Everything is Idealistic, Until It Is Tried

By October 1945, the year which birthed the United Nations, the United States, and rising superpower rival’s, the Soviet Union, were already several years into fighting the Cold War. A conflict, unprecedentedly global in scale, and which, exactly two decades ago, in the crumbled remains of the Berlin Wall, came to its dramatic conclusion.

Together, nuclear proliferation, fraught with the threat of total annihilation, endured for nearly half a century. Persisting it seems, under the aegis of its very own absurdist, internal, yet compelling logic, that is, Mutually Assured Destruction. (Its acronym M.A.D., distinguished in its doubling as fitting description.)

In this, the UN played its part. A forum helping contain Cold War enmity, bringing both, two of five nation’s, that still today, out of 192 nation’s, sit on its controlling body, the Security Council.

In this twentieth anniversary year since the Cold War’s end, the UN has become a focus for renewed debate. Many question its relevance (less ‘Wilsonianism with teeth’, more ‘toothless anachronism’), believing it unsuited to challenges confronting the West. That, despite fewer nuclear missiles existing now than during the Cold War’s height, the world today is a more dangerous, unstable place, home to increasing numbers of budding, bidding nuclear ‘wannabes’, harbouring grandiose uranium-enriched dreams.

Undoubtedly, what today menaces Western security, is much altered, and, in an era further soured by media-savvy terrorists, sceptics argue, the UN languishes, rather than acts. Powerful political and cultural enemies oppose it as merely old-style colonialism, clad in new-fangled semantics, and not as is claimed, adhering to a universalist language of moral rightness, in deciding what action (if any), it should take in any given situation: this hardly-disguised self-interest, never more on show when military force deployed. The West merely continues to prey on the non-Western world.

Criticism often comes from inside the Western world itself. Notably from humanitarian organizations, most famously perhaps, in Amnesty International’s criticising the UN’s failure to intervene in 1990s genocidal Rwanda.

This however, as with much non-Western criticism of the UN, has both utility and purpose, standing apart from the chaff and bluff that today preoccupies our ratings-fixated media, albeit admittedly, only meeting public demand, and much preferring the sensational over substance. This then, helps separate what is merely news from what is ‘newsworthy’, and unfortunately, good news, and consequently much of the UN’s unappreciated peace-keeping, life-saving humanitarian work, does not a ‘news’ story make.

From the laudable if misguided belief that war between nations might one day be eliminated, the UN was born. A symbol of repression for some, a beacon invested with aspiring values and hope for others, in either case, it remains more relevant today than ever. Is it idealistic? Yes! And too-often, falls short of the values it claims to represent. Yet, to paraphrase the poet Robert Browning, even though for what we aim far exceeds our grasp, we must nevertheless strive at reaching, otherwise ‘… what’s a heaven for?’