The international leaders who founded the United Nations envisioned a world spared a repetition of

the horrors of World War Two, which killed an estimated 80 million people. But since then, scores
of wars have killed millions of people killed and displaced millions more.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding two years ago, Secretary General Antonio
Guterres described the organisation’s biggest accomplishment: The most important powers have not
fought against each other and nuclear war was avoided. But it failed to stop the spread of small and
medium-size conflicts around the world.
Guterres’s sigh of relief about avoiding nuclear war came before the Russian invasion of Ukraine
and President Vladimir Putin’s repeated implicit warnings of the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons.
The use of such weapons in war was considered so unlikely by political leaders around the world that
it virtually disappeared from public discourse for many years.
It is back now.
And the U.N. has been unable to stop ethnically-driven massacres, genocidal persecution of
minorities and other smaller conflicts. In 1995, for example, it was in in the town of Srebrenica in
Bosnia, which had been declared a safe zone by the U.N. Security Council, that Bosnian Muslims
were systematically killed while U.N. peacekeepers evacuated foreigners.
That was just two years after U.N. peacekeepers watched but stood by in Rwanda as Hutus
massacred an estimated 800,000 Tutsis. Kofi Annan, a former U.N. Secretary General, described
Srebrenica “as tragedy that will forever haunt the history of the United Nations.”