The two dots I’d like to connect in this article are the seemingly discrete reform agendas of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In his address on 23 September 2025 to the annual gathering of world leaders for the opening of the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump offered an exceptionally blunt assessment of the manifold failures of the organisation, including with regard to its primary purpose of ensuring international peace and security. The wide-ranging address was notable for one important omission.
Not once did Trump mention the Security Council, the organisation’s most important organ with the legal authority to make decisions, up to and including going to war, that binds all countries. Yet, its congenital impotence and accelerating obsolescence and irrelevance are arguably the primary explanation for the UN’s failure to reach its potential on preventing and ending wars that Trump complained about.
They are also centrally relevant to the discussion of a more powerful WHO or a replacement international health organisation. In the current architecture of global governance, the UN Security Council is both the ultimate and the only international entity with enforcement authority over sovereign states.
Furthermore, its authority extends to states that are not UN members, are not members of the Security Council when the decision to authorise enforcement by means of diplomatic, economic, and/or military sanctions is made, or are a member but vote against the authorising resolution. Except, of course, if the negative vote is cast by one of the five permanent members (P5), with the power of veto.
Cases can be decided by the World Court and the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the legal obligations and liabilities of sovereign states. But if they reject the judicial decisions and defy the courts, the only recourse to enforce them is the Security Council acting under chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Nor is the ambit of the veto power limited to actions by one of the P5. Any one of them can veto enforcement action to protect an ally or a client state.
And laws and legal obligations that are binding and have been so affirmed by the relevant judicial organs, but fail to be enforced, damage the authority and credibility of the specialised agency concerned, the UN system more generally, and the overall architecture of global governance. A ‘law’ that is habitually broken but rarely or only selectively enforced is a law in name only.
It is a legal fiction and not an empirical or ‘lived’ reality. If the case for UN Security Council reform is compelling and the need for it urgent, then the lack of enforceability to ensure compliance with legally binding obligations triggers a negative feedback loop that has a cascading effect on the credibility and legitimacy of the entire normative architecture of world order.
In sum, because of its virtually unlimited powers in theory, the single most critical item on the UN reform agenda is the flaws in the structure and procedures of the UN Security Council. Opponents of Security Council reform are in denial about the importance and urgency of the subject.
The ossified Security Council remains trapped in the power equations of 1945 and is therefore out of sync even with its core defining logic. During the UN’s 80-year history, African and Asian states have increased from just over one-fifth to well over half the total membership while the Western group has shrunk from almost one-fourth to about one-sixth.
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