The world’s most powerful nations have significantly undermined what the United Nations can do to help nations resolve conflicts, the globalist organization’s peacekeeping chief lamented Wednesday.
The unelected French career bureaucrat blamed global political divisions and an insistence by countries on sidelining the U.N. in general and the Security Council in particular for the lack of influence.
Jean-Pierre Lacroix used an interview with the Associated Press to point at the U.S. and the West on one side and Russia and often China on the other as affecting not just peacekeeping but everything the United Nations does in trying to promote peace and security.
The political rivalry can lead to the presence of U.N. peacekeepers being questioned by the parties to the conflict — or even asked to leave, as happened in Mali and is happening in Congo, he said.
Lacroix, personally appointed to his role by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said 20 years ago countries were much more likely to heed the U.N. and now it is being sidelined. East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia were used as examples of what is possible.
“But we don’t have that anymore,” he said ahead of the International Day of U.N. Peacekeepers on Wednesday.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sits in a helicopter during his visit to flood-affected areas in Pakistan’s Sindh province on September 10, 2022. (MUHAMMAD DAUD/AFP via Getty Images)
“Yes, we still have a U.N. presence in many different crisis situations, but we don’t have the same united, committed push of the membership to advance those political agreements between the parties,” he said.
“And sometimes, those agreements just unravel or they stagnate and create frustration.”
Multiple foreign countries are intervening in world events on behalf of their own interests today, he went on, citing the Central African Republic, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Mali as examples, adding “the list is long and expanding.”
The importance of multilateralism cannot be overstated, Lacroix declared.
The U.N.’s despair at its increasing lack of relevancy is nothing new in the 21st century.
As Breitbart News reported, the world needs an overarching level of multilateral governance that can sideline problematic “national interests,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in 2020, as he lamented existing U.N. instruments such as the Security Council have teeth but “show little or no appetite to bite.”
Guterres claimed governments are no longer the only political and power reality, declaring “we need an effective multilateralism that can function as an instrument of global governance where it is needed.”
Read the full Associated Press interview and story here