MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
It's been 80 years since the United Nations was formed. Today, the U.N. is deadlocked on key current issues, from Russia's war in Ukraine to Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza. The Trump administration has been cutting funding and pulling out of some U.N. agencies, and countries in the Global South are still craving more of a voice. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Fordham University's Anjali Dayal co-hosts a podcast about the U.N. called "To Save Us From Hell."
ANJALI DAYAL: The U.N.'s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, you know, is reported to have said that the U.N. was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell. And I think that really helps contextualize the way we should understand the organization.
KELEMEN: The United Nations was created 80 years ago, as countries emerged from World War II looking for something better than balance-of-power politics. Dayal says they wanted a place to talk about problems rather than fighting over them.
DAYAL: And that sounds utopian, but the men who supported this project weren't actually utopians. They were battle-hardened, you know? Truman called it, like, the great machinery of peace. Dwight Eisenhower said it was mankind's last best hope of replacing the battlefield with the conference room.
KELEMEN: But that was never easy, says historian Thant Myint-U.
THANT MYINT-U: The U.N. never functioned as intended, right? So that great power unity wasn't there even in 1946. And many people thought the U.N. wasn't going to survive or was going to be useless from then onwards.
KELEMEN: In a new book, he writes about his grandfather, Burmese diplomat U Thant, who he says was the only candidate for the job that Moscow and Washington could accept in 1961.
THANT MYINT-U: The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best example, where it was at the height of the Cold War, where the U.S. and Soviet Union - their vetoes meant that the Security Council was useless in solving that dispute. But it was the office of the secretary-general that became really important. And that's why I think it's so important to go back and look at those episodes and look at ways in which even a deadlocked security council doesn't mean that the U.N. cannot play an important role.
KELEMEN: There was a time just after the end of the Cold War when people thought the U.N. could do wonders. At least that's how former Algerian foreign minister and longtime U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi saw things.
LAKHDAR BRAHIMI: People expected things to change for the better, but that did not happen. On the contrary. At the end of the Cold War, the most remarkable thing that happened was the genocide in Rwanda.
KELEMEN: Even though there were U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda at the time. Then came the massacre in Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia, despite the presence of U.N. troops.
BRAHIMI: There was a feeling of profound disappointment that the U.N. was actually not the beautiful thing that people thought it was.
KELEMEN: After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in the late 1990s, he asked Brahimi to write a report on what went wrong. Brahimi's work was well received, but he says it still wasn't enough to meet global expectations. Now, at age 91, he's still pushing for the U.N. to remain relevant.
BRAHIMI: In my old age, I'm not going to give up on the United Nations.
KELEMEN: For the past few years, the Security Council has been deadlocked on some key issues. The U.S. uses its veto power to shield criticism of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. And Russia, another veto holder, has waged war against its neighbor, Ukraine, trying to redraw borders by force. And it's against this backdrop that the U.N. will begin to consider who should run the world body when Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' term ends at the end of next year. Thant Myint-U has been thinking a lot about that.
THANT MYINT-U: It's really important in a way for the U.N. to go back to basics - to think about its founding purpose, to think about the challenges that we're facing now in terms of war and even the prospect of a big power war, you know, over the coming years.
KELEMEN: The U.N., he says, should be retooled to just focus on preventing war. But he also warns that this is a tall order, pointing out that the world body's founding spirit - internationalism, empathy and solidarity - are in short supply.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News.
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