Why UN General Assembly Matter?
The Security Council was never designed to be fair. It was designed to be governable by five winners.
On September 22, 2026, as the 81st session of the UN General Assembly opened in New York, President Trump told the chamber that the United States could still reach a deal with Iran, or could instead "annihilate the Islamic Republic." Most of the Iranian delegation walked out. A day later, Iran's president took the same podium to accuse Washington and Israel of killing civilians. In between, the British prime minister used his inaugural UN speech to argue that artificial intelligence, not war, should be the organizing question of the century. Three wars (Gaza, Ukraine, Iran) and one argument about the future of AI, all inside the same week, in the same building that keeps getting called useless.
That reputation is not new, but it has hardened this year. The war in Gaza continues; so does Russia's war in Ukraine; so does the civil war in Sudan, which barely gets mentioned. Every one of these crises has, at some point, reached the Security Council, and every one of them has stalled there. The public conclusion is easy to reach: the UN talks, nobody listens, and international law is decorative. That conclusion is understandable. It is also wrong about where the problem sits.
The problem has a name and an article number
The UN was not built as a single, coherent actor. It was built, in San Francisco in 1945, as a bargain between the winners of a war who were not going to accept an organization that could act against their own interests. That bargain has a legal form: Article 27(3) of the Charter, the veto held by the five permanent members of the Security Council (the US, Russia, China, France and the UK). It is not a design flaw that nobody noticed. It is the design.
The consequence is structural, not incidental. In 2025 alone, the Council recorded four vetoes (two American vetoes shielding Israel's conduct in Gaza, two Russian vetoes weakening protections for Ukraine) and adopted only 44 resolutions, the lowest number since 1991. The United States had already vetoed three Gaza ceasefire proposals before abstaining on Resolution 2728 in March 2024, by which point more than ten thousand civilians were already dead. None of this is a coincidence of bad timing. It is what happens when the body legally responsible for international peace and security includes, as permanent members with veto power, states that are themselves parties to the conflicts it is supposed to resolve. CIVICUS LENSGlobal Policy Journal
So when people say "the UN can't do anything," what they are really describing is a Security Council captured by exactly the states the Charter was built around. The rest of the UN system, the General Assembly, the Secretariat, the specialized agencies, the International Court of Justice, is not equally paralyzed. It is paralyzed only where the veto reaches.
Where the Assembly steps in
This is why the General Assembly has spent the last few years becoming the more interesting institution to watch, not because it has more legal power than the Council (it doesn't; its resolutions are recommendations, not binding decisions), but because it is the only major UN organ the P5 cannot individually block.
Two mechanisms explain the shift. The first is Resolution 377, "Uniting for Peace," adopted in 1950 during the Korean War and largely dormant for decades. It allows the General Assembly to take up a matter and make recommendations, including sanctions or the use of force, when the Security Council is deadlocked by a veto. Between 2022 and 2023 it was invoked three times over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, moving the debate to the one chamber where Moscow has no veto.
The second is more recent and more targeted: the 2022 "veto initiative," formalized as General Assembly Resolution 76/262. It requires the President of the General Assembly to convene a formal Assembly meeting within ten working days of any Security Council veto, forcing the vetoing power to explain itself in front of the full membership. It does not undo the veto. It removes the option of using it quietly. As one UN debate on the mechanism put it, ignoring calls to go further on veto reform is a "recipe for irrelevance." InsightsIAS un
None of this makes the Assembly a substitute Security Council. Its resolutions still carry no binding force under the Charter. But political weight is not nothing, especially when it can be converted into something with more teeth: it was a General Assembly request, not a Security Council one, that sent the question of Israel's occupation policies to the International Court of Justice for the advisory opinion the ICJ delivered in 2024. The Assembly cannot enforce international law by itself. It can still put the Court, and the argument, in motion.
A second, quieter test: who runs the place next
There is a second reason 2026 matters for this argument, and it has nothing to do with wars. Guterres's second term ends on December 31, and, for the first time, the process is unfolding with more transparency than the closed-door deals that used to pick a Secretary-General. Candidates including Rebeca Grynspan, Virginia Gamba and Macky Sall have had to make a public case for the role, in front of the same Assembly the Council usually tries to keep at arm's length. As one scholar of UN governance put it while describing the current mood in New York, the veto problem is what leaves the organization "hamstrung," from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan to Iran, and the demand for a different kind of leadership at the top is a direct response to that. NYT
The honest diagnosis
None of this is an argument that the United Nations is working well. It plainly is not, if the standard is stopping wars in real time. But the frustration people feel is aimed at the wrong noun. "The UN" is not a single actor that chose to look away from Gaza, Sudan or Ukraine. It is a set of institutions built on top of a 1945 compromise that gave five states the legal power to protect themselves and their allies from the very organization meant to constrain them, and that compromise is nearly impossible to undo, since Charter amendments under Articles 108 and 109 require the consent of those same five states.
That is the actual question international law has to sit with: not whether the UN is useless, but whether a legal architecture designed by the victors of one war can still deliver anything close to security for everyone else, eighty years later. The General Assembly's growing willingness to act where the Council cannot is not proof that the system works. It is proof that the people inside it have stopped waiting for the Council to fix itself, and started building around it instead.
That, in the end, is why the General Assembly matters: not because it replaces the Security Council, but because it is what happens when 193 states decide that five vetoes should not get the last word on every catastrophe of this decade.
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