Opinion | Amid great power rivalry, the UN is a vital security shelter. It cannot fail

Name: UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going
Uploaded: 2020-09-18T17:15:18.000Z
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going

The US-China contest has unsurprisingly made the UN a main battleground as it celebrates its 75th year

Despite fears of a ‘Great Fracture’, China has no intention of challenging US global leadership or the rules-based order, and its championing of multilateralism is to be welcomed

Reading Time:4 minutes

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A Chinese colonel receives a UN peace medal on behalf of the Chinese peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon in 2017. China is the second-largest contributor to the UN after the US. Photo: Xinhua

Zhou Bo

Published: 1:15am, 19 Sep 2020Updated: 4:28am, 19 Sep 2020

As the United Nations General Assembly celebrates its 75th anniversary on September 21, the question for the septuagenarian is not how to survive, but how to thrive.

The UN’s importance is firstly psychological. It is older than many people and mostly taken for granted. The largest intergovernmental organisation born out of the ashes of World War II looks like a big family where things are discussed peacefully among its 193 members. This gives a feeling of assurance and protection.

The best way to understand the UN is to imagine a world without it: who would take care of our common education, health and humanitarian needs, and our social, economic and cultural development? According to the UN, 690 million people still go to bed on an empty stomach. This is why the UN World Food Programme is indispensable.

Second, the UN has, by and large, fulfilled its primary role of saving people from “the scourge of war”. The long period of peace we are enjoying – an absence of major wars since the end of the second world war in 1945 – has not been documented since the Roman Empire.

That we are seriously discussing second-tier threats such as terrorism, the spread of small arms and human trafficking, and non-traditional issues such as climate change is because we know major wars are less likely today.

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UN’s food relief agency in urgent need for funds to keep coronavirus aid flights going

However, a test of the UN may be around the corner if US President Donald Trump is reelected. For a man who has ordered the United States to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, Paris climate deal and World Health Organisation, to name just a few, the question is what other damage he would inflict in the next four years.

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