E

ight decades after the establishment of United Nations, humanity still faces an alarming rise in conflict. According to the Global Peace Index, more countries are involved in active conflict today than at any given time since World War II.

Lacking effective enforcement mechanisms, the U.N. remains embedded in a post-colonial power hierarchy that privileges dominant states and functions more as a mechanism that reflects existing power dynamics.

Post-1945 conflict trends emphasize this structural weakness. Significant here is the role of the United States. The U.S. military has been engaged in conflicts across the world at virtually all times over the past century. The United States has never experienced a period in which its armed forces were entirely disengaged from conflict. Post second world war, U.S. military action has increasingly occurred without formal declarations of war, relying instead on executive authority, congressional authorizations (such as the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force ), or broad interpretations of self-defense and preemptive wars.

Washington has invoked the U.N. to confer legality and legitimacy on the use of force when multilateral authorization has aligned with U.S. strategic interests. When it has not, the U.S. has demonstrated a consistent willingness to act unilaterally or through alliances of willing bypassing the U.N. framework altogether.

This selective multilateralism has often been justified through expansive references to the “international world order”, a term frequently employed as a flexible political narrative that legitimizes U.S. action while accommodating exceptions for itself. In practice, international law is treated arbitrarily, invoked when useful and sidelined when constrained.

Is International Law subordinate to power?

Today’s American behavior is reminiscent of a declining power which feels increasingly threatened by external forces and is therefore willing to contradict the very architecture of international law it once helped create.

On January 7, 2026, President Donald J. Trump signed a memorandum initiating U.S. withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including 31 United Nations bodies such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , and UN Women. Since returning to office for a second term, Trump has cut funds to the United Nations, exited from the Human Rights Council and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), continued suspension of support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO)  as well as the Paris Climate Agreement.

The institutions deemed expendable are overwhelmingly those concerned with human rights, climate governance, and humanitarian relief. The administration has justified these moves on the grounds of “national interest.” This, however, is a display of selective disengagement from norms that impose political or economic costs.

As such hegemonic actors violate international norms, where enforcement mechanisms effectively collapse. Condemnation alone is insufficient.

The same logic is applicable in Washington’s actions in Venezuela. In a direct violation of state sovereignty, the United States led an intervention to seize President Nicolás Maduro and assert indefinite control over Venezuelan oil revenues. U.N. human rights bodies condemned the act as a breach of the U.N. Charter and international law, warning of its destabilizing consequences.

Trump’s open statements regarding Greenland further extend this posture. By explicitly keeping the use of force “on the table,” the U.S. president normalized territorial acquisition rhetoric that international law was designed to eliminate in the first place. Any such action would constitute an unprecedented intra-NATO confrontation, threatening the coherence of the alliance system itself.

This moment has also bought forth growing transatlantic divergence. European leaders have criticized Washington’s increasingly unilateral and coercive approach. For the first time in decades, the United States and Europe appear contradicting the fundamental principles holding the post-war international order.

Humanitarian discourse has become strategically selective. While the U.S. administration has voiced concern for Iranian protesters amid domestic unrest, it has simultaneously shielded and supported Israeli actions in Gaza. The value of human life varies with geography.

The import of democracy has always been pursued in continuation of U.S. geopolitical interests rather than supporting idea of democracy in principle. U.S. interventions are shaped only by strategic interests, particularly around oil and regional influence. Interventions in energy-rich regions, rising unilateralism, and institutional retreat, indicate anxiety over economic instability, mounting debt, and the weakening centrality of the dollar.

United States’s retreat from international institutions and violations of international law only further damaged an already fragile global system. As power politics reassert themselves, international law lays formally intact but practically hollow. International systems, long shaped by colonial hierarchies and power asymmetries, have been fraying for decades. What is new is its plain brazenness.

Global solidarity is not a finite resource 

Historically, some conflicts have attracted far more international attention than others.

What, then, determines whose suffering matters most? Why does the global response to contemporary wars reveal a clear hierarchy of concern and intervention?

In principle, international law exists to promote peace and equality. In practice, however, the international system is deeply anarchic and increasingly governed by power politics. This dynamic produces selective engagement, in which humanitarian response is activated through geopolitical relevance.

Patterns of neglect persist across parts of Africa; Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and the Sahel, where prolonged violence generates little more than episodic concern. By contrast, conflicts situated along critical energy corridors, alliance systems, or great-power rivalries prompt emergency summits, sanctions regimes, and continuous media attention.

Both military intervention and strategic non-intervention have consistently generated large-scale displacement, producing refugee flows that are later treated as external burdens rather than consequences. Rising anti-migrant sentiment and increasingly restrictive asylum policies are against the spirit of international humanitarian laws. If migration is framed as a threat, then its root causes must also be acknowledged as policy outcomes but the same states that shape these conflicts often adopt restrictive and exclusionary migration policies when displacement reaches their borders.

Are humanitarian principles universal?

Humanitarian principles, therefore, are not universally applied. Intervention is guided by political calculation. In such a system, human suffering is bound to become stratified, with some lives rendered more visible, and more valuable, than others. Beyond ethical inconsistency, this selective engagement erodes the credibility of global humanitarian advocacy and weakens collective leverage within international institutions, allowing entire regions to remain structurally marginalized.

U.N. possesses normative authority grounded in international law, but its decisions have often remained unenforceable in practice, beyond mere verbal criticism. It lacks enforcement power and effectiveness as a mechanism for both conflict prevention and management. Entrenched power asymmetries, most visibly within the U.N. Security Council, have hollowed out the organization’s capacity to act impartially. Compliance has largely remained contingent upon the political will of states rather than legal obligation. Over the years, this has significantly damaged the credibility of international law, as state interests repeatedly superseded collective wellbeing.

Global solidarity within the U.N. framework is not a finite resource but unless international institutions are restructured to prioritize the idea of universal human rights over strategic hierarchy, conflict prevention will remain aspirational.

T

here have long been calls for the reform of the United Nations (UN) on the grounds that it has failed to fulfill its peacekeeping mandate. Yet, some of the calls seem to be related to the agendas of certain countries that want to play a greater role in the decision-making mechanisms of the organization rather than to make the UN more effective in terms of its primary peacekeeping mission.

In this context, countries such as Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil aim to strengthen their positions by gaining permanent member status in the UN Security Council. On the other hand, countries like Turkey want a new structure that would ensure a fairer representation in the Security Council and facilitate decision-making.

To date, efforts at reform have not been successful. Let us examine the consequences of the failure of these efforts, and then consider why it will be very difficult to reorganize the UN. The most important consequence of the failure of any reform efforts to this day is the diminishing credibility of the United Nations as a peacekeeping body.

The problem is compounded by the fact that proposals to reform the Security Council’s decision-making mechanisms are not welcomed by the permanent members, who find the current structure advantageous. While massacres are taking place in Syria, Myanmar, Palestine, and Yemen, and countries like Iraq and Ukraine are being attacked in violation of international law, the organization remains silent.

The UN is rendered dysfunctional when decisions to intervene cannot be taken because one or more countries believe that such action would harm their interests in the region in question. Sometimes it is the United States, other times it is Russia or China that blocks intervention decisions that would end the massacres and establish peace.

In other cases, as in Iraq and Ukraine, the United States and Russia are the direct aggressors. When the veto-wielding countries of the Security Council are on the aggressor’s side, the UN cannot use military intervention or other sanctions, which are its most effective weapons in the peacekeeping mission.

The decision-making mechanism must change

Everyone knows that these shortcomings can only be addressed by changing the Security Council’s decision-making mechanism. More countries need to be included in UN resolutions on military intervention and other sanctions, and the vetoing of such resolutions by a single country must not be permitted. The way to do this is to give member states a “weighted vote” based on their economic and military size.

There is a need for a new decision-making mechanism in which the U.S. and Vanuatu would not have the same voting weight, but the U.S. would not be able to veto all resolutions it does not want. This can be done either under the auspices of the Security Council by increasing the number of members or under the auspices of the General Assembly by transferring the authority to take sanction decisions.

For example, the decision for UN intervention in Syria, which could not be taken at the Security Council, could easily have been taken at the General Assembly with a two-thirds or three-fourths majority through a weighted voting system. In this way, this tragedy, in which more than 600,000 people have lost their lives and 13 million people have lost their homes and became refugees, could have been prevented. However, because the permanent members of the Security Council do not want to lose their current privileged position, the reform that would enable the UN to take rational and effective decisions cannot be realized. The discussions under the name of reform do not go beyond the issue of increasing the number of permanent members in the Security Council.

Explaining the UN reform

If we try to explain why UN reform is not possible with the basic concepts of international relations, we see that reform is not likely to be possible in the near future either. Because, although the establishment of the UN was a product of the desire to prevent the world from being dragged into a catastrophe such as World War II—in other words, the intention to solve problems through “law and diplomacy” instead of “force and conflict”—when we look at the structure of the organization established for this purpose, we see that it reflects the “balance of power” of that period.

The countries that emerged victorious after World War II allocated a special position for themselves in the United Nation’s decision-making mechanisms. In order to reform the UN, which was designed by the powerful actors of the time to reflect their power and protect their interests, the balance of power must change. In other words, countries that want to play a more active role in the UN must surpass the permanent members of the Security Council in terms of all elements of power, especially economic and military power.

Yet, when we look at how the balance of power between the countries demanding reform and the permanent members of the Security Council has changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990, we see the opposite picture.

In 1990, the GDP of the seven countries demanding reform, which are currently among the top 12 in terms of economic capacity (we can refer to them as R7), was 77.5% of the total GDP of the five permanent members of the Security Council in purchasing power parity (PPP). By 2022, this ratio had fallen significantly to 55.4%.

UN reform and the realities of global politics

In terms of military expenditures, another important indicator of power, the picture is much worse for the countries demanding reform. While the military expenditure of R7 countries reached 28% of P5 countries in 1990, this ratio dropped to 18.6% in 2022. Again, while the contribution of R7 countries to the UN budget was higher than that of P5 countries in 1990, it dropped to 45.2% in 2022.

The demands for reforming the UN, which has failed miserably to fulfill its peacekeeping mandate, are extremely justified. In particular, decisions on sanctions against countries that violate international law should be freed from the permanent members’ stranglehold. Yet, the basic principles of international relations dictate that power will be the main determinant in changing the structure of this organization—the same way, power was the main determinant in its establishment and is reflected in its structure.

Therefore, the reform demands of the permanent members of the Security Council whose economic and military capacities have declined over the last 30 years do not find much response in the face of the realities of global politics. Currently, we are faced with a UN that serves the interests of the global system’s powerful actors and, to a large extent, is therefore unable to fulfill its mandate of peacemaking and peacekeeping.