After 80 years, is the United Nations past its prime?

As the United Nations marks its 80th anniversary, the record of the world’s largest—and arguably most important—international organization is mixed. Moments of decisive action vie with long stretches of gridlock, while the debate continues over whether the institution has outlived its purpose. Its history since 1945 is at once a study in institutional ambition, fragile diplomacy, and a constant tug-of-war between global ideals and national interests.

To Randall Stone, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, one of the UN’s greatest contributions over the last eight decades has been to “reduce frictions” that would otherwise prevent cooperation among its 193 member states. But he is sanguine about its limitations.

The question, he says, is whether the organization can continue to matter in an era of intensifying US-China tensions, a resurgent Russia, and planetary crises such as climate change and pandemics.

Spoiler alert: He says it can and must.

Conceived in 1945 in the direct aftermath of World War II, the UN was designed to avoid a repeat of the failures of its forerunner, the League of Nations. Its most important innovation was to embed power directly into its organizational structure by giving five powerful countries—China, Russia (then the Soviet Union), the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—a greater voice within the organization by providing them with a veto right.

The veto assures the great powers that actions won’t be taken that violate their fundamental interests. “As a result,” Stone says, “they’re willing to participate.”

That trade-off—providing legitimacy for small states on one hand and guarantees for mightier powers on the other—was the bargain that made the organization possible. Yet it simultaneously sowed the seeds of future paralysis. After all, no action can be taken if one of the five permanent Security Council members isn’t on board.

The UN’s history, says Stone, is studded with episodes when consensus among the Security Council’s permanent members enabled real breakthroughs. One of the earliest came in Indonesia in 1947, when Dutch forces fought to recolonize the southeast Asian archipelago. After years of brutal war, the UN Security Council forced a ceasefire and passed a successful resolution that demanded a Dutch withdrawal.

“The muscle behind that,” says Stone, “came from the Truman administration, which threatened to withhold Marshall Plan funds from the Netherlands if it failed to comply, but there also was a united front of the five permanent members.”

The model held in 1991, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Security Council agreed to act. When Iraq refused to heed the demand to withdraw, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 678, authorizing member states to use “all necessary means” to force Iraq out of Kuwait. As an aside, Stone points out that the US ended up collecting more monetary contributions from UN members toward its military expenses than the total cost of the war against Iraq. “We actually made a profit on the First Gulf War,” he notes.

In 2015, with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, the UN proved critical.

“The Obama administration was able to get all five Security Council members on board, which meant that if anyone tried to run around the Iran sanctions, they could be blocked, rendering the sanctions extraordinarily effective.”

But such successes, Stone notes, are the exception rather than the rule.

When consensus frays, a veto looms. The Security Council structure, Stone says, reflects an unavoidable dilemma: Cooperative solutions to international conflict require agreement between the major powers. No clever institutional redesign can escape that fact. Weighted voting, broader representation, or curbing vetoes might look fairer, but without buy-in from the great powers, the enforcement of any policy or resolution is impossible.

That leaves the General Assembly as a forum with symbolic clout but little strength. Still, its influence is not trivial: All the major human rights treaties that have been adopted since 1945, Stone notes, started with votes in the UN General Assembly. From human rights to climate change, the General Assembly has launched cooperative approaches to global problems that would not exist otherwise.

Asked whether the UN’s climate action belongs in the success or failure column, Stone resists a simple binary answer. Climate change has become an existential issue that threatens to reduce the quality of life on earth dramatically, while lowering our planet’s ability to sustain populations and species. That’s why any climate action will be “very controversial at every step” because the adjustments necessary to national economies are going to be “very painful and very costly.”

Hence, the need to coordinate policies. “We need every instrument we have,” Stone says, “and the only global institutions that are engaging very effectively with climate change right now are UN institutions.”

Climate action progress has been uneven, contested, and fragile. But, says Stone, “it’s the pragmatic best you can do under bad circumstances.”

If climate policy illustrates the organization’s limits, public health showcases the UN at its most effective.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN agencies have dramatically expanded vaccination programs and the availability of medicines around the globe. The swift and decisive actions at the onset of the Ebola outbreak proved vital, according to Stone.

“If the UN hadn’t been in place,” he argues, “there wouldn’t have been an early warning of the crisis and Ebola might have reached the United States.”

Human rights treaties, too, have played an important role. Stone points to evidence that countries that sign human rights treaties end up improving their behavior afterward, noting that while far from perfect, “it’s a bit of an amelioration of a really bad situation, rather than solving the problem outright.”

Another clear success comes in the form of international aid and development.

Over the last 40 years, per Stone, billions of people have been raised out of crushing poverty. UN agencies have played important roles along with the World Bank and the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in mobilizing collective responses to acute crises and in coordinating broad commitments to address long-term obstacles to development.

For all the successes, the UN’s failures are searing. Probably the most obvious foundering of peacekeeping were Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s when the permanent members were unwilling to act or divided, says Stone.

In Rwanda, the major powers lacked interest. In Bosnia, Russia blocked common action. While those decisions are made by the leaders of major countries, the UN can act only when there’s consensus.

The United States is the UN’s largest contributor, and it has often withheld funds for political leverage. Still, Stone insists that America reaps more than it pays because a large actor benefits disproportionately from economic development in the rest of the world. For example, Stone explains, US firms are in position to gain more of the profits when poor countries develop than firms from smaller countries.

Of course, broader geopolitical reasons also came into play when the US felt during the Cold War, for example, the need to invest in developing countries. “There was concern that if those countries descended even more into poverty, they would turn to communism,” Stone says. Washington, he notes, has long used the UN to amplify its national agenda.

Has the UN outlived its usefulness? Stone flatly rejects that notion.

“International cooperation around problems that are of general interest is still worth investing in,” he says. “I think the UN is more necessary than ever.”

Why? Because today’s pressing problems—climate change, pandemics, global security—are larger, more complex, and more existential than before. Stone cautions that the gravity of global problems has increased while the ability of individual countries to address them has decreased. If cooperation fails, the quality of life on earth will be “dramatically reduced.” All of this will “require engagement, sacrifice, and policy intervention for many, many decades to come.”

In the future, pandemics like COVID-19 are likely to be more frequent and could be much worse. “Imagine,” he says, “if Ebola had spread as quickly and easily as Covid did.”

Stone cautions against overestimating the UN. It simply cannot end rivalries between Washington and Beijing, nor resolve Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Rather, its most tangible contribution is keeping adversaries in the same room. “It’s a mistake,” he says, “to think that the UN can really solve the great power conflicts. But the Security Council provides a forum where they do have to come together and talk periodically.”

Ultimately, the great powers can’t exercise their vetoes unless they show up for the meetings. That dialogue may not end wars or stop atrocities, but it ensures that even adversaries meet, argue, and explain themselves. Sometimes, keeping the dialogue alive is the most the UN can do. And sometimes, Stone says, that may be enough.

Political scientist Randall Stone, the director of the University of Rochester’s Skalny Center for Polish and Central European Studies, is an expert on international institutions and has written extensively on Russia and Eastern and Central Europe. His latest book project, Multinational Order: US Firms and International Organization (Cambridge University Press), is due in March 2026. Stone is also the author of Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition (Princeton University Press, 2002), and Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), as well as numerous articles.