The long peace of the past eight decades has rested on two revolutionary convictions: that wars of aggression are intolerable and that empires must end. The first principle emerged from the carnage of two world wars, which together killed a hundred million people. The second came from centuries of colonial subjugation and the fight across Asia, Africa, and Latin America for self-determination. The United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, gave both convictions political form.
Since then, the world has avoided a cataclysmic great-power war. Even more remarkably, global European empires were dismantled and replaced by a new system of nearly 200 sovereign states. Both achievements combined to make possible extraordinary advances in human well-being. To be sure, the world has witnessed many conflicts since the end of World War II, including savage wars of decolonization, and soaring economic growth has come alongside deep inequalities and environmental destruction. But it remains indisputable that for billions of people, the past 80 years have been a time of peace and rising prosperity.
That era is now coming to an end. The twin convictions of no war and no empire, the load-bearing walls of the long peace, are fast buckling. The symptoms are clear. Interstate and civil wars have mushroomed in recent years, bringing immeasurable suffering to hundreds of millions. The great powers themselves have launched wars of aggression, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Nuclear powers are modernizing and expanding their arsenals, strategic arms control agreements have lapsed, nuclear facilities have come under direct military attack in recent years, and states big and small are arming themselves at a pace unseen since the 1980s. In Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, and now Iran, diplomacy appears only in its most anemic or ad hoc form. And as conflict spreads, United Nations peacemaking is missing in action.
The standard explanation for the unfolding crisis is the collapse of the so-called rules-based or liberal international order, a post–Cold War arrangement tied to American military and financial supremacy. Washington’s retreat from multilateral alliances and institutions such as NATO and the World Trade Organization means this order is indeed breaking down. But this analysis conflates two very different things. The liberal international order was not what produced the long peace. Instead, and in significant ways, it undermined the twin convictions on which the peace has actually rested.
The real disaster is the abandonment of the twin convictions of no war and no empire by states and publics alike, caused not by the American retreat but by an erosion of the international moral leadership and collective memory that once sustained them. It’s a crisis of imagination produced by a compound amnesia, not just of war and empire but also of the extraordinary peacemaking successes of an earlier United Nations. Recovering that lost history and rebuilding the politics (and only then, the institutions) that once placed the twin convictions at the center of global thinking are the essential first steps toward a new, peaceful global order.
This lost history matters all the more because the world that is emerging, in which no single power can organize international politics around its own preferences, resembles more the world of the earlier United Nations (from roughly 1955 to 1990) than that of the past three and a half decades of American supremacy. The recent U.S.-Israeli war against Iran may be a harbinger of future conflicts, an interstate war in which one or more sides will need what is now often termed an “off-ramp.” In the past, it was precisely when warring parties approached exhaustion or were wary of escalation but could find no ready exit that UN secretaries-general proved indispensable, time and again, crafting not just any off-ramp but one that safeguarded future peace by reinforcing the taboo against wars of aggression and the imperative that the age of empire must not return.
The United Nations can be rebuilt. What’s needed is less an institutional fix (however important reform in the membership of the Security Council, for example, may be) and more the restoration of the twin convictions: through political leadership willing to champion them, a new UN secretary-general who will demonstrate them in action, and a global public demanding once more a world with neither war nor empire. Past UN peacemaking was possible not because the institutions were perfect—they never were—but because the convictions animating those institutions were politically alive, defended and advanced by states and peoples determined to keep them at the heart of international relations.
A WORLD REMADE
The United Nations was not born as a liberal project. It was first conceived as a muscular continuation of the wartime alliance, a collective security mechanism that would crush future aggression, with U.S. and Soviet bomber planes operating jointly from air bases circling the globe. But other, more expansive visions of the UN imagined it as an organization that would include the voices of smaller states working together toward a better world. The charter represented a compromise. By the time of its signing 81 years ago, Washington and Moscow were already beginning to eye each other as adversaries and wanted to make sure that the UN would above all prevent a third world war. The five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—were each given a veto to make sure that the organization could never become an alliance against any of them. They hoped that by keeping everyone within the same system, even at the cost of paralysis, there would be no repeat of the dynamics that led to the downfall of that earlier, ill-fated attempt at an international peace organization, the League of Nations.
The Security Council was soon deadlocked, failing for example, to prevent war in Korea. But the UN as a whole soon flourished as secretaries-general spread their wings to become the world’s mediators in chief. During the Suez crisis of 1956, the Swedish secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold deployed the UN’s first peacekeeping force, practically overnight, as a way of providing France, Israel, and the United Kingdom a face-saving egress from their ignominious invasion of Egypt. The UN as an instrument of the first conviction, on the inadmissibility of wars of aggression, was made real. Governments began instinctively to turn to the head of the UN in times of crisis, for instance, in 1958 in Lebanon, where Hammarskjold’s observer force helped create the conditions for an American withdrawal. The secretary-general may have lacked an army, but he had the moral authority of a global and impartial mediator.
At the same moment, the conviction that empires must end was coming to life. Representatives of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa arrived in New York in waves, many of them fresh from victory in decades-long struggles for independence, and transformed the UN into humanity’s first universal institution. They embraced the charter with a fervor its Western authors had not anticipated and insisted that its language of sovereign equality and human dignity applied to all peoples. Many worked with civil rights leaders in the United States; they challenged racial hierarchy wherever it persisted. In doing so, they activated the latent radicalism embedded in the charter’s founding language, turning principles into political demands. In 1960, the UN General Assembly, led by the “Afro-Asian” bloc, overcame long-standing Western opposition and passed the landmark Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, placing the UN unequivocally on the side of those fighting against empire. At the same time, these new states vigorously backed Algeria’s war of independence against the French.
But their vision went deeper than the end of formal empire. Sovereignty, in their view, could not mean simply a European flag coming down and a new one going up. It had to mean genuine freedom from political interference and external economic domination. A world of truly sovereign equals, they argued, was the only stable foundation for lasting peace. They anchored their postimperial vision within a UN framework, preventing international anarchy and forging the global system that exists today.
A TRULY UNIVERSAL MANDATE
The new states in Asia and Africa, countries such as Ghana, India, and Indonesia, working closely in New York with neutral states such as Ireland, Sweden, and Yugoslavia, saw no reason why this new world of sovereign equals should be held hostage by superpower rivalry. They opposed the very logic of the Cold War and worried that the Americans and the Russians, left to their own devices, would sooner or later take the rest of the world down with them. In their view, given the threat of atomic annihilation, only a new era of peace and global cooperation grounded in sovereign equality could follow the age of empire. Together, they invested the UN with a moral authority that did not flow from any great power, a mandate that would prove decisive in the decades ahead.
During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Burmese UN secretary-general U Thant provided the vital off-ramp. Through a series of public and private messages to U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, as well as a personal mission to Cuban President Fidel Castro in Havana at the height of the crisis, he positioned himself, without any authorization from the Security Council, as the impartial mediator essential for de-escalation. (Thant was my grandfather and the subject of my recent book, The Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World.) For Khrushchev and Castro, being able to respond positively to an appeal for peace from a UN secretary-general rather than an ultimatum from Washington proved indispensable. Kennedy, on more than one occasion, pushed back against aides calling for military action by arguing that the United States had to wait for “U Thant’s diplomacy.” When needed most, the UN generated the time and space required for the great powers to walk themselves back from the brink.
There were many more mediation triumphs to come, from Cyprus to Indonesia. In 1965, when India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir, Thant flew to both capitals. Accepting UN mediation implied no weakness. The secretary-general was under no illusion that he could stop a war in full flow. Instead, he cultivated the trust of both leaders, crafted a cease-fire formula, then judged exactly when a degree of Security Council pressure would prove most helpful. After three weeks, when battlefield options became limited, a UN peace option was ready and waiting, including the immediate deployment of military observers to prevent renewed clashes. The war came to an end.
The load-bearing walls of the long peace are fast buckling.
A different kind of test came in the Congo, which had become independent in 1960 but where, within days, the former colonial power, Belgium, launched what it called a humanitarian intervention and hived off a mineral-rich southern region, Katanga, under a white supremacist regime. White supremacist forces soon participated in the overthrow and eventual killing of Congo’s elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Thant pushed for a military solution, mobilizing an Indian-led UN force of Africans, Asians, Swedes, and Irish troops that routed the white supremacist forces in early 1963. In this case, tough UN action put the organization’s increasingly spirited stance against empire into practice.
Washington’s attitude toward its creation, however, began to sour. Thant’s framing of the war in Vietnam not as a Cold War “domino” but as a fight for self-determination, together with his multiyear efforts without any Security Council mandate to broker talks between the United States and North Vietnam, provoked fury in Washington. From 1967 onward, his attempts to seek a peace in the Middle East that included Israel’s full withdrawal from the occupied territories also fueled perceptions that the world body was biased against the Jewish state.
Starting in the late 1960s, the UN, overriding Western objections, supported liberation movements against colonial and white supremacist regimes across southern Africa. The UN also pushed for a reshaping of the global economy, an effort culminating in the 1974 Declaration for a New International Economic Order, which demanded fairer terms for trade, technology transfers, and control over natural resources, a vision of global economic relations that could power growth while reducing inequalities.
But by then, a very different view of the future was consolidating in Washington and other Western capitals, one in which the Soviet Union was defeated and economic globalization was anchored in Western markets and in which an independent and assertive UN had little place. And in the former colonial world, the tide had turned. The generation of postcolonial internationalists, such as Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, and Indonesian President Sukarno, had passed from the world stage. From Jakarta to Accra to Santiago, right-wing military coups (often with U.S. backing) ousted some of the governments most committed to a postimperial vision.
As American hostility swelled and developing-world leadership waned in the 1980s, this earlier version of the UN, now hidden from view, not only survived but also matured. Drawing on decades of shared experience, the Peruvian secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and his team of mediators labored patiently to build the framework that in 1988 finally brought the Iran-Iraq war to a close. Over these years, they brokered complex settlements in Afghanistan, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia, and elsewhere, setting the stage for an end to the Cold War.
By the early 1990s, the UN had safeguarded the long peace through over a dozen peacemaking interventions and through its consolidation of the postimperial system of sovereign nation-states. It had helped the world avoid a disastrous alternative: ever-bloodier struggles for independence, fueled by the arbitrary borders left by colonial powers, that could have led to an unimaginable conflagration, even nuclear war. The UN’s success was not the work of any single power or ideology but the twin convictions of no war and no empire, realized through the labors of the first institution representing all the peoples of the world.
NEW WORLD ORDER
Over the following years, however, the UN was reshaped again, this time by the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower. The so-called liberal international order that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was built around Washington’s unchallenged economic and military supremacy. The UN reached new heights but often as an uncomfortable adjunct of the new dispensation.
Interstate mediation gave way to interventions in civil wars. The “Third World” vision of a new international economic order with a fairer global trading system at its core was swapped for development aid and poverty reduction targets set by the agendas of Western donors. Sovereignty became conditional, subject to override in the name of human rights and humanitarian need, with armed operations, for example in Haiti, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia, setting new precedents.
The problem was not the ambition: ending civil wars and advancing human rights are entirely consistent with the UN Charter’s founding principles. But in prior decades, the newly independent states had fiercely defended the UN’s principle of nonintervention as the institutional embodiment of the conviction against empire. The increasing number of Security Council-authorized interventions after the Cold War, from Somalia in 1992 to Libya in 2011, even when occasioned by atrocities or widespread violations of human rights, risked turning the organization into a mechanism for projecting American power rather than upholding universal principles. In the process, the conviction against empire that once defined the UN began to erode. The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 dealt a direct blow to the conviction against wars of aggression. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, the twin convictions were already crumbling. The once highly visible role of secretaries-general as mediator between states had all but disappeared.
And now, the post–Cold War liberal international order is itself disappearing. The United States has turned its back on alliances that were the linchpins of that order. That order was also never designed to accommodate the rise of non-Western powers, above all China. Amid these swirling currents, the UN has been left rudderless and now faces acute financial pressure, its past record of peacemaking success almost entirely forgotten.
PAST CAN BE PROLOGUE
What is needed now is the restoration of the original twin convictions to the heart of global politics. The principles of no war and no empire are not idealistic aspirations, but the load-bearing walls of the only period of truly global peace humanity has ever built. They require urgent, determined, and articulate defense. What’s important is not multilateralism, which is value-free and can serve any agenda, but the ideas served by global cooperation. Reform of the UN matters, but it is secondary: institutions can only reflect the politics that animate them.
The current moment underscores the urgency of making these ideas operational again. For that to happen, three things are required. First, a mix of governments from across all regions must be willing to work at the highest levels to champion the dual convictions and insist that they guide international responses to conflict and crisis.
Second, the next secretary-general, who is to be selected in the coming months, must have the courage and creativity to insert himself or herself into the most dangerous conflicts, demonstrating through bold action that principled peacemaking remains possible. To be sure, the successes of past secretaries-general were never purely personal. They depended on the willingness of great powers to grant at least minimal room to maneuver and leaders from other states, big and small, to invest genuine political capital in the organization. Failures may be more numerous than successes. But energetic efforts by the next secretary-general to defuse and end conflicts can begin to shift what states believe is achievable and what publics can imagine.
Third, and most fundamentally, governments and publics must recover the memory of the disasters of war and empire and of what the early UN achieved. Without that, even the most determined efforts at renewal will be impossible.
Stories of the clash of heroes and villains are more compelling than those of mediation and compromise.
There was a time when every person sitting around the UN Security Council table had direct experience of total war or colonial humiliation. They needed no reminders of the horrors of both. What should have followed the passing of that generation was cultural transmission, the stories a society tells about itself, that kept the twin convictions alive. But the transmission failed. World War II, for example, is routinely celebrated in the West as a historic triumph but seldom remembered as an overwhelming calamity in which ascendant powers and waning empires flung the world into a maelstrom of unprecedented carnage. In much Western publishing, media, and elite education, early UN history, particularly the pivotal role played by non-Western states in shaping the postcolonial world, has been entirely overlooked, often in favor of narratives framed around the United States’ contest with the Soviet Union. The deeper problem is cultural: stories of the clash of heroes and villains are more compelling than those of mediation and compromise. Even in the global South, many have only absorbed a version of the past from which their own most important chapters had been air-brushed from view. The early UN was memory-holed so successfully that in the mid-1990s, transcribers working on John F. Kennedy’s audiotapes from the Cuban missile crisis garbled references to the “U Thant initiative” as “the attack thing.”
War is, of course, not distant from everyone today. Millions around the world have had their lives destroyed in recent conflicts. But those most affected are rarely in the rich countries where the decisions that matter most are made. An exception are the men and women of the United States who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families, many of whom have made clear their desire never to see their country fight a war of choice again. But this desire is orphaned from the story of the very institution created by their own country that once prevented and might again prevent the kinds of wars they oppose.
Across the world, the desire for a world free of war and empire exists, waiting to be mobilized and given fresh political voice. These convictions remain the surest basis on which to build a new peace architecture for the rest of the twenty-first century. Recovering that memory and renewing global leadership is the most urgent task in international politics today.
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