How the UN Lost Its Way: Restoring the Twin Convictions That Built Global Peace

The world has enjoyed eighty years without a great-power war. That achievement rests on two ideas: that wars of aggression are intolerable, and that empires must end. Both emerged from catastrophe—a hundred million dead across two world wars, and centuries of colonial domination across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. When the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco in June 1945, it gave these convictions legal and political form. For most of a lifetime since, the system held. Billions of people lived in peace and rising prosperity. The empires that once carved up the globe were dismantled and replaced by nearly two hundred sovereign states. It was, by any historical measure, extraordinary.

That era is ending. The twin convictions that built the long peace are buckling visibly now. Wars between nations and within them have multiplied in recent years, displacing and killing hundreds of millions. Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States and Israel waged war against Iran. Nuclear powers are expanding arsenals. Strategic arms control agreements have lapsed. Nuclear facilities have come under direct military attack. In Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and Iran, diplomacy has become skeletal or improvised. The United Nations, once the world's mediator in chief, is largely absent from these crises.

The standard explanation blames the collapse of the American-led liberal international order—the post-Cold War arrangement that depended on U.S. military and financial dominance. But this misses the real disaster. The liberal order was not what produced the long peace. In significant ways, it undermined the twin convictions that actually sustained it. The real crisis is that states and publics have abandoned those convictions, not because America retreated from multilateral institutions, but because the international moral leadership and collective memory that once defended them has eroded. It is a crisis of imagination born from amnesia—amnesia about war, about empire, and about the extraordinary peacemaking successes of an earlier United Nations. Recovering that lost history and rebuilding the politics that once placed these convictions at the center of global thinking are the essential first steps toward a new, peaceful global order.

The UN was not born as a liberal project. It was conceived as a muscular continuation of the wartime alliance, a collective security mechanism that would crush future aggression. But other visions imagined it as an organization that would include the voices of smaller states working toward a better world. The charter represented a compromise. By the time it was signed, Washington and Moscow were already eyeing each other as adversaries. The five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—were each given a veto to ensure the organization could never become an alliance against any of them. They hoped that by keeping everyone within the same system, even at the cost of paralysis, there would be no repeat of the League of Nations' failure.

The Security Council soon deadlocked, but the UN as a whole flourished as secretaries-general became the world's mediators. During the Suez crisis of 1956, Swedish secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold deployed the UN's first peacekeeping force practically overnight, giving France, Israel, and the United Kingdom a face-saving exit from their invasion of Egypt. The secretary-general had no army, but he had the moral authority of a global and impartial mediator. Governments began instinctively turning to the head of the UN in times of crisis. At the same moment, the conviction that empires must end was coming alive. Representatives of newly independent states from Asia and Africa arrived in New York in waves, fresh from decades-long struggles for independence, and transformed the UN into humanity's first universal institution. They embraced the charter with fervor its Western authors had not anticipated and insisted that its language of sovereign equality and human dignity applied to all peoples. In 1960, the UN General Assembly, led by the Afro-Asian bloc, overcame Western opposition and passed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, placing the UN unequivocally on the side of those fighting against empire.

These new states saw no reason why a world of sovereign equals should be held hostage by superpower rivalry. They opposed the very logic of the Cold War and worried that Americans and Russians, left to their own devices, would eventually take the rest of the world down with them. Given the threat of atomic annihilation, only a new era of peace and global cooperation grounded in sovereign equality could follow the age of empire. Together, they invested the UN with a moral authority that did not flow from any great power. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Burmese secretary-general U Thant provided the vital off-ramp. Through public and private messages to President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev, and a personal mission to Havana to meet Fidel Castro at the height of the crisis, he positioned himself as the impartial mediator essential for de-escalation. For Khrushchev and Castro, being able to respond positively to an appeal for peace from a UN secretary-general rather than an ultimatum from Washington proved indispensable. Kennedy pushed back against aides calling for military action by arguing that the United States had to wait for U Thant's diplomacy. When needed most, the UN generated the time and space required for the great powers to walk themselves back from the brink.

There were many more mediation triumphs. In 1965, when India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir, Thant flew to both capitals. He cultivated the trust of both leaders, crafted a cease-fire formula, then judged exactly when Security Council pressure would prove most helpful. After three weeks, when battlefield options became limited, a UN peace option was ready and waiting. The war came to an end. In the Congo, which had become independent in 1960 but where Belgium launched what it called a humanitarian intervention and hived off a mineral-rich southern region under a white supremacist regime, Thant pushed for a military solution, mobilizing an Indian-led UN force that routed the white supremacist forces in early 1963. Tough UN action put the organization's increasingly spirited stance against empire into practice. But Washington's attitude toward its creation began to sour. Thant's framing of the war in Vietnam as a fight for self-determination, together with his multiyear efforts to broker talks between the United States and North Vietnam, provoked fury in Washington. By the early 1990s, the UN had safeguarded the long peace through over a dozen peacemaking interventions and through its consolidation of the postimperial system of sovereign nation-states.

Then came the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower. The liberal international order that followed was built around Washington's unchallenged economic and military supremacy. Interstate mediation gave way to interventions in civil wars. The Third World vision of a new international economic order with a fairer global trading system was swapped for development aid and poverty reduction targets set by Western donors. Sovereignty became conditional, subject to override in the name of human rights and humanitarian need. The increasing number of Security Council-authorized interventions after the Cold War, from Somalia in 1992 to Libya in 2011, even when occasioned by atrocities, risked turning the organization into a mechanism for projecting American power rather than upholding universal principles. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 dealt a direct blow to the conviction against wars of aggression. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, the twin convictions were already crumbling. The once highly visible role of secretaries-general as mediators between states had all but disappeared. Now, the post-Cold War liberal international order is itself disappearing. The United States has turned its back on alliances that were its linchpins. The UN has been left rudderless and faces acute financial pressure, its past record of peacemaking success almost entirely forgotten.

What is needed now is the restoration of the original twin convictions to the heart of global politics. Three things are required. First, a mix of governments from across all regions must champion these dual convictions and insist that they guide international responses to conflict and crisis. Second, the next secretary-general, to be selected in the coming months, must have the courage and creativity to insert himself or herself into the most dangerous conflicts, demonstrating through bold action that principled peacemaking remains possible. Third, and most fundamentally, governments and publics must recover the memory of the disasters of war and empire and of what the early UN achieved. There was a time when every person sitting around the UN Security Council table had direct experience of total war or colonial humiliation. They needed no reminders of the horrors of both. What should have followed was cultural transmission, the stories a society tells about itself, that kept the twin convictions alive. But the transmission failed. World War II is routinely celebrated in the West as a historic triumph but seldom remembered as an overwhelming calamity in which ascendant powers and waning empires flung the world into unprecedented carnage. In much Western publishing, media, and elite education, early UN history, particularly the pivotal role played by non-Western states in shaping the postcolonial world, has been entirely overlooked, often in favor of narratives framed around the United States' contest with the Soviet Union. Across the world, the desire for a world free of war and empire exists, waiting to be mobilized and given fresh political voice. These convictions remain the surest basis on which to build a new peace architecture for the rest of the twenty-first century. Recovering that memory and renewing global leadership is the most urgent task in international politics today.