Americans are losing faith in the UN, but the world still needs it

Only one-third of American citizens believe that the United Nations is doing a good job, according to a February Gallup Poll. That's down from last year when 39 percent expressed confidence in the global body. And it's far from the all-time high of 58 percent in 2002.

This is hardly surprising. The current paralysis in the UN Security Council over Ukraine and Gaza has dominated media coverage. The UN has also shown more general powerlessness in addressing climate crises, growing humanitarian crises, and the tail-end of a deadly pandemic.

These findings remind me of polls asking whether the United States is going in the right direction. Poor results supposedly suggest that US President Joe Biden's administration is to blame. The country certainly is not headed in the right direction if one is concerned about attacks on democracy, reproductive rights, and gun availability.

However, the Biden administration is not responsible, any more than the UN is responsible, for the lamentable ills in world politics and the inability to address myriad threats to human survival with dignity.

The answers in the latest Gallup poll reflect an absence of knowledge about the UN system’s limitations and the impact of its worldwide activities. The latest results, for instance, should be tempered by the half-century of largely contradictory data from the annual Chicago Council on Global Affairs surveys.

These have consistently found that around 60 percent of US respondents are usually favourable to improved multilateral cooperation of all sorts.

Reverse Alzheimer's

Views about the world organisation reflect evaluations that are an inch deep but a mile wide. Americans do not actually have less or more confidence in the UN these days.

Rather, their sentiments mirror a well-known ahistoricism, which is at least as pronounced for the United Nations as for the nation’s own past.

We could call it an inverse Alzheimer’s disease, in which short-term experiences are retained and highlighted, while the contexts that crafted these memories have slipped away or were ignored in the first place.

To wit, it is essential to recall that the latest know-nothing version of "America First" was not invented by Donald Trump and his nativist followers.

Rather, the isolationist slogan emanated from the proto-fascist trio of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindberg, who sought to keep the US out of World War II. That version collapsed after Pearl Harbor.

What followed? The establishment of the United Nations and the system of satellite functional organisations reflected the clear recognition by former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and then-Vice President Harry Truman about why Washington required international cooperation.

The creation of the "United Nations" was not in San Francisco in June 1945, but rather in Washington, DC, on January 1, 1942, when 26 (and later 44) countries signed the Declaration by the United Nations.

Most observers are unaware that the UN was initially founded as a military alliance to defeat fascism, which entailed a parallel commitment to multilateralism as the standard operating procedure during the war.

The goal was also to guide post-war peace and prosperity through an institution with the same name. The 1940s in many ways represented the pinnacle of enthusiasm and support for global intergovernmental governance.

The tumultuous US-UN relationship in the 20th century was documented by the late Edward Luck in Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization 1919-1999.

The rollercoaster ride intensified in the 1990s and has continued since then. Shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and the allied efforts in Iraqi Kurdistan, "renaissance" was ubiquitous in media and academic analyses. Apparently, there was nothing that the UN could not do.

Downturn

By 1994, however, there was nothing that it could do to halt the murder of a million people in Rwanda. From that nadir, 1999 witnessed contrasting interventions by the international community in East Timor and Kosovo, with and without UN approval.

Following Washington and London’s decisions in March 2003 to wage war in Iraq without explicit Security Council approval, the world organisation once again confronted widespread disillusionment.

Either there was nothing that the UN could do to thwart US hegemony, or there was nothing it could do to enforce decisions against the rogue regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The ups and downs have continued with humanitarian paralysis in Syria accompanied by efforts to isolate Bashar Al Assad's regime for using chemical weapons, the responses (positive and negative) to regime change in Libya, and the unequal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The most embarrassing recent illustrations of the UN's ineffectiveness were the Security Council's inability to react to Russian aggression against Ukraine and Israeli retaliation against Hamas in Gaza.

However, the General Assembly did overwhelmingly condemn Moscow’s war (six times to date, usually with some 140 affirmative votes) and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin.

A similarly challenging and confusing public relations puzzle has arisen since the October 2023 attack on Israel and the disproportionate Israeli response in Gaza. Once again, the UN Security Council experienced paralysis, but the General Assembly did succeed in a vote against Israeli and US positions, with margins comparable to earlier ones against Russia.

General Assembly resolutions do not have the same potential enforcement impact as Security Council decisions, but they nonetheless reflect the weight of world public opinion.

They also verify the fact that it is a limited number of member states that are responsible for the inaction—and not all countries or the world organization’s Secretariat. It is often said that citizens get the governments they deserve; and states the UN they deserve.

As the UN approaches its 80th birthday next year, it's worth calling attention to the circumstances of its actual birth, during the 1942-45 United Nations Alliance.

The end of World War II—like World War I and the Napoleonic wars before it—resulted in yet another experiment in international organisation after rampant nationalism and going-it-alone were exposed as empty vessels.

Today, armed conflicts no longer represent the only threat to human survival and justice. Collaboration is required to address what former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan aptly called "problems without passports."

So, how full or empty is the UN glass?

It is important to pause before becoming despondent over the most recent numbers about negative US attitudes toward the world organisation. The UN system’s shortcomings are legion—indeed, much of my own analytical career has been devoted to outlining problems and prospects.

But "no" remains the clear reply to the question posed in my 2018 book’s title, Would the World Be Better without the UN?

The proverbial bottom line is clear: without more robust multilateralism, especially in the form of universal organisations like those launched during and after World War II, nations and their citizens will not reap the benefits of trade and globalisation, discover nonviolent ways to meet security challenges, alleviate poverty and address environmental degradation.