Born from the ruins of war, the United Nations embodies humanity’s attempt to replace conflict with dialogue and raw power with shared rules. It is flawed, often paralyzed, yet remains the only common roof under which adversaries must speak. Its worth lies less in lofty declarations than in sustaining conversation, compromise, and fragile concord where discord might otherwise harden into war.
Moral Courage
Beethoven’s Ninth turned suffering into universal harmony—a vision multilateralism once aspired to echo. Now, that moral music weakens under trends and slogans. Can the concert hall of nations recover its universal score—or will it simply binge what’s next?
Foreign Affairs
The UN is no world government—and that is its virtue. Its inertia slows war, its discord blocks monopoly, and its stage lets rivals quarrel without empire. Flawed and fragile, it preserves what liberty most requires: prudence, time, and knowledge.
Foreign Affairs
◳ The UN’s future will not be decided by new mandates or bigger budgets, but by whether it can still be trusted to know the world better than anyone else. As the United Nations turns 80, the familiar critiques resurface. The Security Council is paralyzed by vetoes; peacekeeping is costly
Foreign Affairs
At 80, the UN faces not just a budget crisis but an epistemic one. Its only path to legitimacy lies in knowledge—rigorous, transparent, indispensable. Either it becomes an analytical superpower or drifts into irrelevance.