United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld once said, “The UN was not created to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity from hell”. When he said this in 1954, the Korean War had divided the world, vetoes paralysed the Security Council, and faith in multilateralism was faltering. Hammarskjöld’s line was not drenched in defeatism—it was realism rather. But 80 years on, the question returns: Has the UN really saved humanity from hell?

A catalogue of disillusionment

The war in Ukraine has exposed, once again, the UN’s limitations. Article 2(4) of the Charter explicitly forbids the use of force by one state against another, yet Russian tanks have been rolling across Ukraine since 2022. And whenever the Security Council seeks even a symbolic resolution calling for a ceasefire, Russia’s vetoes block any action against itself.

Similarly, Israeli bombardment in Gaza has reduced the Strip to rubble, killed the UN’s own humanitarian staff, and killed thousands of children—a devastation widely condemned as genocidal. Yet every resolution demanding a ceasefire meets the United States’ veto. After Gaza, the UN, to many, looks less like a guardian of peace and more like a bystander issuing press statements while the world burns.

Closer to home, Nepal has learnt that even the UN’s principles can be ignored with impunity. When India found the promulgation of Nepal’s 2015 Constitution politically inconvenient, it imposed a months-long economic blockade that cut off essential supplies to an earthquake-stricken neighbour. Article 125 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea guarantees landlocked states the right of free transit; however, during the Indian embargo, queues for fuel stretched for kilometres, and medicines ran out of stock. India’s continuing occupation of Nepalese territory in Limpiyadhura—or frontier aggressions in dozens of other places—similarly mock the spirit of the UN and of international law.

But such frustrations aren’t new. In 2003, the United States-led coalition illegally invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without an explicit authorisation by the Security Council—one of the only two ways a war can be legal, the other being self-defence—only after being sure that France and Russia would veto any such resolution. The UN could not stop this invasion, exactly as it couldn’t stop Russian tanks rolling into Georgia in 2008. And in 1975, when India annexed Sikkim, or in the 1950s when China gradually annexed Tibet, the UN again looked away. No wonder cynics repeatedly question the organisation’s relevance, credibility and effectiveness.

The “almost” that matters

Louis Henkin—a legendary professor at Columbia Law School—in his book How Nations Behave writes, “almost all nations obey almost all of international law almost all the time.” The focus, Henkin argued, should not be on the “almost” but on the vast realm of compliance that goes unnoticed. The same is true of the UN.

Yes, the UN fails spectacularly on some occasions—but so do domestic institutions! Think of a high-profile case at home where a powerful politician is accused of wrongdoing. The police hesitate, prosecutors delay, the court stalls. The system looks broken, yet no one declares the entire judiciary defunct or useless, because it continues to function, day after day, in thousands of other cases that draw no headlines. The UN, too, does its work silently in a thousand places where there are no vetoes—and more important, no cameras.

Even those who violate the Charter rarely dismiss it outright. The United States went to great lengths to claim that its 2003 invasion of Iraq was consistent with international law. It cited how Resolutions 678 and 1441 legally authorised the invasion, although most experts called out the fig leaves. Russia, similarly, justified its 2022 invasion of Ukraine as an act of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter—and even filed the notification with the Security Council, as was required by Article 51—performing legality even while undermining it. Although experts have dismissed such arguments as legal contortions that hollow out the Charter, even the mightiest powers do not renounce the UN outright, and rather seek to rationalise their conduct within its framework.

UN beyond the Council

Critics often forget that the UN is more than the sum of vetoes in the Security Council. While the vetoes do their best to hamstring the UN, its other organs and specialised agencies have been quietly reshaping the lives of ordinary people. For example, UNICEF has immunised billions of children and expanded girls’ education. UNHCR shelters millions displaced by conflict. UNESCO helps conserve and safeguard cultural heritages like Lumbini. The ICJ, in dozens of cases, has articulated limits on the use of force and even prevented wars by settling hot frontier disputes. These institutions have done far more than Hammarskjöld’s modest aim of “saving humanity from hell”, as they have helped millions live with dignity. They remind us that the UN’s failures are political—not humanitarian or technical.

Furthermore, we must realise that the UN acts mainly through its members, and exceptions apart, the members—especially the powerful ones—fail it. When Russia or the United States veto a ceasefire, it is not the Secretariat or the Charter that falters—it is political will. To paraphrase Shakespeare on Brutus in Julius Caesar, the fault is not in the UN but in its members. Calls to “reform” the Security Council by adding more permanent seats—which will merely multiply the vetoes, not the virtues—will not solve this. Before we denounce the UN, then, we must ask a simpler question: Have states kept their own promises? Although the Charter begins with the words “We the Peoples”, it is governments—not peoples—that hold the levers. The UN is only as strong as its members allow it to be.

Inevitability of imperfection

Even if we were to abolish the UN tomorrow, human conflict would force us to invent another organisation much like it—and it, too, would suffer the same shortcomings because its members would still misuse power for petty interests.

The question, therefore, is not whether the UN has failed, but whether humanity can afford a world without it. For all its shortcomings, it remains the only universal forum where a small country can speak with the same dignity as a superpower. It remains the custodian of the idea that law, not force, should govern relations among nations. And it remains the one place where even those who defy it must still explain themselves. As Hammarskjöld understood, the UN was never built to take mankind to heaven. But so long as it keeps us from descending into hell, it is not just relevant—it is indispensable, however imperfect—and serves as a reminder that civilisation itself is a work forever in progress.