It was another fine speech. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, with his usual mournful gravity, warned the world this week that the situation in Gaza had reached “the cruellest phase yet.” A humanitarian catastrophe. Famine. Children dying. “A moral outrage,” he called it. And then what? A press release. Another grim statement filed under “Too Late, Again.” If the UN were judged not by the eloquence of its leaders but by the lives it failed to save, its headquarters might as well be a mausoleum.

The UN’s Original Sin: Doing Nothing Loudly

The UN was created to prevent war, to uphold human rights, to protect civilians from the horrors of unchecked power. What we have now is an elite diplomatic spa where the permanent members of the Security Council (US, Russia, China, UK, France) veto each other’s morality into oblivion. It's an old boys' club with blood on its hands, sipping Geneva cocktails while Gaza burns.

Just yesterday, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, a pediatrician in Gaza, received the corpses of nine of her ten children — killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home. Her husband and surviving child are in critical condition. And what will the UN do? Express "deep concern." It might even tweet a hashtag.

This isn't an isolated failure. It's the norm.

Syria: The UN’s Diplomacy of Delay

In Syria, over a decade of mass murder, chemical weapons, starvation sieges — and the UN's grand contribution? Four envoys (yes, four: Kofi Annan, Lakhdar Brahimi, Staffan de Mistura, and Geir Pedersen). What did they achieve? Time — for Assad to starve opposition cities into surrender, for Russia to bomb hospitals with impunity, for international apathy to congeal into policy.

When the Syrian people finally overthrew Assad in December 2024, it wasn't because the UN helped; Syria was liberated by its people despite the UN’s bureaucratic enabling, not through any UN support for freedom. Peace didn't arrive through diplomacy. It arrived after 13 years of hell and the dragging down of a regime the UN spent more time conferring with than confronting.

A Global Warning, Written in Rubble

The failure to act in Gaza — to hold Netanyahu’s government to account, to stop the systematic killing of civilians, the use of starvation as a weapon — is not just a moral abdication. It is a signal flare to every autocrat-in-waiting.

You can kill thousands, starve children, flatten cities — and as long as one of the Big Five has your back, you’re untouchable. The international community, that ghostly phrase, has become a euphemism for paralysis.

This is how norms die. Not in explosions, but in silence, through the UN’s ritualised mourning and toothless diplomacy.

If the UN can't restructure itself to override the chokehold of the Security Council veto, to act when civilians are being slaughtered and war crimes broadcast live — then what, exactly, is it for? A museum to lost ideals? A diplomatic hospice for dying principles on life support?

Worse: by its inaction, the UN isn't merely failing — it's abetting.

The far-right, emboldened by the normalization of state violence, has watched how the language of “counterterrorism” grants impunity. Assad used it to flatten Homs and Aleppo. Netanyahu invokes it as entire Gazan families are buried beneath rubble. Putin used it to erase Grozny, then Kyiv’s suburbs. Resistance becomes “terrorism.” Civilian life becomes collateral. International law becomes optional.

And this playbook has been copy-pasted globally. From Europe to India to Latin America, authoritarians are learning the same lesson: if you wrap your war crimes in anti-terror rhetoric, the international community will flinch, then fall silent.

The UN was meant to be the world's moral compass. Instead, it’s become a weather vane — spinning helplessly in the wind of geopolitical power.

And if this continues — if Gaza becomes just another line in a future speech about "lessons not learned" — the next atrocity won’t come with calls for UN intervention.
It will come with applause.