Ukraine debacle could make UN irrelevant

WHAT would happen to the UN should diplomacy fail to end Russia’s aggression against Ukraine?

Such an outcome would mean that the UN would become increasingly irrelevant and eventually succumb to the fate of its predecessor, The League of Nations, with all the human losses and destruction that went with it.

By the time the world stood on the verge of global conflict following the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland (Northern Czechoslovakia) in 1938, the league had become irrelevant.

As a desperate act to try to regain some credibility, the league expelled the Soviet Union in 1939, following its invasion of Finland.

The Soviet Union is the only state to have been expelled outright from a global organisation dedicated to maintaining international peace and security.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of the UN is that the most isolated of its members has been Israel, as the UN offers platforms for the most immovable and unreasonable Palestinian demands.

The fixation upon alleged Israeli wrongdoings is the flip side of the UN’s tolerance for, and indulgence of, dictatorial and authoritarian regimes.

However, every so often a crisis comes along that reminds us of why the UN was created in 1945, along with all the hopes it embodied. Ukraine is one such example.

During his recent visit to Moscow, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, in a rare UN statement without ambiguities: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the UN. The war is evil.”

Yet it is difficult to see where Guterres’s honest appraisal of Russia’s invasion and its impact on Ukraine and the world more broadly will lead.

Russia is not any old aggressor, but a member of the UN Security Council armed with nuclear weapons that its leaders have invoked on more than one occasion in the past two months.

The question is then, how useful can the UN be as long as Moscow exercises the power to veto?

The UN will not follow the example of the League of Nations by expelling Russia. But democratic member states can, and should, take all necessary steps to isolate Russia within its ranks and to expose it as the pariah state it is.

Beyond that, the debate about how to establish a rules-based world order that actually works, a debate that started in 1919, was re-enforced in 1945 and again in 1989 (Rights of the Child), is still hanging.

KEVIN MEINEKE | Hout Bay