Of paramount interest?: 

Of paramount interest?: 

Context:

• The UN General Assembly has confirmed the growing ineffectiveness of the world body.

Introduction:

• In June 1945, India’s princely states sent a single representative to sign the Charter of the United Nations at the San Francisco conference.

A word war

• Religion became cause to divide rather than build a common understanding, and the dignity of the United Nations, disappeared as each side used its multiple rights of reply for name-calling and rhetoric hurled at the other.
• The India-Pakistan word war was outdone by the U.S. and North Korea who sparred over Pyongyang’s latest provocations.

Secretary General’s list:

• The Secretary General António Guterres in his UN’s 72nd General Assembly listed the world’s seven biggest threats: nuclear peril, terrorism, unresolved conflict and violations of international humanitarian law, climate change, growing inequality, cyber warfare and misuse of artificial intelligence, and human mobility, or refugees.

• The UN’s actions in response to North Korea’s missiles and nuclear tests amounted to another round of sanctions against the Kim Jong-un regime.

• Since 1966, the UN Security Council has established 26 sanctions regimes, of which about half are still active. In some cases, the sanctions only squeezed the country’s poor, as in Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia ) and DPRK itself, while not changing its belligerent positions.

• In most cases, the misery was heightened by international military interventions, from Yugoslavia to Libya and Yemen.
• Even the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, against which the U.S. and Russia united to pass a slew of economic, political and travel sanctions in the 1990s, didn’t change course on its support to al-Qaeda or its brutal treatment of women and minorities.

Lacking guarantees

• The UN has done itself no favours by failing to censure NATO on violating its mandate only to the responsibility to protect (R2P) and not for regime change in Libya in 2011.

• To other countries that may enter talks, as Iran did, the imminent threat from the U.S. of walking out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (P5+1 agreement) would make them question the efficacy of the UN in guaranteeing any deal struck.

• Other decisions of the Trump administration in the U.S., to walk out of the climate change agreement as well as threaten to cancel its funding contributions to the UN, have also seen little comment from the world body, which further reduces the respect it is viewed with.

• India’s struggles to convince China to allow the Security Council to sanction Masood Azhar, whose release in exchange for hostages in 1999 should   have been proof enough of his perfidy.
• Both Russia and the U.S. have been known to use cyber warfare, but equally the use of new-age warfare-drones, robotic soldiers and remote killings must see more regulations from the international community.

Each one ‘first’

• Solving the world’s inequalities, the last point on his list, where Mr. Guterres pointed out that “eight men represent as much of the world’s wealth as half of all humanity”, will be a harder and harder task for the UN, where member countries speak only of putting themselves “first”.