Actually, the UN is broken – and that’s exactly why reform matters

Abhinandan Kumar recently argued (Opens in new window) in The Interpreter that the United Nations was not designed to abolish power competition, but to contain it. He concluded that the organisation is therefore not broken, and only functioning as intended.

Structurally, he is correct. The UN Charter (Opens in new window) granted the five permanent members of the Security Council (Opens in new window) a veto in 1945 not as a drafting flaw or constitutional accident, but as the price of a functioning organisation underwritten by the great powers. Without the veto, America, Britain, France, the Republic of China and the Soviet Union were being asked to sustain an organisation that could, in theory, authorise collective action against them. The veto made that bargain acceptable.

The bargain was therefore not fairness, but restraint. The UN was designed less to eliminate conflict than to keep the strongest states inside a common legal framework and reduce the risk of wars capable of destroying the international system itself.

That logic made sense in 1945, but explaining why the UN was built this way does not prove that the design still works today. Kumar risks mistaking institutional realism for institutional health.

The significance of the United Nations lies not only in the Security Council but in the Charter itself. Its central achievement was the attempt to outlaw war between states. The distinction it drew between legal and illegal force remains the organisation’s most important innovation. Article 2(4) (Opens in new window) reversed the presumption – best expressed (Opens in new window) by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz – that war is the continuation of policy by other means. The Charter established, as a condition of UN membership, that states must refrain from using or threatening force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state.

When the UN cannot uphold that distinction, it may still be structurally explicable, but it is also broken.

Kumar is right that expectations of the UN require recalibration. The organisation cannot abolish power politics, impose justice evenly, or transform sovereign states into obedient subjects of a global legal order. He is also right that expanding the Security Council would not, by itself, solve the problem. More permanent members could mean more vetoes, more paralysis, and a wider distribution of the same privilege that already obstructs enforcement.

The fundamental problem is not simply who sits on the Security Council, but that the current system imposes no meaningful institutional cost on a permanent member that uses the veto to obstruct accountability for its own breach of the Charter. In such cases, the veto ceases to function as a safeguard of great-power consensus and becomes a mechanism of impunity.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates the contemporary failure of the system’s ability to deliver on its foundational promise. Twelve years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, when Moscow directly contravened Article 2(4)’s prohibition on the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence” of any state, the Security Council remains unable to fulfil its founding mandate because Russia itself holds a veto on it. The institution responsible for upholding the prohibition on war cannot act against one of its clearest breaches. Yet governments – including Australia’s Foreign Minister (Opens in new window) – still routinely describe it as an “illegal and immoral war of aggression”.

But the practical meaning of war’s legality depends on whether lawful enforcement is itself institutionally possible when states breach the prohibition. For this reason, the United Nations is both historically successful and institutionally broken. The mechanism originally designed to anchor the great powers inside a shared legal framework can equally place them beyond its reach.

A more credible framework requires that any permanent member vetoing enforcement of Article 2(4) while directly implicated in its breach must justify its position before the wider UN membership. If that justification fails to command sufficient support, the General Assembly must have a clearer route to authorise emergency collective measures. Reform therefore focuses not only on representation but on procedural accountability, the relationship between the Security Council and the General Assembly, the legal status of collective measures when the Council is paralysed, and the conditions under which Resolution 377 (Opens in new window), “Uniting for Peace”, can be triggered.

Such a mechanism does not abolish the veto or remove great power politics from the United Nations. It does, however, prevent the veto from remaining final when a permanent member uses it to shield its own breach of the Charter and render lawful enforcement impossible. In effect, these ideas reintroduce the precise anxiety that the permanent members in 1945 feared most: the possibility that the wider international community could authorise lawful counterforce against a great power.

So, yes, the United Nations was indeed built this way (Opens in new window), and that design remains one of the great constitutional achievements of modern history. But its most important legacy was not the institution itself but the proposition that war between states is illegal. Preserving that norm does not require pretending that great power politics can be abolished. It requires ensuring that great power privilege does not make the Charter unenforceable. Otherwise, the prohibition on war risks becoming not a rule of international order, but merely a ritual of condemnation after the fact.