Since the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the post-WWI creation of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 — a quixotic attempt to "outlaw" war — and the establishment of the United Nations, the world has searched for ways to keep nations from invading and slaughtering each other. And the world has failed. Miserably.
The latest exhibit of international peacekeeping's dysfunction, that is, of the U.N.'s dysfunction, is, of course, the Russia-Ukraine war. Vladimir Putin's regime sits as a member of the global body, whose mission, in its words, is to be "the one place on Earth where all the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems, and find shared solutions that benefit all of humanity."
This week, Putin's Russia landed five missiles on Ukraine's capital city, which at the time was hosting the U.N.'s secretary general. Finland's foreign minister has called for the U.N. Security Council to examine the unprecedented outrage. Yet Russia is a permanent member of the Council with veto power, hence even a statement of condemnation would be doomed.
The absurdity of a warmongering, atrocities-committing Eurasian shogunate sitting on an alleged peacekeeper's "security" council is also a conspicuous assault on even the concept of international stewardship. As a humanitarian organization, the United Nations is a valuable resource; as an arbiter of peace, it is useless.
In urging Russia's expulsion from the U.N. earlier this month, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky explained his watertight reasoning: "so it cannot block decisions about its own war." In any respectable court of law, a self-interested judge would be required to recuse him- or herself from presiding over a case. At the U.N., a corrupt judge is assigned the protection of his own criminals.
Putin is laughing at his good fortune; his charter-sanctioned freedom to make a mockery of the world's only "conflict resolution" organ, even to show his contempt of the body by bombing a city in which the organization's leadership is meeting in solemn, sympathetic unity with the head of an aggressively brutalized nation. Brutalized by a dictatorship that sits cynically — ironically is too soft of a modifier — within the U.N. as a principal decision maker.
This is not to argue that other U.N. member nations are saints. Still, there exists a vivid dividing line between those states of the world that prize liberty and national self-determination and those that do not. The president of one of the freedom-defending states has perceived the modern world's greatest crisis with alarming accuracy: the life-or-death struggle between liberal democracies and repressive autocracies.
In this struggle our planet's conflict arbiter is — let's just say it — worthless. The U.N. is made pitiably impotent by the autocracies that embody the world's most undesirable attributes and undertake its most objectionable transgressions. If the free world is to confront and overcome its defining crisis, it must fundamentally reorganize.
The most direct and possibly only approach to an international body charged with authentic, global suppression of national belligerence would be the creation of a worldwide NATO — with all its mutual-defense provisions. Let us not forget that the free world has the numerical advantage. Pew Research reported in 2017 that the world's democracies outnumbered autocracies by 96 to 21. (Other nations were classified as anocracies.) Free nations are also more likely to be the world's more prosperous nations, thus their combined resources would make the project financially doable.
Had such a global peace-enforcing organization existed when Vladimir was merely contemplating Ukraine's invasion, he would have stopped at contemplation. He never would have tackled the power of NATO as it is, let alone a NATO whose national membership stretched across the globe.
If Earth is to be a genuinely civilized planet, it requires a genuinely effective peacekeeping force. The United Nations is inherently incapable of performing the task. NATO, transfigured into the GTO — a fully armed, adequately manned Global Treaty Organization — could, and in fact obligatorily would, prevent the Putins of this world from ever again initiating unprovoked aggression.