If the UN Cannot Hold the Powerful Accountable, What Is It Really For?

The 81st United Nations General Assembly is taking place under a strikingly appropriate theme: “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” Yet perhaps the most important message emerging from this year’s General Debate is that many countries no longer believe the existing international system is capable of delivering what it promises.

The criticism has not simply come from governments outside the traditional Western power structure. It has appeared repeatedly from leaders speaking from different regions and with very different foreign-policy positions. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan argued that the United Nations has become unable to fulfil its mission of maintaining international peace and security. He specifically criticised a system in which more than 190 countries are effectively constrained by the decisions of five permanent members of the Security Council.

Kenyan President William Ruto made a similar argument from an African perspective. He pointed out that every UN member has a vote in the General Assembly, but five countries possess permanent power over the most consequential questions of war and peace. His formulation was blunt: the equality proclaimed by the UN effectively ends at the doors of the Security Council. He also renewed Kenya's demand for permanent African representation, with the rights and privileges attached to permanent membership.

These criticisms are becoming difficult to dismiss as simply complaints from countries seeking greater influence. The Security Council was designed in 1945 around the distribution of power that emerged from the Second World War. Eight decades later, the world looks profoundly different. Yet the permanent members remain China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The problem becomes even more serious when some of the very states entrusted with maintaining international peace are themselves involved in major military operations. Russia is waging its war against Ukraine, while the United States has repeatedly used military force in different parts of the world. Data from the conflict monitor ACLED, cited by Al Jazeera, counted US military attacks in seven countries during 2025, including operations involving aircraft and drones. That figure should be understood in its specific 2025 context rather than as a claim about every US military operation during the past twelve months.

The point is not that every military action by a permanent member is legally or morally identical. They are not. States routinely invoke self-defence, counterterrorism, protection of citizens, collective defence or other legal arguments to justify military operations, and those arguments are often contested. The deeper institutional problem is that the countries with the greatest ability to shape the international security system also possess the greatest ability to prevent the Security Council from acting against them or their allies. That is where the credibility problem becomes unavoidable.

If the Security Council is paralysed when one of its permanent members is directly involved in a conflict, the question is not merely whether the Council has failed in one particular crisis. The question is whether the structure itself contains a built-in accountability problem.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly raised this concern. At the opening of the 81st General Debate, he called for a Security Council that is more representative, transparent and reflective of contemporary geopolitical realities. He singled out Africa, noting that the continent had no permanent representation despite being the largest regional group by number of UN member states and a major focus of UN peacekeeping.

The African argument is particularly difficult to ignore. When the United Nations was established, much of Africa was still under colonial rule. African states therefore had little meaningful opportunity to shape the architecture of the organisation. Today, Africa has 54 UN member states and more than 1.3 billion people, yet it still has no permanent seat on the Security Council. Guterres has described that situation as “unjust and indefensible.”

There is already a recognised African position on this issue. The African Union's Ezulwini Consensus calls for at least two permanent African seats and additional non-permanent seats, with the permanent seats carrying the same rights and privileges as existing permanent members. Current UN reform negotiations also explicitly recognise the need to address the historical underrepresentation of Africa, while identifying Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean among other underrepresented regions.

But simply adding more permanent members may not solve the fundamental problem. If the veto remains capable of paralysing collective action, expanding the number of states holding veto power could create a larger version of the same problem.

This is why the debate should go beyond the question of who gets a seat. It should also examine what happens when a permanent member is directly involved in a conflict. One possible reform question is whether there should be stronger procedural consequences, transparency requirements or restrictions on the use of the veto when a permanent member is itself a direct party to a dispute. Another is whether the General Assembly should have stronger mechanisms for acting when the Security Council becomes paralysed. These are not simple reforms, because they would require agreement among the very states whose privileges are being reconsidered.

That difficulty, however, should not become an excuse for permanent stagnation. The UN itself acknowledges that reform is necessary. Its current reform discussions call for a Security Council that is representative, inclusive, transparent, efficient, effective, democratic and accountable. Member states have also discussed mechanisms to ensure that the Council remains fit for purpose over time.

The irony is that the 81st General Assembly is demonstrating both the weakness and continuing importance of the United Nations. Governments are using the same institution they criticise to demand a different international order. They are not necessarily asking for the UN to disappear. They are asking why an organisation created to prevent powerful states from determining the fate of weaker states still gives extraordinary privileges to five countries whose own actions can contribute to international conflict.

Perhaps that is the real question of this year's General Assembly. The world has changed since 1945. The distribution of economic power has changed. Africa has changed. Asia has changed. Latin America and the Caribbean have changed. The nature of warfare has changed. Yet the fundamental architecture of global security has changed remarkably little.

If the United Nations wants to restore trust, reform cannot mean simply giving speeches about reform every year. It has to confront representation, veto power and accountability together. Africa's permanent exclusion has to be addressed, but so does the larger question of whether any country, regardless of how powerful it is, should have the ability to block collective action indefinitely while remaining insulated from meaningful institutional consequences.

The 81st General Assembly has made the problem impossible to ignore. The remaining question is whether the countries that designed the system in 1945 are prepared to allow the world of 2026 to redesign it.