Charter of 1945 had little specific to say about human rights, a shortcoming that was corrected in 1948 when a Declaration of Human Rights was drawn up. But even this document contained no reference to racial discrimination, which became a sore point for US delegates when African-American campaigners called on the UN to do more about racial injustice in the United States. No less than Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's widow and doyen of multiple progressive causes, weighed in to help American negotiators make sure that the subject of racial discrimination was kept out of the 1948 Declaration - so as not to offend powerful southern politicians in Congress (many of them Roosevelt Democrats). It's surprising to learn too that, despite its leading role in the Nuremberg trials, the US failed to sign up to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, only doing so in 1985 when President Reagan, after press criticism of his state visit to West Germany for failing to give sufficient recognition to victims of the Holocaust, hastily pushed it through Congress. All that said, and for all the UN's imperfections from the outset, the great difference in 1945 was that the prevailing political will, led by US dollars and drive, was greatly in favour of such a global forum, so that emergent post-war nations were only too eager to join, not least as a way of legitimising their status in the new world order. In contrast, Trump's America has turned its back on multilateralism: it's not interested in finding global solutions to global problems - indeed, arguably it doesn't want the UN to work at all.

The first ever session of the UN Security Council was held on 17 January, 1946, not on American soil but in London - at of all places Church House, Westminster, headquarters of the Church of England. This was because the committee creating the UN was based in wartime London and, symbolically, Church House seemed appropriate for an organisation dedicated to world peace.
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