The U.N. can never be a force for peace, as long as it bends to the will of U.S. imperialism

The International Day of Peace was established by the United Nations (UN) in 1981 and was later designated as a day of non-violence and cease-fire in 2001. However, the UN's approach has consistently overlooked the root causes of conflict. Wars are not just acts of violence, they are political and social tools used to achieve the interests of states, peoples, or classes.

The world is engulfed in grave wars, genocides, and other monumental threats to peace caused primarily by US imperialism. Today over 90% of Gaza is destroyed. 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced, 162,000 have been injured, 17,000 detained, 248 journalists killed, and 64,300 have been martyred, including over 20,000 children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Yet, Trump will roll out the red carpet for war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, while banning any Palestinian presence at the UN General Assembly this September in New York City.

The UN will never be a true multilateral force for peace as long as it bends to the will of US imperialism, the main source of war in the world today.

The world has witnessed the US use its position as a permanent Security Council member and the UN’s largest funder to systematically block every resolution demanding a ceasefire, sanctions, or an arms embargo on Israel. It has even bowed to Trump-era sabotage of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), strangling aid channels as Gaza endures a UN-declared Level 5 famine. As Trump boasts about being a “peace president,” his actions mock the very idea of international cooperation and peace while the United Nations and all the international institutions led by the US enable him to do so.

“The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, referencing a report on Sept 16. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.” Yet, it welcomes Israel, which is actively committing genocide and intensifying its airstrikes on Gaza City, totally destroying large areas and massacring entire families as the Israeli army begins a full-scale invasion deep into the city.

This is not peacekeeping, it is aiding and abetting a genocide.

A Peace of the Graveyard

The United Nations, set up in the aftermath of World War II, has now survived for 80 years. It has persisted through the US-Soviet Cold War and numerous limited wars since the 1950s, from the US war of aggression against the Korean people, which left a nation still divided by the 38th parallel and the truce village of Panmunjom, to the war against the Vietnamese people, and all succeeding US-initiated wars against the Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian people. Today, it exists amidst a developing cold war and inter-imperialist rivalry, raging proxy conflicts, counterinsurgency wars, widespread military occupation and expansion, driven primarily by US aggression.

While the UN's own International Day of Peace call says "From peacekeepers on the front lines of conflict, to community members, to students in classrooms around the world, everyone has a role to play", in reality the institutions of UN peacekeeping missions have long served as instruments of neocolonial control, upholding the guise of “liberal internationalism.” UN peace missions enforce a “peace of the graveyard”: one that silences resistance through military presence to facilitate a return to the status quo of exploitation, land grabs and foreign intervention for profit. In practice, the UN has become a forum where US and European interests dominate, marginalizing pro-independence movements and even whole sovereign states. This is exemplified by two key cases: the ongoing blockade of Palestinian statehood via US veto power in the Security Council, and the historic exclusion of the People's Republic of China for over two decades. From 1949 to 1971, US influence ensured the Chinese seat was held by the defeated fascist government in Taiwan, silencing the mainland Chinese government and a major anti-imperialist voice in the Cold War era.

The UN similarly claims to advocate for global cooperation "through understanding, non-violence, and disarmament". However, its structure and history often don't uphold the right of nations to self-determination. Numerous UN so-called Peacekeeping Missions have been undertaken over the decades with the result of, at best, leaving things status quo and, at worst, contributing to destabilization and terrorizing the people. Current ongoing operations include long-standing missions whose widely recognizable "blue helmets" try to present an image of benign intentions over what could actually be described as blatant foreign intervention.

The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), initially established in the 1970s during the brutal Lebanese Civil War, served as a seemingly neutral actor in the war. But by equating Lebanese and Palestinian national liberation forces with fascist paramilitaries backed by the US, France, and "Israel," the latter was able to operate with impunity and terrorize the people with weapons provided by the same foreign powers that armed UNIFIL itself. The result was that the genuine forces fighting for peace through national liberation were directly attacked and blamed for disrupting the "peace" mission of the UN.

The 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus resulted in nearly half the island's land being seized by the Turkish state and a puppet government, the so-called "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," that forcibly displaced the Greek-speaking Cypriots who lived there. The UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), already active for 10 years at that point, has since held silent watch over still-ruined buildings and a settler-occupying force while stifling any calls to eject the rising number of settlers from Turkiye from the land stolen from both Greek and Turkish speaking Cypriots years ago. By keeping the status quo, while claiming to be the force for peace on the island, UNFICYP in fact stifles the chance for peace by rejecting the just struggle of the Cypriot people for national liberation.

From the 1990s to the 2010s, UN peace missions formed across Africa and the Caribbean that continued the trend of destabilization for the very communities that they claimed to protect. The UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) has sat idly by while the Moroccan occupation intensifies and the Polisario Front of the Saharawi people lacks genuine support from the UN. The so-called "stabilization mission" in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Interim Security Force for Abyei in Sudan have proved to be even worse actors in the communities, with multiple "peacekeepers" being exposed for crimes of bribery, looting, rape, and other violent crimes. The Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti would even spread a cholera outbreak to the island in the midst of a devastating earthquake due to severe neglect of their own sanitation facilities.

These missions have also been active throughout Latin America and Asia, with historical involvement in nations including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, and Syria.

To Achieve Just Peace: Resist US Led-War

Can we truly say that the United Nations has maintained peace over these last 80 years? The answer is obvious. The roots of armed conflicts remain unaddressed and unresolved by the UN. At 80, the organization is tattered, weakened by the actions of its most powerful member. The US has abandoned the UN's most important agencies, such as UNRWA , and retreated into a selfish unilateralism, even discarding the devastating neoliberal system it once championed.

Ultimately, the impulse for peace comes from the people themselves, and only they can achieve it through united struggle against imperialism and all reaction. Across the globe, people are taking action: the Global Sumud Flotilla is currently challenging the blockade of Gaza to intervene directly against the siege. The Axis of Resistance is fighting back and standing up against Zionism and US imperialism through targeting the US bases, striking Israeli military and infrastructure targets, blockading trade with the Zionist entity and waging a peoples war across Palestine. Workers are fighting back to block war supply chains, exemplified by the victorious Italian and Spanish dock worker's blockades of the Maersk shipping company to end shipments to Israeli settlements. Mass movements are targeting key war production hubs like Italy’s Leonardo, Germany's Rheinmetall and UK's DSEI showing rising dissent against the further fueling of Europe's military production. People in countries hosting US bases or with US military cooperation agreements are demonstrating and organizing to oust these installments from their land from Puerto Rico to Okinawa to Korea to the Philippines. Liberation struggles resisting US-led wars are showing that the only way to end war is to fight the systems that produce it.

We join movements worldwide in exposing the US war machine, targeting the corporations and military bases that sustain it, and advancing a true anti-militarist agenda:

Shut down overseas US bases and commands!
Fight weapons companies and arms sales!
Resist Zionism, end the occupation, and liberate Palestine from the river to the sea!
End all US-backed settler colonial regimes!
US out of everywhere!