“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”
Those opening words of the UN Charter were not meant as an ornament. They were carved from the rubble of two world wars, a vow that dignity and sovereign equality must stand above brute force. Eighty years on, they hang like a ghost in the General Assembly hall. Leaders file into New York, but the promise their predecessors etched in blood and ash has been hollowed by vetoes, rivalries, and the swagger of men who bend truth as if it were clay.
Donald Trump’s latest address was not simply combative; it was contemptuous of fact itself. He dismissed climate change as a “con job,” claimed credit for ending “seven wars,” and folded the UN into his theatre of grievance. Fact-checks swiftly dismantled the rhetoric, but the damage lies elsewhere: when the most powerful state treats evidence as disposable, it signals that law and science are for the weak. In an anarchic world order, that precedent is poison.
He rambled for nearly an hour, railing against globalism, deriding Europe’s immigration policies, and mocking renewable energy. It was a repeat of Muammar Gaddafi’s 2009 speech at the UN, without ideology, a word-salad that mixed boasts of Nobel ambitions with scorn for multilateral institutions. The lukewarm applause line came only when he demanded the release of hostages in Gaza. On everything else there was nothing of substance: war in Ukraine, suffering and ‘inhumane killing’ of Palestinians in Gaza, and climate justice. In the very hall designed for collective strategy, the United States appeared diminished, strong in volume but shrunken in respect.
At the heart of the UN lies a paradox. It is both fragile and indispensable. Fragile because its resolutions depend on the will of the very states it is meant to restrain. Indispensable because without it, the world slides into unmediated anarchy, a system of raw nerves where every withdrawal, every treaty shredded, every budget line gutted adds stress until collapse becomes inevitable.
The week’s High-Level meetings were meant to rally behind the Sustainable Development Goals, yet they unfolded like crisis management. The Secretary-General warned of “an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering,” not as metaphor but as diagnosis. Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, famine in Sudan, disinformation at scale, climate tipping points accelerating: the safety valves are failing. If the UN cannot anchor cooperation, the centrifugal pull of great powers will tear the system apart.
Yet amid Trump’s derision, another story flickered into view. Britain, France, Canada, and Australia announced recognition of the State of Palestine. Recognition is not a peace plan, but it is a break in the diplomatic script of delay. Recognition now reframes the conflict not as a dispute to be negotiated indefinitely but as a legal reality denied in practice. It is, at the very least, a crack in the edifice of impunity.
Frames matter. The label “terrorist” or “criminal” travels faster than fact. Once the word is spoken, missiles follow. The danger is not only legal; it is existential. To treat sovereignty as a shield for mass atrocity, or to treat drones as substitutes for trials, is to erode the very ground the UN stands on. Here lies the lesson of history. The League of Nations collapsed under the weight of impunity in Abyssinia and Manchuria. The Congress of Vienna and the Treaty of Westphalia each crumbled when the balance of power curdled into arrogance. Every time the leaders walk away from the table, the collapse follows. Always after, never before.
Palestine today echoes Bosnia yesterday, Rwanda before it, Kashmir through decades – places where promises of law dissolved in the acid of geopolitics. In Gaza, more aid workers have been killed in the recent years than at any time in UN history. In Ukraine, the survival of whole communities depends on international relief pipelines. These parallels are not academic. They are warnings. The failure to enforce norms in one corner of the map accelerates collapse everywhere.
Recognition of Palestine is therefore more than symbolism. It signals those Western capitals are weary of carrying the reputational cost of silence while civilians are slaughtered. It also complicates Washington’s automatic shield at the Security Council. If the United States vetoes again, the General Assembly can test the old “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, mustering a two-thirds majority to override paralysis. Such votes are not binding, but they map moral terrain. When 142 states have already recognised Palestine, the arithmetic is against indefinite denial.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis does not pause for diplomatic theatrics. Trump’s dismissal of climate science is not simply ignorance; it is sabotage. To call warming a hoax is to tell drowning islands their future is a mirage. To deride clean energy as a scam is to sneer at the one sector scaling fast enough to blunt catastrophe. Rhetoric will not stop the seas, but it will slow the funds, and in this system, time is everything.
As the UN’s authority frays and its Charter promises are treated as decorative text, responsibility cannot be outsourced. Publics must press their governments, and states must relearn that survival rests in solidarity, not defection: to keep lifelines open, face the climate storm, and rebuild what fracture has undone. To abandon these tasks is to concede the future to collapse.
What endures then is the oldest truth of international politics: there is no higher sovereign, no arbiter above the fray. States themselves draw the line between order and disorder, and great powers, above all, decide whether that line holds or shatters. History shows the cost of arrogance; empires confident in their invulnerability brought low not by rivals but by the weight of their own neglect. The UN withstands not as a monument to perfection but as a guard against the void. Big, powerful states’ cooperation is not a luxury, nor a gesture of benevolence. It is the only thread left binding a fragile order to the possibility of survival. Pull it, and there will be nothing but the flood.
