Comedian Larry Miller once remarked on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’ that, ‘The U.N. couldn’t break up a cookie fight at a girl scout meeting.’ Sadly there are a lot of worse things going on than innocent fighting over delicious, mint crisps or chocolate-covered peanut butter cookies. The U.N. Security Council is a joke. In arguably the greatest ‘shot-not’ of all time, the United States, France, China, Russia and the United Kingdom all effectively declared, ‘Shot-not ever leaving the U.N. Security Council.’ That’s right. Ever. At least the Fab Five, as we’ll dub them, have the common decency to let 10 other countries sit in the room and drink the Kool-Aid for a brief two-year non-renewable term. In the meantime, those five countries make the decisions that impact the rest of the world. One of the reasons the United Nations struggles to exert its authority is because often times there is disagreement amongst the Fab Five. All it takes is for one country to be tied closely to the situation in another, such as in the case of the Sudan, where for many months China held up U.N. action in order to protect their lucrative investment in Sudanese oil fields, or Russia’s sheltering of Iran from sanctions to protect its economic interests throughout the Middle East. The rest of the world has nary a voice when it can be drowned out so easily by one country.

Outside of a security council designed to police the world, what purpose does the U.N. serve other than to occupy some of Manhattan’s finest office space? Distribution of humanitarian aid remains a primary and vital function for the U.N. A friend of mine who spent a semester in the African country of Kenya told me that in the rural villages in which he stayed, his host family and thousands of other fellow Kenyans are completely reliant on food given to them through U.N. aid programs. Millions of other residents of third world countries find themselves in the same predicament and the U.N. does its best to feed them all. The U.N. is also instrumental in disaster relief worldwide, coming to the aid of people displaced by earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters. The U.N. also provides a forum, through the International Court of Justice, for legal disputes to be aired out between member states. But rulings in those cases can be overridden by a security-council veto, rendering the decisions of the court, far from binding.

After considering the positive and negative attributes of the organization, the question becomes what does the future hold for the U.N.? Some call for disbandment citing too many fatal flaws in the enforcement mechanisms and unfair advantages for larger, more influential countries. Others wish to depoliticize the organization and have it serve the world as a unifying voice of reason on non-military or security issues with member nations looking to obtain support on decisions being forced to comply with certain environmental and human rights policies. The real future probably lies somewhere in between. Too many humanitarian aid projects are already in full swing to make complete dissolution of the U.N. a viable option because so many under-privileged citizens of the world are completely reliant on them for sustenance. Peacekeeping missions have been effective when enough soldiers were available. As it stands now, the U.N. is simply unequipped for the numerous peacekeeping tasks at hand. This stems from the lack of a sizable and effective U.N. army caused by a lack of testicular fortitude on behalf of global leadership to contribute to one. Understandably, most countries are reluctant to place their own soldiers under the command of foreign leadership. But it’s time we all (America included) traded a little bit of our countries’ military sovereignty for the chance to have a U.N. peacekeeping army that can truly act as the world’s police force. Once the prestige of the U.N. is restored, it will become much easier to compel member nations to abide by a basic set of environmental and human rights ground rules, vital for the continued advancement of our society.