At 80, is the UN still relevant? Mid-East crisis raises hard questions

America's Middle East intervention unfolded with the UN reduced to near-invisibility.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

As the United Nations marks the 80th anniversary of its founding charter on June 26, a perennial question becomes ever sharper: Is the UN still relevant? Would anyone notice if it quietly slipped into oblivion?

This past week's events in the Middle East make the question especially urgent.

America's dramatic entry into Israel's campaign to severely degrade Iran's nuclear capabilities—and the ceasefire that followed—all happened with the very global organization tasked with conflict deterrence reduced to near-invisibility.

The question on the lips of journalists and the commentariat was: What is US President Donald Trump's next move? No one was wondering what the 15-member United Nations Security Council thought of all this.

Consider the press conference Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth held just 15 hours after Operation Midnight Hammer. Reporters pressed him and top US General Dan Caine on everything from compliance with America's War Powers Act to tactical specifics. Tellingly, no one asked if the strikes had UN Security Council sanction or whether they breached international law.

The resounding silence is perhaps the harshest indictment imaginable—far more damning than any trenchant criticism. It seems the organization's fate is to be treated increasingly as irrelevant to conflict deterrence, relegated to the status no serious diplomatic player wants: bystander, a mere observer.

Few seemed to question whether Mr. Trump's unilateral decision to bomb the three Iranian nuclear facilities was in keeping with the United States' obligations as a UN member state.

As observers claim, it revived the so-called Bush doctrine—the notion that Washington may strike first against a "future threat"—the same legal rationale that lit the fuse for the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.