In fairness, it must be acknowledged that the United Nations has at times attempted to assist international society as was envisioned by some of its founders--and probably a bit more effeectively than the League of Nations ever did. This has mainly taken the form of occasionally effective humanitarian assistance, meetings, agreements, and Conventions, as well as some successful instances of negotiation, mediation, and arbitration.
For example, in 1946, the U.N. sought and obtained donations of grain from its members during a time of crisis due to the postwar food shortage. A hundred thousand tons was secured from the United States that year, and five hundred thousand more from Argentina. During that same year, the organization adopted a disarmament resolution prohibiting futrure development or stockpiling of atomic weapons.
In 1947, hostilities between Holland and Indonesia ended when the Security Council called for a cessation thereof, and settlement via arbitration. This marked the first success by the organization to halt a conflict via peaceful means.
Commencing in 1950, armed intervention, or "police actrion," in Korea constituted the first occasion that the United Nations, as a body, acted militarily to resist aggression. However, it should be pointed out that ninety percent of the troops and supplies were contributed by the United States--hardly an "international effort." Moreover, when the Chinese Communists entered the war, the Soviet veto in the Security Council put an end to any further or additional action on the U.N.'s part.
The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 was dealt with via a U.N.-directed cease-fire, a call for the withdrawal of invading forces, and stationing of a "United Nations international police force" in the region. But when subsequent demands were made, in March, 1957, by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, for immediate restoration of Egyptian rule over the Canal, the U.N. force that was stationed there was said to have been so "light" as to have had "no real choice in the matter,"
Most if the U.N. membership, including the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, signed a treaty in 1963 outlawing nuclear tests in the atmosphere and underwater. The organization began to deal with terrorism that same year, when a Convention of Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft was enacted under U.N. sponsorship.
In 1968, a U.N. approved non-proliferation treaty was signed, prohibiting nuclear powers from passing nuclear weapons to countries that did not possess them. During the following year, a U.N. Committee on Disarmament was established, consisting of eighteen nations, which, by 1979, had grown to forty. In 1971, a U.N.-sponsored treaty banning biological weapons was signed.
Delegates from 137 nations met at a U.N. conference in Geneva in 1990, where the dangers of global warming were recognized as a threat to humanity, and early steps directed toward the accomplishment of climate change were begun. During the 1990s as well, the U.N. provided peacekeeping forces to help supervise elections in Cambodia, Eritrea, Namibia, and Nicaragua. It also sponsored the distribution of some food to people in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Somalia.
In 1991, a U.N. operation was undertaken aimed at the expulsion of Iraq from its occupation of Kuwait. However, as usual, this was carried out for the most part by U.S. forces.
In June, 1992, a great assemblage, consisting of over a hundred heads of state, as well as twenty thousand non-governmental representatives from nations around the world, met at Rio de Janeiro at the now famous U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (the "Earth Summit"). At this landmark convention, agreements were enacted and executed, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, wherein 178 governments agreed to take steps to deal with global warming via the stabilization of greenhouse gas production. Additional deliberations concerned the preservation of forests and endangered species throughout the world.
Subsequently dubbed "Agenda 21," these efforts have been strongly criticized and opposed by the ultra-conservative among us, as a "conspiracy" against states' respective sovereign rights, and individual persons' property rights. It has further been assailed as a plan for the imposition of global political control upon mankind.
In France it's been labelled a "sham"; In Australia, a "threat to freedom." Some states within the United States have enacted legislation forbidding participation in said program.
Of late, there has been little further action taken in regard to what actually seems no more than an innocent program to mobilize world effort in attempts to improve the environment of our planet.
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