The UN as Global Police Force and Negotiation Facilitator
As Mingst and Karns (2016) note, the UN has played a predominant role in setting the standard for human rights—and it did so in 1948, three years after the conclusion of WW2. However, setting the standards is not the same as enforcing the standards and so far the UN’s declaration of human rights has been fairly toothless in terms of holding nations accountable through any type of police action. Global police action when it does occur tends to come from the U.S., which emerged as the world leader among the nations in the post-War era. Mingst and Karns (2016) state explicitly that “much of the UN’s success in defining human rights norms, monitoring respect for human rights, and promoting human rights has depended on the activities of the growing international human rights network of NGOs—the third UN” (p. 218). UN-led partnerships have not done much to ensure human safety: “The lack of local ownership of programs, inadequate institutional accountability measures, politicization of some programs, and the need for a steady stream of financial resources” all have served to undermine any UN-led approaches to serving as the force for good in the world in the post-war era (Mingst & Karns, 2016, p. 268). This paper will address the issue of the UN’s scope of authority, the kind of international problems it seeks to ameliorate or resolve, its methods of enforcement, and its chief limitations.

The scope of the UN’s authority to act as an enforcement institution or negotiation facilitator is basically determined by the individual nations themselves. While nearly 200 countries are member states of the UN, the member states are the ones who essentially wield the power. They can form alliances among themselves against other member states, if one group wants to sanction another. The UN is basically a forum for these negotiations to take place. It has a World Court—the International Court of Justices—and the Security Council is responsible for monitoring issues and making reports, as it did in the Middle East in the run-up to the Iraq invasion by the U.S. The UN had reported that Iraq was not hiding weapons of mass destruction—and yet that did no good because the U.S. determined to invade anyway. The UN meanwhile can adopt resolutions that identify states as being human rights abusers. In 2016, the UN adopted a resolution identifying Israel as a violator of the human rights of Palestinians, yet, again, the U.S. has attempted to negate that resolution by making it unlawful for individual Americans to boycott Israel and advocate on behalf of the oppressed in unison with the UN. Thus, the UN’s scope of authority is essentially determined by the individual member states and the extent to which they want to play ball with what the rest of the UN is doing.

The kinds of international problems that the UN seeks to ameliorate or resolve tend to be rooted in things it can actively address—such as poverty, health issues like the spread of AIDS in Africa, human trafficking, child enslavement, terrorism, and so on. It works in partnerships with other countries at the local level, but there is mixed levels of success...…the U.S. wants to adopt—such as the desire to invade another Middle Eastern state or to have Assad declared a butcher (when all the evidence appears to point to the White Helmets being agents of the West, using false flags and fake reporting to move the public). The UN is at its best when it is acting as a forum where the nations of the world can exchange ideas and take action—but because the U.S. is engaged in a zero sum game for hegemony and has expressed no interest in sharing a multi-polar world with Russia or China, the UN is essentially limited and handcuffed by what the U.S. wants to do.

In conclusion, the UN was organized in the post-War era to help fill a power vacuum left by the dissolution of regional authority throughout Europe and throughout other parts of the world. The UN promoted human rights with its 1948 declaration and put forward 13 peacekeeping operations over the course of four decades, but in that same amount of time a great many humanitarian crises, genocides, and disasters have occurred that the UN was unable to prevent, contain or address in an effective manner. The reason is that the UN is largely a faux-political body that can put out resolutions but that is still dependent upon individual nations to enforce them and to police themselves. If there is no real agreement among the nations (and there is not in the current climage, particularly with the U.S. acting increasingly as though it is either its way or the highway), the utility of the UN is very limited.…