In a seminal 2015 article in the Guardian— "70 years and half trillion dollarslater: What has the U.N. achieved? "— Chris McGreal's opening line captured the deep ambiguities that are revealed in any balanced assessment of the world organization:
"The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and education across the world, but it is bloated, undemocratic- and very expensive".
Five years later the political, financial, and personnel pathologies described by McGreal have only gotten worse and all are now starkly illuminated in the burgeoning controversy surrounding the World Health Organization (WHO) and its deplorable handling of the Coronavirus pandemic.
No evaluation of the WHO can be understood unless seen in the wider context of the U.N. itself and its evolution from the brave beginnings of 1945 to the problem- plagued institution of today.
The political dysfunction of the U.N. is directly traceable to the United States and Britain’s having grantedthe Soviet Union's 1945 demand that each member of the dominant Security Council should have the absolute power to veto any initiative. Absent this concession the Soviet Union would not even join the U.N.— and with only one of the world's two postwar Great Powers as a member, the organization would have been reduced to little more than a loose federation of the USA’s client states with no unifying purpose.
Franklin Roosevelt's dream of succeeding with the United Nations where his mentor Wilson had failed with the League of Nations would then be dead. Such was simply reality in a broken world in the immediate aftermath of a cataclysmic world war. But that reality has haunted the U.N. ever since.
Early (and arguably fanciful) hopes that the Soviet Union— the West’s great ally of convenience in WWII—would constructively evolve and become a reliable partner in making the U.N. a true guarantor of world peace were soon dashed by the onset of the Cold War, which would become the world's central political preoccupation for over forty years.
Thus the U.N. became not the "consequential arbiter" its founders had envisioned, but merely a weak referee utilized by the Great Powers when it served their interest and ignored when it did not.
The U.N.'s decline in status and effectiveness was worsened in 1964 when 77 of the smaller and weaker member states (a voting majority in the General Assembly) joined together seeking to counterbalance what they saw as the excessive power wielded by the wealthy Western nations who were the principal financial support of the world organization.
Dubbed the G-77 but now including 133 of the U.N.'s 195 members, the group rapidly spread its influence throughout the world body's systems, particularly its budgetary committees.
Given the prominent role played in it by authoritarian governments including some of the world's most odious and oppressive regimes (e.g. Libya, Zimbabwe, Syria), the group early on showed a strong bias toward inefficient central planning rather than free-market forces in the allocation of resources.
The most lamentable damage done by this group was its utter corruption of the U.N.'s personnel practices, transforming them from a merit-based system into a metastasizing patronage scheme which infected every key position from Secretary-General on down with jobs awarded not on the basis of qualifications but rather furious behind-the-scenes lobbying and horse trading.
There is no better example of this syndrome than the last two WHO Directors General—Tedros Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia and his predecessor, Margaret Chan of China—both manifestly unfit for this critically important position.
Any effort to impose true accountability on the U.N.'s sprawling aggregation of 17 specialized agencies, i4 funds, a secretariat with 17 departments employing over 40,000 people worldwide is made next to impossible by bureaucratic anachronisms such as having 80 separate locations processing payrolls using different methodologies, and each agency having its own IT system.
The last serious effort at reform (2005) conducted by a highly credible panel chaired by the prime ministers of Norway, Mozambique and Pakistan issued a devastating report and proposed a new approach called "Delivering as One.” But this led only to the usual cascade of goals statements—and ultimately zero results.
Amidst all these disorders it must be remembered that there still remain thousands of U.N. personnel at the field level—proud, capable and dedicated—who are doing good things for needy peoples in some of the remotest and often most dangerous places on earth.
However it is so sad to think how much more could be done if the U.N. as an institution had not fallen so far short of the hopes and dreams of its founders.
William Moloney, Ph.D., is a Fellow in Conservative Thought at Colorado Christian University 's Centennial Institute and a former Colorado Commissioner of Education. He studied at Oxford and the University of London.