Raise your hand if you can name the smallest member state of the UN.
Unless you're deeply involved in climate change, if you can't, you're not alone. Tuvalu (population 12,460 as of early December 2022). Located midway between Hawaii and Australia, it is threatened by rising sea levels. Last November, the Prime Minister made headlines by calling for an international agreement to ban fossil fuels.
What is noteworthy on a small scale is that Tuvalu's voting volume at the UN General Assembly is equivalent to that of China (population 1.45 billion) and India (1.42 billion people). That is the United Nations. One country, one vote. Democracy as pure as possible. Put it on the “good” side of the ledger.
However, resolutions by the 193 members of the UN General Assembly are non-binding and can be invalidated if one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, France, or the United Kingdom) exercises its power to veto them. That means Tuvalu's voter turnout at the General Assembly will match China's, but China can veto any resolution coming from the General Assembly.
This puts this on the “bad” side of the ledger.
Security over diplomacy
Over the past decade, the structure that grants special powers to these five countries has blocked efforts by diplomats and international leaders to reform the United Nations' top decision-making panel on international security.
Stewart Patrick, a foreign policy veteran at the Council of Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, called the Security Council “a corpse frozen in amber after World War II.”
This reflects the world at the time when international leaders gathered in San Francisco in October 1945 to announce the creation of the United Nations. This anachronistic system created for the UN's two most important forums has often been the target of criticism. Most recently, a majority of the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an end to Russia's war against Ukraine, only for Russia to veto the resolution.
That war and a series of bloody conflicts around the world contrast with the noble goals of the founding chapter.
The purpose of the United Nations is “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end take effective collective action to prevent and eliminate threats to the peace and to suppress acts of aggression or other violations of the peace. and to mediate or resolve situations of international conflict that may destroy peace by peaceful means and in accordance with the principles of justice and international law.”
Despite efforts to maintain peace, war continues.
The international leaders who created the United Nations dreamed of a world where the horrors of World War II, which killed approximately 80 million people, would not be repeated. But since then, numerous wars have left millions dead and millions more homeless.
Two years ago, on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the UN's greatest achievements as follows: The most important powers did not fight each other and nuclear war was avoided. However, this did not prevent the spread of Sino-Soviet conflict around the world.
Guterres' sigh of relief at having avoided nuclear war came before Russia's invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin's repeated implicit warnings about the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons. The use of such weapons in war was considered so unlikely by political leaders around the world that they virtually disappeared from public discourse for many years.
Now it's back again.
And the United Nations has been unable to prevent ethnic genocide, genocide against ethnic minorities, and other small-scale conflicts. For example, in 1995, Bosnian Muslims were systematically killed while UN peacekeepers evacuated foreigners from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which the UN Security Council had declared a safe zone.
That was just two years after UN peacekeepers stood by and watched as Hutus massacred some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described Srebrenica as “a tragedy that will forever remain in the history of the United Nations.”
World peace seems more difficult than ever.
As the United Nations steadily grew from its original 51 member states, a peacekeeping force was born. The Security Council has deployed lightly armed soldiers wearing distinctive blue helmets to monitor ceasefires and peace agreements between the conflicting parties. Blue-helmeted peacekeepers are recruited from a variety of countries. Bangladesh, Nepal and India contributed the most. In 1988, UN peacekeepers won the Nobel Peace Prize.
For many people, the term United Nations is associated with its 39-story headquarters in Manhattan, but it is part of a broader system of funds, programs and specialized agencies, including the World Food Program (WFP) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). , International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and World Health Organization (WHO).
Technically, the Washington-based World Bank is also part of the UN system, but has a different governance structure.
Perhaps more important than the difficult goals for international peace and security set out in the Charter is the UN's persistent efforts to prevent global catastrophe through climate change. For nearly 30 years, the United Nations has brought together nearly every country in the world for climate change summits. COP is known as the abbreviation for Conference of Parties. The last COP27 was held in Egypt and the next COP is scheduled for Dubai next year.
Voices on climate change return to Tuvalu, where voices are disproportionate to its scale.
In Egypt, Tuvalu's Prime Minister Kausea Natano made headlines by calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty modeled on the nuclear non-proliferation agreement. The issue is sure to come up again at the next COP, as low-lying Tuvalu, which is just 15 feet above sea level, fears being swallowed by rising sea levels if it continues to burn fossil fuels. The ban treaty is an ambitious goal.
The same goes for a world where peace and safety are guaranteed.