by Sukrit Sabhlok

Created on: January 30, 2009

In 1945, the United Nations was founded amidst much euphoria. It was to be mankind's "last best hope": an organization that would tie all member-states together for collective security and peacekeeping purposes. But the U.N., useful as it has been in some minor cases where a broker was required, has been totally ineffectual at removing the harmful ideologies that cause war in the first place. It has done very little to quell aggressive economic and political nationalism, for example. But most disappointingly, the U.N. has been a destabilizing force. It has allowed itself to be used by the great powers, and especially America, to cloak militarism.

From 1945 to 1990, the U.N. was forced to limit itself to small-scale operations (with the exception of the Korean War) due to the prevailing Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. As the Cold War drew to a close however, another round of excitement swept through the globalist camp. "At last!" U.N. supporters declared, the organization could function as envisioned by its founders. Instead of tensions between the U.S.and the U.S.S.R. crippling the Security Council and placing some matters beyond its jurisdiction, there would be a new age of cooperation. This was to lead to a more effective institution.

But what did it mean to be more "effective" when the underlying ideologies of interventionism and nationalism still dominated foreign policy discourse? This question remained unanswered. Instead, the U.N. adopted a fallacious public sector definition of effectiveness. It prided itself in "doing something, anything" with its available resources (Rothbard 1974, p. 82). The more things it did, no matter how absurd, the more effective the U.N. bureaucrats claimed they were. Thus, the U.N. boasted of an increase in the size and scope of its operations. A new Department of Peacekeeping Operations was created. At its height in 1994, the U.N. had nearly 79,000 peacekeeping personnel; the organization had substituted small-scale operations with a permanent nation-building corps.

Since effectiveness was measured in terms of the scale of U.N. activities, rather than the usefulness of said activities, there was no discernable difference in the extent of world peace. Realpolitik struggles continued as they had been for thousands of years. There was no overarching strategy presented to achieve the Charter's objective of saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war". The U.N. is, therefore, a typical

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