Is the United Nations still relevant?

This is a genuinely debated question, and reasonable people land in different places depending on what they mean by "relevant." Let me pull in some current perspectives to ground the answer.## Is the UN Still Relevant? It's Complicated.

The honest answer is: relevant, but badly strained — and 2026 has been a particularly hard test of that relevance.

The case for "yes, still relevant"

Public opinion still backs it. A 20-country survey released in September 2026 found that 57 per cent of respondents were worried about the future, while nearly nine in ten believed that even the world's most powerful countries need the international system rather than trying to confront today's problems on their own. Notably, only 13 per cent regarded the United Nations as outdated and no longer necessary.

It remains the only truly universal forum. Analysts note that the United Nations was born from the recognition that humanity's biggest problems cannot always be solved by national power alone, and that principle remains relevant. For issues like pandemics, climate, refugee crises, and AI governance, there's simply no substitute venue where nearly every country has a seat at the table.

The case for "it's failing at its core job"

The Security Council — its most powerful body — is arguably paralyzed. Critics describe a body facing a deepening crisis of effectiveness and legitimacy, designed in 1945 with an anachronistic structure centred around five permanent members with veto powers, increasingly unable to address today's conflicts. In practical terms, in 2025, permanent members cast vetoes blocking action on Gaza and Ukraine, and the Council has been largely silent on other crises too — one analysis points to the South Caucasus as an example of the Council's irrelevance, where Azerbaijan's drone-centered warfare overturned decades of military balance, yet the Security Council remained silent, unable to restrain technologically enabled aggression.

Representation feels outdated. Reflecting an order that no longer exists, the Council's permanent members represent a minority of the world's people, fueling Global South demands for real reform — including African representation aligned with the Ezulwini Consensus: permanent African seats with full veto rights, or, if the veto is curbed, equal standing for all permanent members.

The UN is also in genuine financial crisis. The United States owes roughly $1.5 billion in unpaid assessments, arrears that have since climbed above $2 billion, while China has run hundreds of millions behind. Secretary-General António Guterres has warned bluntly of a "race to bankruptcy," proposing a 15 percent cut to the UN's regular budget for 2026 and the elimination of roughly 2,600 posts. This liquidity crunch has forced real cutbacks: the reform effort is occurring in the context of a liquidity crisis facing the UN—largely driven by member states' failure to pay their assessed contributions in full and on time—that has forced the world body to operate in a resource-constrained environment, leading to a hiring freeze and reduced services.

My take

Calling the UN simply "relevant" or "irrelevant" misses the point — it's more accurate to say the UN is structurally necessary but institutionally broken in specific, fixable-in-theory ways. It still does enormous unglamorous work (humanitarian aid, disease surveillance, refugee support, peacekeeping in dozens of places nobody covers on the news) even while its flagship function — preventing great-power-backed atrocities via the Security Council — is often gridlocked by design (the veto). One commentator frames it well: without the P5 actually cooperating, without sustained deconfliction among the P5, the U.N. cannot function as a system of collective security. That's less a UN problem than a great-power-politics problem the UN was built to contain but was never given the tools to force.

2026 itself is something of an inflection point: it's the year a new Secretary-General will be chosen, and it comes as the 2026 Secretary-General selection will take place in a context in which mandate delivery is greatly hampered by political uncertainty, and UN governance is expected to operate under fiscal constraints, testing the extent to which major powers are willing to pursue deeper structural reform to make the UN fit for purpose. So the more useful question isn't "is it relevant" but "will member states — especially the P5 — actually let it function as designed, or keep it hobbled while blaming it for the paralysis they themselves create?"