For close to eight decades, the world has been asked—no, instructed—to genuflect before the United Nations as though it were the court of human conscience, the hallowed altar of human values.
Presidents arrive in motorcades, draped in borrowed gravitas. Diplomats speak eloquent dialect of polished emptiness – “rules-based order,” “collective security,” “international norms” – phrases so overused they now sound like the incantations of a tired priesthood presiding over a dying, fading faith.
We were told this institution would tame power, civilize the jungle, and banish war forever and ever more. Humanity would live peacefully for eternity.
We were fooled. The savage jungle never left; it simply rented office space in Midtown Manhattan in New York City.
The recent assault on Iran by the United States and Israel did not merely violate international law; it exposed the farce beneath it.
No serious legal defense was mounted to justify the naked aggression. No attempt at diplomatic nicety or subtlety was made.
The convicted felon in the White House did not bother to hide his duplicitous and barbarous nature. Pedo Trump spoke with the blunt confidence of an Emperor at the peak of his imperial power. He told the world that he does not recognize any International law, and his actions would be tempered only by his gut feelings and his morality. This comes from a power-drunk narcissistic pedophile with the integrity of a hyena.
The leader of the Epstein Elite dared International legality to adjust itself to his whims and caprices.
And what did the United Nations do? It did what it has perfected since 1945; it cleared its throat, shuffled some paperwork, and disappeared into procedural irrelevance.
We shouldn’t consider this an institutional failure, since the UN was deliberately designed this way. Despite all the fanciful and lofty declarations, the UN remains a club where might makes right.
To understand the United Nations, we must discard the mythology and return to its origins.
In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allied powers – the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China – faced an ancient problem: how to convert military triumph into durable political control without appearing overtly imperial.
Their solution was not naïve by any chance. It was exquisite in its duplicity.
The victorious powers constructed an organization that preached sovereign equality while embedding structural inequality at its core. It was for a purpose.
As we all know, the United Nations Charter speaks loftily of equal nations, but the real power resides in the Security Council, where five permanent members possess the veto, the most effective legal weapon ever devised.
The veto is not merely a procedural tool; it is a shield against accountability.
It ensures that no great power can be judged, restrained, or even meaningfully criticized when its interests are at stake. The veto system transforms the Security Council from an arbiter into a cartel, a closed boardroom where the powerful negotiate the terms of their own impunity.
Imagine a courtroom where the accused can terminate proceedings at will. That is what was presented to the world as the architecture of global justice.
And like all structures built to preserve privilege, it has outlived the world that produced it.
Britain and France still occupy permanent seats, even though they are now relics of a vanished imperial age, their geopolitical weight now sustained less by material power than by institutional inertia.
Meanwhile, entire continents remain structurally voiceless. Africa, with its vast population and strategic significance, is absent from permanent representation. Latin America watches from the margins like a spectator at a match. India, a civilizational state of immense population and consequence, is treated as a perpetual aspirant rather than a stakeholder.
The United Nations system is not merely outdated; it is anachronistic.
Yet the conversation remains trapped in the language of “reform,” that most diplomatic of euphemisms. Reform suggests adjustment; what the UN required is replacement.
The central contradiction of the UN is no longer defensible: a body that claims universality but operates through exclusion cannot sustain legitimacy indefinitely.
Defenders of the United Nations argue that, despite its flaws, it provides a framework for international law.
But law, in any meaningful sense, requires consistency. It demands that rules apply irrespective of power. This flaw is at the core of the United Nations failures.
When weaker states violate international norms, the response is swift and theatrical. Sanctions are imposed with stunning alacrity. Investigations are launched without delay. Condemnations are issued with moral clarity. The machinery of accountability moves with impressive efficiency. Libya is a good example. The most successful African country was bombed into the Stone Age by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (UNSCR 1973).
But when a great power acts in flagrant violation of international law, the system hesitates, then retreats. The UN retracted into its shell as the US and Israel waged an illegal war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Now, the language becomes evasive, and context is invoked. Great emphasis is now laid on complexity. And when necessary, the veto is deployed, not as a last resort but as a routine instrument of geopolitical hygiene.
What resulted from the double-dealing is not a rules-based order, but a hierarchy disguised as one.
Each crisis now unfolds with predictable choreography. Emergency meetings are convened. Speeches are delivered. Cameras capture the performance. Then the inevitable occurs: paralysis, followed by quiet acquiescence.
The aggressor continues. The institution issues another statement of “deep concern.” We can dismiss this as governance. It is not. What we have is pure theatre. A ritualized, expensive, and ultimately inconsequential theatre.
Perhaps the most revealing spectacle is the annual gathering of leaders from the Global South at the General Assembly. They speak, often with genuine conviction, about justice, sovereignty, and equality. Their words echo the anti-colonial struggles that gave birth to their nations.
But the General Assembly is structurally impotent. It can deliberate, but not decide. It can proclaim, but not enforce.
Power remains concentrated where it has always been, inside a chamber where five Chosen States retain the legal authority to override the will of the rest of humanity.
Thus, the world is left with an institutional absurdity: a parliament without legislative power and a court without jurisdiction over the powerful.
The recent attack on Iran did not disrupt this system. It clarified it.
When American officials declare that international law does not bind them, they are not being reckless. They are articulating the operational logic of the order itself. Law exists, but selectively. It is enforced downward, never upward.
In this sense, the United Nations merely provides a language through which dominance can be justified, managed, and, when necessary, obscured.
But institutions, no matter how carefully constructed, depend on belief. And belief in the UN is eroding fast.
Each unpunished violation, each selective application of law, each veto deployed in defense of power chips away at the fragile legitimacy upon which the entire system rests.
The façade remains, but the conviction behind it is weakening. History is unforgiving to systems that lose their moral credibility. History also teaches that Empires do not collapse because they are challenged. They collapse because they are no longer believed in.
The United Nations now stands at that threshold.
The question is no longer whether the United Nations can be reformed, but whether it can continue to command the illusion of neutrality in a world that increasingly sees through its hypocritical double-standards.
We do not know what comes next, but one thing is clear: any future international order that seeks durability must confront the foundational flaw of the current one, that law without equality is merely an instrument of power.
A new International order is urgently required. The world needs a new organization where no one wields a veto. One where there is no permanent aristocracy and no exemptions from the rules.
Anything less will reproduce the same contradictions under a different name.
The attack on Iran did not break the United Nations. It stripped it of its illusions and contradictions.
What remains is an institution revealed in its original form, not as a guardian of peace, but as a manager of hierarchy—a house of law for the weak, and a playground for the strong.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
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