The United Nations was eighty on 24 October this year. How has it fared in all these years? To what degree does it yet hold relevance at a time when it is systematically ignored by governments and nations and its resolutions are flouted with impunity? When Donald Trump voices his disappointment with the UN, when Israel’s ambassador to the world body openly demands that Secretary General Antonio Guterres resign because he condemns Tel Aviv’s genocide in Gaza, what future is there for it? These are questions that call for answers.

Does the UN still merit a reputation as a force for global stability? Has it been able to ensure peace in the diverse regions of the globe? With the Trump administration intent on destabilising the governments of Colombia and Venezuela, with talk in the West of a Gaza administration studiously avoiding any mention of a role for the UN, there is cause for worry.

In this flurry of questions, it is perhaps a moment to step back a little and recall the UN as it used to be once upon a time. Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary General of the UN, perished in the depths of Africa in his quest to bring peace to Congo. His sacrifice remains a supreme example of the lengths to which humanity can go in order to ensure the survival of the world it inhabits; and by doing so make certain that it can forge ahead in making life better, in that qualitative sense of the meaning, for itself.

Hammarskjoeld was a dreamer, a near mystic who believed in the power of humankind to change the world. More importantly, it was his conviction that in a world constantly assailed by the inordinately ambitious and the plainly villainous, hope for a turn-around rested with and in the United Nations.

He was not concerned that Nikita Khrushchev was unhappy with him and demanded that a troika take over the responsibilities of administering the global body. For Hammarskjoeld, the fundamental point was one of rising above petty squabbles brought on by the bitterness of the Cold War and moving on to reassure people that with the United Nations around, there was hope of a better world taking shape.

Dag Hammarskjoeld did not live to see the organisation he loved and nurtured realise its potentials despite all the odds stacked against it through the decades since 1961. Had he been around, he would have agreed with us that the world, in tune with the lessons of history, remains an imperfect place.

He would have noted that the United Nations, for all the advances it has made through the lanes and alleys of what many would like to call globalisation, has much more to do to ensure peace across the continents. He would have acknowledged, though, as we acknowledge today, that the United Nations has arrived at a point in time and history where its presence in guaranteeing a more secure world than the one we live in is a reality we wish were part of life.

Do recall the time when Indonesia’s President Ahmed Sukarno took his country out of the United Nations in the mid-1960s. And recall too the twenty-two years which went by before the People’s Republic of China could take its rightful place in the world body. And remember too, the many occasions when any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council exercised the right of veto, thereby leaving the global body emasculated, unable to assert its authority.  If you recall, you will have occasion too to remember the bizarre. When Khrushchev banged the podium of the UN General Assembly with his shoe in 1960, it was not exactly an edifying spectacle. Decades later, when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez sniffed the presence of the devil in the same hall, he scandalised even his well-wishers around the world.

The United Nations has nevertheless been much larger than the men and women whose pettiness has often tended to denigrate the organisation. Men like America’s John Bolton, even as they sat at Security Council meetings, conveyed their disdain for the UN. That largeness one associates with the organisation comes from the critical and crucial role it has played in keeping stable and steady a world that endlessly threatens to spill over into all-consming chaos.

And therein is the moral power that the United Nations embodies through its presence around the world. If Rwanda 1994 was a terrible hallmark of failure, when the global body was found wanting in the task of preventing the country from collapsing into ethnic genocide, the readiness with which the United Nations went into the business of enforcing peace in such regions as the former Yugoslavia, Timor-Leste and large parts of Africa is a strong hint of the moral role it can play in preventing the globe from sliding into disorder.

Which raises the interesting question: had the United Nations been asked to step into the long conflict that was Vietnam, would matters have been any different? For three decades, a helpless world watched as the Vietnamese waged relentless, and justified, war against the French and then the American presence.

The United Nations was nowhere around. The result was disaster, first at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and then in Saigon in 1975. The French and American administrations, in that order, felt little compulsion to include the United Nations in the search for honourable ways out of the crises confronting them.

The consequence was disaster.

Fast forward to more recent times. When Tony Blair and George W Bush, adamant about Iraq’s Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction and so needing to be punished, they cared little about the concerns expressed by Hans Blix and his inspection team, indeed had little inclination to take the global body seriously. The ramifications of ignoring the United Nations in Iraq were horrifying. A beautiful country was destroyed on the basis of a lie, on the assumption that the United Nations did not need to be around. A palpable absence of morality is what you detect in the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Of course, no one will advance the notion that the United Nations can restore absolute order in a fractured world.  And yet in Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the moral authority of the United Nations gave us hope that in good time, the organisation would be an enduring benchmark of the limits to which human conscience can go in reaching out to societies around the world.

The peace-keeping forces operating under United Nations command, drawn from diverse nations around the world, bring together not merely soldiers from various armies but, in a larger sense, are representative of the diversity of cultures that helps contain or defuse crises which, left on their own, could spiral out of control. When you have soldiers from Ghana, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other nations, all symbolised by the blue helmet of the United Nations, serving together in war zones, you realise how remarkably perspectives have changed.

The United Nations has sensitised us all to the need for adhering to all those principles which go into bettering the quality of life for peoples and societies around the world. Its programmes on health, especially for children, have underscored the significance of a major area of social concern.

Its relentless stressing of the urgency of safeguarding human rights around the world, an idea formidably espoused through the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, has in the past many decades been pursued with vigour across the globe. Its pursuit of an environment agenda has brought home to governments the risks the world is exposed to unless urgent corrective measures are taken.

And yet there is opportunity for the United Nations to take on a wider dimension for itself. While more internal reforms need pursuing, there is a paramount need for member-nations, especially those powers instrumental in the formation of the world body in the mid-1940s, to take a comprehensive view of a world that has changed, and continues to change.

With such centres of power as India, Brazil, Japan and Germany taking centre stage in the global scheme of things, the time has arrived for the United Nations to give these nations the places they deserve in such bodies as the Security Council.

As Dag Hammarskjoeld would say, “Life only demands from you the strength that you possess. Only one feat is possible --- not to run away.”

The United Nations, for all its shortcomings, has not run away.

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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history