Simply put, the United Nations is incapable of undertaking military action under it’s own banner as long as the contributing states can only provide poorly trained, equipped soldiers who have little understanding or direction in the conflict they are ordered to contain (A. J. Venter, War Dogs, Chapter 6: The United Nations Debacle in West Africa). Whereas past conflicts involved clear distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, the United Nations was now facing situations where there was no distinction at all, and warzones were rife with criminals, paramilitaries, terrorists and mercenaries. For an organisation consisting of states that have a history of only dealing with state vs. state issues, it is difficult to now be dealing with a number of non-state actors. Furthermore, UN forces have a history of being hamstrung by vague mission mandates and diplomatic pressures. During the 1994 UNAMIR mission in Rwanda, an understrength contingent of UN peacekeepers was unable to intervene during the genocide because of its limited jurisdiction and mandate to act. It took the UN Security Council six weeks to adopt a resolution which provided aid to the UNAMIR force, but by that stage it was too late, and a failure of the United Nations to act quickly resulted in the mass murder of up to 800,000 Rwandan people. The UN is better suited to act as a forum for international diplomacy and cooperation between states rather than as an international interventionist military force.

It is difficult to clearly state why many states are pessimistic when it comes to dealing with the United Nations. Realists would argue that because the international system exists in a state of anarchy, then NGOs such as the UN are not to be trusted or relied upon. This would explain a lack of active involvement or trust in the United Nations, which in turn explains why the United Nations is incapable of addressing modern conflicts. Liberals would argue that the UN is in fact a competent organisation, but only with the contribution of all states, and that the only reason the UN is prone to failure is because states have not invested enough trust or resources into the United Nations for it to work properly. This is a “chicken or the egg” causality dilemma. Attempts by states to bolster or champion the United Nations as a “solution” have been troubled since the fall of the Cold War. As the United States proclaimed itself the victor, it asserted the idea that this was the UN’s opportunity to take on it’s role as the “guardian of international peace and security” with it’s plans for “An Agenda for Peace” without the traditional Soviet influence hampering efforts. To quote Chesterman, “the rhetoric was euphoric, utopian, and short”. The following two decades saw a notable increase in the number of UN peacekeeping expenses – the result was a massive financial and human expense, with very few positive results to show for it.

The prevalence of realism and the growing mistrust in the United Nations was not helped by the obvious drawbacks in having an international collection of states needing to reach a consensus on interests before action could be taken. With the founding of the UN, there was an immediate rush by all states to push for their nationals to be awarded senior positions within the bureaucracy. It would be naïve to assume that there was ever a point in which the personnel under the UN were not subject to political factors – the Soviet Union continually accused the first Secretary General of pro-Western bias. This proved a problem in situations where the United Nations required consensus from a large proportion of its members for action to take place. It means the interests of other states can hamstring legitimate and well-intentioned actions – effectively bringing the UN down to the lowest common denominator. It has been noted that as the UN has grown so large now that achieving consensus with a number of small developing countries is particularly difficult.

Since the end of the Cold War the United Nations has struggled to maintain it’s position as an eminent actor in the international system, mostly because of the relationship between realist states and the public attention which has been drawn towards the operational failures of the UN when it comes to addressing modern conflicts.