That’s not the question being asked, however.
And let’s not forget the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which together authorized the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC is the most important international body for providing authoritative assessments on the science, impacts, and mitigation of climate change to government policymakers around the world, and its findings are used as guidance by another UN body, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which negotiates international climate change treaties. Together, these institutions are addressing one of the most pressing long-term problems humanity has ever faced.
Agreed. Even if the UN were nothing other than a debating society…that’s a good thing for the world to have. It lets nations vent a little pressure. Or spleen.
More generally speaking, decolonization. Which, admittedly, was often less “the UN” and more “the US strong-arming everybody into it through Marshall aid blackmail” but still, having e.g. China, India on the board helped a lot to get the point across, and the UN was a good safe place to negotiate terms (and, for the colonized, to have them enforced).
You might want to research some of those cases a little more closely.
You mean the USSR, not Russia. It it’s vetos you worry about, do you realize how many the US uses?
Or the reverse?
Oh dear.
Exactly.
I’m ashamed to admit I hadn’t considered the “offshoot” organizations like WHO. So I suppose the UN is like a man with weights tied to his feet in a race. You can’t keep adding more then ask why he isn’t winning.
Possible only because Russia was boycotting it at the time, a mistake they will never make again.
UN peacekeeping has proven terribly ineffective, because unless it is an “enforcement action” under Chapter VII of the Charter, it requires the consent of the nation involved to operate within in - and such consent will not be forthcomming if that nation wants war, not peace.
The UN rather permanently lost legitimacy as peacekeepers in the Arab/Israeli conflict, not because “the US keeps defending [Israel] unconditionally”, but as a result of their actions during the run-up to the Six-Day War (essentially, the UN had a peacekeeping mission in the Sinai; as a rhetorical gesture, Nasser ordered them to leave, so he could attack Israel; and they just … left). Ever since, no-one has taken them at all seriously - neither Arabs nor Israelis.
Can’t put the blame on the US for that one.
The UN has done lots of good work, but structurally, they simply cannot act as “peacekeepers” with any effectiveness, where the “peace” to be kept is between nation-states. The UN exists in a world where nation-states are the highest form of sovereignty. The ‘good works’ done by the UN lie in the realm of oiling relations between nation-states, not in attempting to be an international arbiter itself. That it just cannot do, and it is unfair to expect that it can; unfortunately, it often gives the pretense that it can.
At the time no one blamed the UN. Exactly what were their options? Stay on Egyptian territory and get run over? Quickly build up a fighting force to rival the Egyptian army? They did a pretty good job of keeping things quiet for 11 years before that.
While nuclear weapons deserve some credit, there have been no world wars for 70 years, and part of that is the forum afforded by the UN. (Hell of a lot better record than the League of Nations.) When the big powers agree it does a lot of good, even when they don’t it does no real harm.
Anyhow, the UN paid my upkeep for the first 21 years of my life - my father worked there for a long time. And I got an all expenses paid 8 month vacation in the Congo also. That got to count for something.
I did not say people blaimed them for the 6 Day War, I said they lost all credibility. Tamely leaving because the Egyptians asked them to demonstrated that they were pointless and useless.
In fact, there are indications that Nassar was the one person most surprised by their pusillanimity: that in fact he had been counting on them to say “no”, in which case he would have scored rhetorical points without taking any actual risks (‘I asked them to leave and they would not - as much as I want a war with Israel, it cannot be’). The UN leaving, according to most biographies I have read, caught him flat-footed, and seriously accelerated what had been an accidental drift to war.
The key thing here is this: as is now clear in hindsight, Nassar did not really want war (for one, half his army was busy massacring people in Yemen). However, he did want to look beligerent, and there was no way for the Israelis to know he didn’t want war - and moreover, if it looked like Nassar was going to win (as his incompetent chief of staff kept telling him), he wasn’t adverese to taking a chance.
Syria was continually taunting Nassar for “hiding behind the UN’s skirts”. For his own credit, Nassar had no choice but to make some sort of gesture at removing the UN - hence his initial request, for some redeployment … U Thant then basically said publicly ‘no redeployment - either they stay as they are, or they all go’.
Put like that, Nassar had no choice but to ask them all to go - which, at one and the same time, alarmed the Israelis, boosted Nassar’s image in the Arab world, and removed any protection against Israeli retaliation.
This was a purely self-inflicted wound by the UN. They had many choices, and no-one seriously thought Nassar was going to attack the UN! 
The fall-out is that UN peacekeeping lost all credibility (in that region).
The arab region? According to who and among who?
Well, Israel blamed them.
As to what they should have done: they should have said that they’re not leaving, and that if Egypt laid one finger on them it would find itself at war with the UN. In other words, serve as trip-wires, like they were supposed to.
Of course, there’s no way they could have done that, for the same reason that UN peacekeeping can’t really work - because no-one is willing to die for the UN. And if your army isn’t willing to die for you, it isn’t really your army.
The post war US never met a colonial power it did not like. It supported Colonial powers throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, the French, the British, the Portuguese.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
UN peacekeeping has proven terribly ineffective, because unless it is an “enforcement action” under Chapter VII of the Charter, it requires the consent of the nation involved to operate within in - and such consent will not be forthcomming if that nation wants war, not peace.
[/QUOTE]
In places where its proven ineffective is because the nations who contributed troops were not willing to pay the political price of combat and the parties had powerful protectors, Bosnia, Somalia.
In the Congo, peacekeepers have kept a lid on things since 2003. And in Haiti and in Sierra Leon.
The Israelis knew perfectly well that Nasser did not want nor expect war, they could count and see how much of his forces were elsewhere for one.They saw a chance and took it. Good on them. However, the UN did not expect a war either.
[QUOTE=Alessan]
Well, Israel blamed them.
As to what they should have done: they should have said that they’re not leaving, and that if Egypt laid one finger on them it would find itself at war with the UN. In other words, serve as trip-wires, like they were supposed to.
Of course, there’s no way they could have done that, for the same reason that UN peacekeeping can’t really work - because no-one is willing to die for the UN. And if your army isn’t willing to die for you, it isn’t really your army.
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You are telling me that Messr Rabin and Dyan did not know how the UN worked? I doubt it.
[QUOTE=Trinopus]
Agreed. Even if the UN were nothing other than a debating society…that’s a good thing for the world to have. It lets nations vent a little pressure. Or spleen.
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The UN was designed to be a talking shop. A place where all nations can gather and talk. Even if two countries have no links at all the UN missions in NY allow them to continue diplomacy. And thats one of the lessons of the run up to WW1 and WW2. Lines of communication need to remain open.
yes, but Israel likes blaming the UN. Just like the arab governments like blaming the Israel.
This is news to the Spanish who have died recently. That the Israelis do not like them is special to the Israelis position. This makes for a substantial bias in the way you see them.
it is not a general thing.
it is not entirely fair, as it must be recognized that the US stopped the French-British-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956.
yes.
it seems to me much of the israeli talk about the Un is like the way popular arab press talks about Israel, a lot of scapegoating for justifying.
I see it was actually channelling an israeli view of the un but pretending it shared by the arabs.
It is worth making note of the prejudiced note about Nasser and the Yemen as what is made reference to is the Egyptian intervention in the north yemen civil war on the side of the republican arab socialist coup forces against the Moutaouakil royalist forces.
What is interesting if a reminder of the simplistic narrative of the ancient hatred of shia and sunni is turned upside down as it is was a civil war where the ibn saud sided with the royalists who were mostly zaidi shia (which is very different from the twelver shia despite the simplistic comments made now in the press), against the more sunni but socialist and pan arabist republicans.
Not quite true - US diplomatic efforts before the war, particularly in Asia, were working against colonial dynamics. Granted that didn’t stop the US from totally_not_colonizing the Philippines ; and the attitude was less motivated by moral concerns and more by arriving late to the party, not wanting to be shut out of the game and favouring protectorates over straight-up colonies, but still.
During and immediately after WW2 however it was a strong force against colonists/in support of nationalists - specifically it hamstrung French efforts in Vietnam (both openly through a partition plan that shut out the French and let the nationalists build up their defences in preparation for the expected war, and more discreetly by helping Uncle Ho’s Viet Minh via the OSS) and it also forced the Netherlands to open discussions with the nationalist of Indonesia which eventually led to independence.
I’m much less knowledgeable about India, Sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was true there. It’s only from the 50s onwards, thanks to the Cold War and the silly communist bogey, that the US became a lot more colony-friendly (or at least colony-tolerant).
In the Arab-Israeli conflict; and among everyone.
Disagree - Suez, 1956.
Yes, those were situations in which no significant nation-states objected to peacekeeping. My point stands - it doesn’t work if nation-states object. It can keep peace in Congo, but not between Israel and Egypt.
The situation was by no means that simple.
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Nasser’s (admittedly incompetent) chief of staff kept attempting to convince Nasser he could win.
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Nasser had, to a great extent, taken the tiger by the tail - he had aroused great enthusiasm for war, and could not find any credible means to back down - once he had taken such a belligerent stand - without losing all credibility. Such ‘drifts into war’ are hardly unknown to history - WW1 is another example of a war no-one expressly wanted.
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While the Israeli military was chomping at the bit to eliminate the Egyptian threat, prime minister Eskol was not - he attempted by every means to prevent it. This apparent weakness encouraged Egyptian ambitions.
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Also, Egypt did not have to actually fight a war to win. Israel’s army was an army of reserves. Israel could not afford to stay mobilized forever; Egypt’s could. If Egypt could simply prolong the crisis, it could deal grave harm to Israel at little cost to itself.
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The UN was well aware that leaving the Sinai could, and probably would, lead to war. The notion that Nassar did not expect it to, or that “the UN did not expect a war either” is simply not historical.
“It was obvious to everyone, and Nasser was no exception to this, that the withdrawal of UNEF would eventually lead to war”
- Major General Indar Jit Rikhye, The Sinai Blunder
I rather think he would know - I mean, he was only the general in charge of the UN deployment and all.
Note also his trenchent comments on the impact of the UN inaction on the reputation of the UN and its ability to conduct peacekeeping, at p. 183.