In 80 years of UNGA, keeping the peace has never looked so difficult

The United Nations General Assembly is meeting in New York this month after 80 years of trying to help bring about world peace. But do you care? Should we care? The fact that UNGA continues is positive, a sign of goodwill and good people coming together, but “keeping the peace” has rarely looked quite so difficult as right now.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres offered a sense of optimism, or at least of hope, when he reflected that “eighty years ago from the ashes of war the world planted a seed of hope. One Charter, one vision, one promise: that peace is possible when humanity stands together.”

All true, but with a big caveat. Humanity “standing together” is not the story of 2025. Tensions between countries are compounded by tensions within countries, civil wars, unrest, deep political and ideological gulfs and competing ambitions.

It’s not even easy to count how many conflicts there are in the world today. Some break through into news headlines but dozens are not clocked on the radar of news reports.

Just in the past couple of weeks we have seen the war in Ukraine escalate via a provocative incursion by Russian drones into Poland, a Nato member. Poland, the UK, Germany and other Nato states are already starting ambitious weapons programmes to raise defence spending to levels not seen since the Cold War.

The UK and Norway signed a £10 billion agreement for at least five - and possibly up to 10 - new Type 26 anti-submarine frigates. This means a combined fleet of 13 such warships in the seas around northern Europe, eight for the UK and at least five for the Royal Norwegian Navy.

Poland hopes to spend 5 per cent of gross domestic product on defence by next year. Germany plans to double defence spending by around 2030. Humanity “stands together” in boosting military forces rather than UN peace-making. Then there is the extraordinary Israeli attack on Qatar.

This was explained by Israel as an attempt to take out elements of the Hamas leadership. That attempt failed, and even if it had succeeded the attack was provocative and ill-judged on one of the states in the region, along with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, most involved in trying to find a positive workable solution for the people of Gaza.

But there are many more conflicts that remain under the news radar. The Global Peace Index has identified 56 active conflicts around the world with as many as 92 countries involved in some way or another. The Peace Research Institute in Oslo calculates around 28 state based conflicts in Africa alone.

The Geneva Academy lumped together the Middle East and North Africa to come up with as many as 45 different armed conflicts in the region, involving Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and the Western Sahara among others.

The UN cannot be blamed for failing to put this messy world to rights. Like any organisation it can only be as strong as its members, and the members can only work together if their leaders wish to do so.

Four of the “P5” - the permanent five members of the UN Security Council - are divided at home or weakened by problems in different ways. The French government is in turmoil. The British government of Keir Starmer is dealing with internal divisions, scandals and significant domestic problems ranging from the economy to street disturbances over migration. Russia is involved in the Ukraine war. And the US under the Trump administration is dealing with its own profoundly dangerous divisions, including the assassination of the conservative religious firebrand Charlie Kirk.

Predictions of more street disturbances, more gun violence and deep political divisions are now daily events on American news media in a polarised and deeply divided superpower. All that leaves China as a growing power on the P5, politically stable, trying to expand Beijing’s influence and friendships with Russia, India and North Korea.

The danger of all this is that the UN, founded after the Second World War, will go the way of the League of Nations founded after the First World War in 1919, especially since the UN at times does not help itself. The bureaucracy is cumbersome and expensive.

UN peacekeeping forces can be brave but also ineffective and at times corrupt. Agencies such as Unicef, the agency for children, clearly do good work but are stretched, including by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from international programmes.

The hard truth is that any organisation is only as effective as its members and that means the UN is fractious, bureaucratic and expensive. Nevertheless, the second UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold brilliantly articulated the organisation’s real purpose.

The UN, he said, “was created not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell.” Let’s hope the UN General Assembly and the P5 members at their annual gathering in New York live up to that insight.