Among the anniversary events associated with 1945, besides the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat in the Second World War, the anniversary of the creation of the United Nations plays an important role. In the current extremely acute and unstable situation in the world, understanding the activities of the UN as well as its limitations and real possibilities acquires additional significance.
In the context of geopolitical divisions in the world and a sharp increase of the practical use of military force, we come to the 80th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, which took place on June 26, 1945. The creation of the UN was called for to solve, on the one hand, a pragmatic task: to form an international organisation that could replace the pre-war League of Nations. On the other hand, the inefficiency and politicisation of the activities of the League of Nations put on the agenda the issue of creating a fundamentally new format for a comprehensive international organisation. An organisation was needed that would be free of all the shortcomings that had manifested themselves earlier.
From this point of view, the key role was played by the formalisation of the new status of permanent members of the UN Security Council, which acquired, in general, more powers and the ability to influence international processes than the members of the Council of the League of Nations. It is no coincidence that the specifics of the status of permanent members of the UN Security Council partly grew out of the "global policemen" concept proposed by US President Roosevelt.
However, the reality in this case turned out to be different from hopes and legal documents. Almost immediately after the end of World War II, the allies of the anti-Hitler coalition were no longer bound together by anything. In Great Britain, in Churchill's entourage, a plan was being developed for Operation Unthinkable, which entailed the start of military action by the British and Americans against Soviet troops immediately after the defeat of Nazi Germany. This plan remained on paper, the British forces were not prepared for such a turn of events, and the Americans preferred to distance themselves, since they were vitally interested in the assistance of the Soviet Union in the war against Japan. Nevertheless, it was Churchill who is credited with coining the phrase "iron curtain" in 1946. The geopolitical and ideological interests which Western countries shared with the Soviet Union were too different. As a result, the concept of a comprehensive "containment" of the Soviet Union became key on the agenda of Western countries immediately after the end of World War II. It also determined the nature of a new war - the Cold War, which, in turn, determined the framing of world politics for almost half a century.
Naturally, this politicisation immediately had a negative impact on the activities of the newly created UN. It turned into an arena of geopolitical battles for a long time. As a result, all those hopes for effective regulation of a fair world order that were invested in the creation of the UN and the formulation of its Charter turned out to be largely unrealized.
However, unlike the almost entirely Western-centric League of Nations, the UN began to differ from it for the better in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was primarily due to the global process of decolonisation and the formation of new independent states on the African continent and in other regions of the world. This allowed for a sharp expansion of geographical representation in the UN, and as a result, the voice of non-Western states became more audible. That period was also marked by increased solidarity between the states of Asia and Africa. This process began at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and then was developed and further expanded geographically within the Non-Aligned Movement. All of this was reflected in the activities of the UN. Although it should be noted that conflicts and disagreements between non-Western states (between China and India, between Indonesia and Malaysia, etc.) also occurred during that era. As a result, the UN, by and large, failed to yield any kind of united front among the non-Western states. Their own national interests also turned out to be different, and even conflicting not only in relation to the West, but also with each other.
New hopes for increasing the effectiveness of the UN arose after the end of the Cold War. But the period of global geopolitical euphoria of the late 1980s also turned out to be short-lived. Illusions about the “end of history” launched in the expert and media space during that era also became just another utopia (although they allowed their author to earn a good amount of money).
Almost immediately, new conflicts arose that accompanied the collapse of the bipolar world of the Cold War era. They were partly caused by that collapse. They included military clashes in the post-Soviet space, in the former Yugoslavia, and in Africa. To some extent, a paradoxical positive element in the bipolar confrontation of the Cold War was that the total confrontation of the superpowers put a significant and often quite effective limit on the path towards uncontrolled escalation among many regional conflicts. The desire to prevent a major nuclear clash that could arise from the escalation of any regional war where the USSR and the USA had conflicting interests was still quite clearly understood at that time. This helped to preclude the proliferation of local wars, and to some extent "disciplined" the course of the conflict and its participants. Thus, albeit in a transformed form, the concept of "global policemen" turned out to be essentially the only working tool during the Cold War. It is clear, however, that all this was not centred on the UN.
With the collapse of the bipolar confrontation, this "discipline" of the "global policemen" also disappeared. If there is no risk of a major nuclear war, then everything is allowed. This principle has become key to the evolution and escalation of many armed conflicts since the 1990s. The UN, as before, only reflected this new reality, and again turned into a field of rhetorical battles on geopolitical topics.
However, the unipolar world that Western countries tried with all their might to implement in practice after the Cold War turned out to be incapable of becoming a deterrent to armed conflicts, at least to the extent that one existed in the bipolar era. Moreover, many major conflicts during this period were directly provoked and started by the Western states themselves. Geopolitical interests were supplemented by value narratives - a new feature that distinguishes modern conflicts from what was before.
Naturally, this trend towards unipolar dominance and coercion of dissenters could not help but provoke resistance. In theoretical concepts of revisionist powers, China and Russia are primarily called such, but similar discontent was also significant for many other non-Western countries. This made the anti-colonial discourse relevant and revived demand for it in the developing countries of the world.
The disappearance of the restraints of the Cold War era ultimately led to the situation of 2022 - and to the starkest geopolitical split in the world, the severity of which exceeds everything that had happened before in the UN period of world history.
Against this background, US President Donald Trump is putting forward an ambitious program for restoring peace. However, there is practically no room left for the UN there. Rather, these initiatives of Trump make us remember the original positive connotation of the concept of the "global policeman". Durign the first months of his presidency, Trump tried to resolve both the Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, as well as the situation around the Iranian nuclear programme. Trump did this almost single-handedly, essentially breaking with the closest US allies. As a result, the landscape of world politics in the spring months of 2025 changed significantly. However, at the UN level, this was reflected in the united position of Russia and the United States on a number of resolutions of the Security Council and the UN General Assembly, which had rarely happened on pressing issues before. By analogy with previous metaphors and seeing quite tangible hope in the social networks of many countries for an expected turn for the better, the past several months can well be called Trump's spring.
But this spring also turned out to be short. The escalation in Gaza began again. The process of Russian-Ukrainian settlement does not seem to be fast-paced, if it’s possible at all. Finally, the Israeli-Iranian missile war began. It seems that Trump is not to blame for this failure. The "global policeman" did everything he could. He proposed restoring peace, but the reality turned out to be more complicated.
And what about the UN? Over the last 80 years and in recent months, we have only recorded that the UN is a platform for a rhetorical clash between the opposing geopolitical interests of various countries. Nothing more. The modern UN is hardly capable of preventing and stopping wars. Again, this is due to the differences in interests of the participating countries. It seems that hopes for increasing the effectiveness of the UN as a guarantor of peace are quite utopian. This will not be changed by various UN reform projects, which have been discussed with varying degrees of intensity for three decades. However, at least such a platform is better than none.
