THE UNITED NATIONS, FAILING AT ITS CORE MISSIONS.

It's long been a useless debating society contributing to traffic jams in New York.

A look at the resolutions passed by last year's General Assembly—often nonbinding, unlike those of the U.N. Security Council—shows an organization that meddles in the domestic politics of its members while failing to pursue its stated mission to "maintain international peace and security."

Active wars rage in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, with internecine conflicts erupting yearly in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet the previous General Assembly passed five times as many U.N. resolutions directed at Israel as any other nation, including countries with notorious human rights records like Cuba, Iran, and Myanmar.

Thanks to its unwieldy organizational structure, the U.N. is highly susceptible to waste, fraud, and abuse. It can't enforce the policies it adopts, and its actions often depend on the whims of the Security Council, whose five permanent members opportunistically exercise veto power. Unable to do much to curtail global conflicts, the U.N. has focused on issues better handled by domestic governments, like environmental laws and racial justice.

The incongruent nature of its mission and what happens in practice are perhaps best seen in the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, which is currently presided over by a representative of Indonesia, whose government sanctions arbitrary killings, torture, and crackdowns on dissent, according to the State Department's 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

That might be about as well as any international organization can do.  Each country gets one vote in the General Assembly.  That's obviously less than democratic, if you apportion by population.  Five permanent members of the Security Council can gridlock anything they don't like.  Its continued existence at least gives the sort of process-worshipper who sees value in a rules based international order as something to invoke, or perhaps an opportunity to write position papers.