Quotes about UN Effectiveness

Atal Bihari Vajpayee

International institutions like the UN can only be as effective as its members allow it to be.

Donald Trump

When has the UN done any good. All they do is damage.

He was responding to the United Nations Security Counsil resolution calling on Israel to stop the building of settlemetns in the "occupied" territories. Normally such resolutions such as these were vetoed bu the United States, but this time it was not and Secretary of State John Kerry made a major speech urging the Israels not to keep building settlements which in his view inflamed the Palestinians and made the prospects for a peace less likely. The Israelis argued that the particualar areas--Jerusalem, Judea and Summaria were consecrated by God for the Jewish people who have inhabited the area for over 3000 years, and while they do not insist on sovreignty over the Judea and Summaria, from which Jews had been ethnically cleased, they do demand that the Jewish People who want to should be allowed to fulfill God's mandate and settle in their traditional territories. The traditional view of the United States on the settlement issue is that what God had done thousands of years cannot be allowed to override the obligagtion of israel and teh Palestinians to negotate the status of the territories that became an obligation when the Oslo Accords were signed in the recent past. Trump was very sympathetic to the Israeli position and was one of the many Americans who ha little or no respect for the United Nations.

Miroslav Lajcak

What keeps me awake at night is the issue of relevance of the United Nations.

Jeffrey Sachs

The idea that the UN system could provide real leadership on the great development challenges will strain credulity in some quarters.

Dore Gold

Who is going to be in charge of security in a divided Jerusalem if it is put under a United Nations mandate? The UN forces that were in Rwanda?

The UN peacekeepers have had a sorry record of protecting people from aggression, attacks and even genocide. In Sarajevo they stood by as the Serbs rounded up 7,000 male Muslims and marched them off to be executed right past the United Nations forces. And the UN was unable to stop the genocide in Rwanda. In the Middle East on several occasions, Arab armies have walked right through the United Nations peacekeepers and attacked Israeli civilians. So no one, lease of all the Israelis have any confidence that the United Nations can provide security in Jerusalem or anywhere else in the Middle East. The Israeli position was that when the Jordanians controlled the city, they did not allow Jews to their sacred places to pray or have access to the city. The UN could not prevent violence at all. No one else is willing, but since 1967 the Israelis have maintained the peace and security of the city while allowing the Arabs and other groups access to their places of worship.

Kofi Annan

There was a time, with the Berlin Wall down, that [it looked as if] the UN finally could do what it was set up to do, the rivalry between the two camps would dissipate, and we could all co-operate. And then, of course, Iraq came and blew it all apart. These upheavals will always take place in the world, and the design and construct of the UN ideally should be such that it can deal with these upheavals, and possibly influence them, and survive and thrive, but it doesn't work out that way, because as an organisation we are so dependent on the same member states.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail... You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

Bahai Universal House of Justice

Most criticisms of the operations of the United Nations are based on comparisons with the operations of the leading organizations in the private sector or on measurements relative to inflated initial expectations. Although some specific comparisons may be useful in increasing the efficiency of the United Nations more general exercises of this kind are essentially unfair. The United Nations lacks not only the clear authority, but also the requisite resources to act effectively in most instances. Accusations of the UN's failure are in fact indictments of the member states themselves.

UN Effectiveness Quotes