ISIL, Syria and Ebola loom large at UN General Assembly

President Barack Obama will have the chance to drum up more support for Washington’s battle plan on Wednesday, when he chairs a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. However, tensions between the council’s permanent members, in particular the U.S. and Russia, often render the council toothless when it comes to matters of war and peace.

Both countries freely flex their vetoes, and their divergent positions on a range of issues, among them the war in Syria, have paralyzed the council.

The U.N. and its effectiveness were the subject of Al Jazeera America’s Sunday evening segment The Week Ahead. In it Carne Ross, founder of the Independent Diplomat, a nonprofit group that consults on diplomatic strategy, said he experienced firsthand the “grotesque amount of power” wielded by the council’s five permanent members when he was posted at the U.N. as a British diplomat.

“That distorts the U.N. throughout,” he said. “That distorts the Security Council, it distorts the General Assembly, and it distorts the appointment of senior officials, including the secretary-general.”

Since the founding of the U.N. in October 1945, promoting peace and security has been one of the organization’s main missions. Originally envisioned as a kind of global police force, today it has more than 120,000 peacekeepers with 16 operations on four continents, according to U.N. figures.

Despite successful missions in East Timor and Cyprus, Ross described the U.N.’s record on curbing violence as “deeply imperfect.”

Among its major failures was the 1995 Serb massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, which was supposed to be a U.N. safe haven in Bosnia. Before that, there was the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. 

In The Week Ahead, Michael Schroeder, director of the global governance, politics and security program at American University, said the crisis there was the low point for the U.N.

“The Security Council, in fact, sought to actually remove [U.N.] forces, rather than to expand them so they could take action and protect civilians,” he said. “I think following that, there was a real period of reflection.”

From the beginning, the U.N. has been far more effective on the front lines of relief efforts. One of its first missions was to help Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Today it assists nearly 39 million refugees around the globe.  

And for all its bureaucracy, diplomats say, the U.N.’s mission — and its role in global affairs — should not be discounted. Ross told Al Jazeera that the upcoming General Assembly is important too.

“Yes, it is pretty boring, and the speeches do sound rather dull, but believe me, hard-core diplomacy goes on in the corridors and in the private suites of the United Nations this coming week,” he said.

“World leaders meet — and they talk about real stuff.”