Num podcast recent newspaper PoliticoAntónio Guterres was faced with an uncomfortable question: in the face of escalating conflicts, is the UN still relevant or just a powerless vestige of the rules-based international order? The UN SG’s response was honest. The problem with multilateralism, he said, is not in the institutions, but in the behavior of the great powers, which blocks their role.
The criticism is pertinent, but it requires an essential distinction that is often lost in the public debate between the paralysis of the Security Council and the irrelevance of the United Nations system as a whole.
The Security Council reflects the distribution of power in 1945. The right of veto, conceived as a guarantee of stability between the great powers, has today become a blocking mechanism in a more fragmented international system. In contexts of strategic rivalry, the Council tends towards inaction, as became clear recently, when two permanent members violated the Carta also HIM without consequences. This is where the perception of impotence arises.
But reducing the UN to the Security Council is an analytical error. Outside this political core, the system works and produces measurable results. Agencies, funds and programs operate on a distinct, execution-oriented plane and often away from the eyes of public opinion.
The recent data is clear. The United Nations Population Fund contributed, in 2024 alone, to preventing millions of unwanted pregnancies, tens of thousands of maternal deaths, reaching millions of women and young people with essential services. UNICEF has supported more than 100 million families with social protection programs. Global child mortality has fallen by more than half since 2000, a result of coordinated health and nutrition interventions.
Also in the area of governance, which is often invisible, the impact is structural. Data and census systems supported by the United Nations today allow many countries to design more effective public policies. In crisis contexts, from war to natural disasters, the international humanitarian response continues to depend, to a large extent, on the operational capacity of the UN system.
This duality defines contemporary multilateralism. At the top, political blockade and at the base, technical execution. A locked system where power is disputed, but functional where cooperation is possible.
When we think about multilateralism, we must think of Hammarskjöld, also UN SG, who recalled that the UN was not created to take Humanity to paradise, but to prevent it from ending up in hell. The expectation that multilateralism resolves conflicts between great powers ignores its nature as an organization that ultimately depends on the will of the States themselves.
The problem, therefore, is not the irrelevance of institutions, but the erosion of the political commitment that makes them effective at a strategic level. Still, and even in an adverse context, the system continues to deliver concrete results that would be impossible in its absence.
In a world of growing rivalries, the value of multilateralism lies less in grand declarations and more in the ability to produce global public goods, stabilize fragile contexts and support national policies.
The UN is neither irrelevant nor omnipotent. It is an imperfect instrument, conditioned by power, but indispensable to prevent international disorder from pushing us down the highway to hell.
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