“The UN Claims To Represent United Nations, But In Truth, It Is FU: Five United Powers Compelling The Rest Of The World To Serve Their Interests”

 

'Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.'

Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince)

 

 

Abstract

This article contends that the United Nations (UN), conventionally celebrated as the definitive embodiment of post-war international cooperation, is not a rupture from but a direct institutional descendant of the League of Nations. Marking the UN’s 70th anniversary, the analysis exposes a disingenuous metamorphosis: where the League served as an overt instrument of European colonial powers, the UN represents a sophisticated rebranding of the same hegemonic project for the post-colonial era. Framed not as a birth of global unity but as the calculated repackaging of a colonial powerhouse, the article argues that the UN’s core architecture—epitomised by the Security Council veto—was designed to ensure continuity of control by the victorious Allied powers. Through a critical historical and structural examination, this paper dismantles the myth of multilateral equality, revealing an organisation that systemically prioritises the strategic interests of its permanent members over genuine justice, self-determination, or democratic global governance. The UN, in this light, is reconceptualised not as a neutral arbiter but as a chameleonic entity adept at draping enduring imperial logic in the legitimising language of peace and human rights.

 

 

Introduction: The Imperial Midwifery of a World Body

The League of Nations was not born of universal idealism but was midwifed into existence as a tool of imperial preservation. Its concrete formation during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was a diplomatic endeavour dominated by the very colonial powers, chiefly Great Britain, France, and their allies, that sought to manage the post-World War I order to their enduring advantage. US President Woodrow Wilson’s championing of the concept, though couched in the language of self-determination, was swiftly co-opted into a process that excluded the voices of the colonised world. The special commission Wilson chaired to draft the Covenant operated not as a constituent assembly for humanity, but as a committee of victorious powers, integrating their new institution as Part I of the punitive Treaty of Versailles. This was a deliberate, structural tethering: the League’s legitimacy was made inseparable from a colonial peace settlement. When the League formally came into being on 10 January 1920, it did not signal a new dawn of international equality. It institutionalised a council of victors, headquartered in the neutral comfort of Geneva, from which they could administer their global domains under a novel, and ostensibly legitimate, international guise. This was the original skin of the chameleon: a colonial powerhouse assembled in the Hall of Mirrors, its reflection designed to appease a weary world while extending the reach of empire.

 

 

Historical Genesis: The Paris Peace Conference and the League's Formation

The procedural establishment of the League of Nations emerged directly from the diplomatic negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, which commenced in January 1919 following the Armistice ending the First World War. US President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Europe championing the concept as a central element of the post-war settlement. A special commission, chaired by Wilson himself, was established in early February 1919 specifically to draft the organisation's founding document, known as the Covenant of the League of Nations. This commission, comprising representatives from major Allied and Associated Powers (including Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and smaller states), worked intensively over several weeks. The final draft of the Covenant was completed and unanimously approved by the plenary session of the Peace Conference on 28 April 1919 (MacMillan, 2001).

 

This Covenant was not a standalone treaty. Instead, it was integrated as Part I of the major treaties drafted at the conference, most significantly the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. Consequently, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed by the delegates in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919, the Covenant was also signed. The League's existence was therefore inextricably linked to the ratification of these peace settlements. The League formally came into being when the Treaty of Versailles entered into force on 10 January 1920. This date marked the League's official birth, with its inaugural Council meeting held in Paris shortly afterwards, on 16 January 1920 (Steiner, 2005).

 

The practical establishment of the League's operations followed swiftly. Its headquarters were permanently established in Geneva, Switzerland, chosen for its tradition of neutrality among European powers. The first meeting of the League's Assembly, comprising representatives from all member states, convened in Geneva in November 1920. Key institutions, such as the Permanent Secretariat (the League's administrative civil service) under the first Secretary-General, Eric Drummond of Britain, began functioning from Geneva. The Permanent Court of International Justice was subsequently established in The Hague in 1922 to handle legal disputes between European powers. Membership initially consisted primarily of the victorious Allied powers and neutral states, though it expanded over subsequent years as other nations joined, including Germany in 1926 (though it later withdrew in 1933) and the Soviet Union in 1934.

 

 

The Objectives

The League of Nations, despite its professed ideals, was fundamentally an institution created, dominated, and utilised by the major European colonial powers – chiefly Great Britain and France, alongside Belgium, Italy, and Japan. These nations, actively engaged in the brutal subjugation and economic exploitation of vast colonial territories across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, designed an organisation that inherently served to preserve their imperial interests (Pedersen, 2015).  The very structure of the League, conceived during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference without meaningful input from colonised peoples, reflected this reality. Permanent seats on its powerful Council were reserved for the principal Allied powers, ensuring their hegemony over decision-making.

 

A stark manifestation of this imperial control was the League's Mandate System. Ostensibly established to guide former German and Ottoman territories towards self-determination under international oversight, it functioned as little more than colonialism rebranded.

 

Britain and France, the primary Mandatory powers, acquired control over resource-rich regions like Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Cameroon, and Togoland. Belgium gained Rwanda and Burundi, while South Africa took South West Africa (Namibia). The League provided a veneer of international legitimacy to this continued domination, demanding annual reports but exercising little genuine supervision to prevent exploitation or prepare mandates for true independence. The system entrenched, rather than dismantled, imperial influence.

 

The profound hypocrisy at the League's core became undeniable during crises involving aggression by its own powerful members against weaker states. The League's failure to take decisive, meaningful action against Italy's full-scale invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 stands as the most damning example. Despite Ethiopia's status as a fellow League member and clear evidence of Italian atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons, Britain and France prioritised appeasing Mussolini over upholding collective security. Their reluctance stemmed from complex factors, but crucially included a desire not to destabilise Europe and a tacit understanding that imperial conquest, when conducted by a major power, was still considered part of the established order. Similarly, the League's weak response to Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 revealed its inability and unwillingness to challenge the imperial ambitions of its Council members when directed outside the European sphere.

 

The League's concept of "peace" ultimately functioned to maintain stability primarily among the dominant imperial powers themselves and to protect the existing global order built upon their colonial possessions. Its mechanisms proved useless against aggression perpetrated by those very powers it was designed to accommodate.

 

 

The Demise of the League of Nations

The League effectively operated as a club dominated by the major Allied powers, particularly Britain and France in its early years. The Council's permanent seats institutionalised their privileged position. Crucially, the absence of key players – the defeated powers initially excluded, and most damagingly, the United States, whose Senate rejected membership over sovereignty concerns – fatally weakened effectiveness from the outset.

 

For conservative statesmen, particularly in Britain, supporting the League also served as a means to channel and contain more radical demands for international change emerging after the war, offering managed reform within the existing state system. A tension that ultimately contributed to its failure to prevent the descent into another catastrophic global conflict.

 

Whilst the League had been critically weakened by its failures, it continued a nominal existence after the WWII began. Its headquarters in Geneva remained open, and the Secretariat and some technical agencies (like those dealing with health or refugees) laboured on in a limited capacity. However, the core function of maintaining peace among Western powers through collective security was utterly paralysed. Key member states were now belligerents, and the Council essentially stopped functioning as a security body. The League proved incapable of influencing the conflict in any meaningful way.

 

The death knell sounded symbolically in December 1939, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland (the Winter War). In a final, largely symbolic act, the League Assembly expelled the USSR for its aggression – a stark contrast to its inaction against Italy and Japan earlier in the decade. This expulsion highlighted both the League's powerlessness and the hypocrisy of its belated enforcement against a major power only after war had engulfed Europe. After this, the League's political machinery fell almost entirely dormant, though technical committees continued minor operations.

 

The League's final Assembly convened in Geneva in April 1946. Delegates formally acknowledged the League's failure to prevent the war and voted for its dissolution.

 

Yet the League did not truly vanish. Like a chameleon, it shed its skin and re-emerged as the United Nations, recast to suit the post-colonial order, but fundamentally loyal to the same strategic interests. Through mechanisms such as “peacekeeping”, binding resolutions, and economic sanctions, the UN has served to protect the dominance of its most powerful founders and their allies. Rather than dismantling colonial structures, it has often managed global stability in ways that favour elite continuity over genuine justice or self-determination. The League’s demise, in this light, was not a conclusion, but a metamorphosis.

 

 

Polishing the Control: Dressing Colonial Powers in the Language of Peace

The transformation from the League of Nations to the United Nations was not a rupture but a calculated rebranding, an institutional sleight of hand designed to restore legitimacy to global governance after the Second World War, while retaining the mechanisms of imperial control. Where the League faltered through its overt colonial loyalties, the United Nations emerged as a more agile and rhetorically refined actor, wrapping the interests of powerful states in the language of peace, human rights, and international cooperation.

 

At the centre of this reconfiguration lies the UN Security Council, whose permanent members, coincidentally, the principal victors of the Second World War, wield the veto power with impunity. Far from embodying democratic global governance, this structure codifies global inequality, offering legal and moral cover for strategic self-interest. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the United States’ use of the veto. Since 1972, the US has vetoed over 50 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, including those condemning illegal settlements, human rights abuses, and the continued occupation of Palestinian territory (Zunes, 2003). Even resolutions calling for a two-state solution, aligned with the UN's own stated position, have been blocked. The result is a UN paralysed in the face of one of the longest-running occupations in modern history, not due to global consensus, but to the protected impunity of one of its most powerful members.

 

Yet the veto is not merely a shield; it is also a sword. When strategic interests align, the same states that silence the Council’s moral voice will invoke its resolutions as legal justification for war. This was evident in the case of Resolution 1441, which was cited, albeit dubiously, by the US and UK as part of the legal rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, despite the absence of Council consensus for military action. The same Council that is mute on occupation can become eloquent when empire demands a war.

 

This was evident in the case of Resolution 1441, cited as a pretext for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a war sold on documentary forgeries and wilfully manipulated intelligence. The very ‘evidence’ of weapons programmes presented to the public and the UN was later exposed as fabrication, from the Niger uranium dossiers to the lies of asset ‘Curveball’. The invasion, launched on this basis of state deception, precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe costing over one million Iraqi lives. The stark contrast in institutional response is telling: where the IAEA could swiftly expose a forgery (as with the Niger documents it obtained), it remains powerless, and the UN Security Council silent, in holding the Western states that propagated those forgeries to account. This impunity for crimes of aggression reveals the core function of the system: not to prevent wars born of imperial ambition, but to launder their justifications and bury their consequences.

 

Beyond the Security Council, other UN agencies exhibit similar contradictions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), nominally tasked with ensuring compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), increasingly functions less as an impartial watchdog and more as an extension of Western intelligence interests. Its disproportionate scrutiny of Iran, for example, contrasts starkly with its silence on Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal or the nuclear modernisation efforts of the United States. Meanwhile, the IAEA’s inspections often appear designed not to uphold non-proliferation equitably, but to provide technical and political leverage against regimes viewed as adversarial to Western interests.

 

The selective concern extends beyond weapons. The UN’s deafening silence on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s sustained campaign of repression, against women, students and trade unionists, betrays a moral double standard. While the General Assembly may occasionally produce non-binding condemnations, there has been no serious international response to the regime’s systemic violations of fundamental rights. When people rose up in Iran in 2009, again in 2019, and most recently in 2022 following the murder of Mahsa Amini, the UN issued platitudes, but took no real action. A system that claims to speak for “humanity” remains eerily indifferent when those humans are not geopolitically convenient.

 

This disparity is no accident. The United Nations, for all its multilateral pomp, functions as a globalised Eurovision for state power, a stage-managed performance of equality in which the real votes are already counted backstage by the five permanent members. Human rights, peacekeeping, and development aid become instruments of selective enforcement, deployed to manage dissent and maintain an international order that benefits the very powers it claims to regulate.

 

Thus, the post-war UN did not bury the imperial logic of the League, it merely polished it. Where the League operated as an unapologetic club of empires, the United Nations mastered the language of emancipation to better conceal the continuity of domination. It is not the guardian of world peace; it is the velvet glove of structural power.

 

 

The Myth of Unity: Why the "United Nations" Is a Misnomer

To speak of a “United Nations” is, at best, aspirational; at worst, it is an intentional mischaracterisation of an institution that centralises global decision-making in the hands of an unelected elite. The title evokes inclusivity, consensus, and international cooperation. Yet the structure of the organisation, most visibly through the UN Security Council, reveals a system designed not to represent the world’s peoples, but to manage them according to the interests of a privileged few.

 

The five permanent members of the Security Council, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China, hold powers that override the collective will of the rest of the international community. These states were self-appointed in the aftermath of the Second World War and have never been subject to election or meaningful review. Their veto power grants each of them the unilateral ability to block any resolution, regardless of how many nations support it. In practice, this means that decisions on matters of war, peace, sanctions, and intervention are subject not to moral principle or democratic will, but to the self-interest of these five powers.

 

This arrangement would be troubling under any circumstance, but it becomes absurd in light of the West’s endless preaching about democratic governance. The United States and United Kingdom, in particular, continue to position themselves as global evangelists of democracy, even as they anchor and defend the very system of unaccountable global governance embodied in the Security Council. No one elected these five states to permanent status. No rotation occurs. No accountability exists. It is, in essence, a diplomatic aristocracy.

 

The contradiction becomes even starker when comparing how justice is dispensed through international legal mechanisms. The International Criminal Court (ICC), though nominally independent, is treated as a tool of legitimacy only when its rulings serve the interests of the West. The arrest warrant issued for Vladimir Putin in 2023 was met with cheers and calls for swift enforcement across Europe and North America (International Criminal Court, 2023). Yet when the same court issued a warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2024 for ‘Crimes against humanity’ and ‘War Crimes’ (International Criminal Court, 2024a; 2024b), the tone changed. The United States did not merely disagree; it launched a political offensive against the Court (The White House, 2025). Threats were made against its officials, sanctions were proposed, and the ICC’s legitimacy was publicly undermined. In effect, the rules are enforced only against geopolitical adversaries, not allies. This is not international law, it is selective prosecution masquerading as justice (El-Baradei, 2011).

 

 

The Strait of Hormuz: A Case Study in UNCLOS as Sovereign Dispossession

 

​

 

Prior to the codification of the modern law of the sea, the Strait of Hormuz was functionally part of the Iranian realm. Its deep channel, the only navigable route for large vessels, lay within Iranian territorial waters under the traditional three nautical mile rule. Iran's historical sovereignty over the islands in the Strait, including Qeshm, Hormuz, Larak, and the contested Tunbs and Bumusu (Abu Musa), reinforced this reality. Foreign powers seeking access to the Persian Gulf did so at Iran's forbearance.

 

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, known as UNCLOS, fundamentally altered this arrangement. By imposing a regime of transit passage on straits used for international navigation, UNCLOS stripped Iran of its historical right to control, regulate, or impede passage through its own deep channel. Under Article 38, all ships, including warships of hostile powers, submarines in submerged transit, and military aircraft, enjoy an absolute right of passage that Iran shall not impede.

 

What did Iran receive in exchange for this loss of sovereignty? Nothing but the abstract promise of reciprocity, a promise that rings hollow when the principal beneficiary of the regime, the United States, has not even ratified UNCLOS. The United States Navy patrols the Strait, invoking a treaty that the United States Senate has rejected, to enforce a right of passage that did not exist under customary international law before the Western powers wrote the rules.

 

 

The Question of Selective Application: Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the Rules for the West

If UNCLOS is presented as a neutral and universal regime, one must ask why it applies so absolutely to Iran while other states have preserved their sovereign control over strategic waterways through exceptions, grandfather clauses, or simply through the exercise of raw power.

 

The case of the Turkish Straits, namely the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, is instructive. These narrow waterways connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and are, like the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint of global importance. Yet Turkey does not operate under the standard UNCLOS transit passage regime. Instead, Turkey governs access under the Montreux Convention of 1936, a treaty signed decades before UNCLOS was even conceived. Under the Montreux regime, Turkey retains the right to limit the number, tonnage, and type of warships passing through the Straits. Turkey may ban aircraft carriers entirely from transit. Furthermore, Turkey retains the authority to close the Straits to all foreign warships in times of war or when threatened with imminent aggression. If UNCLOS were truly a universal instrument, the Montreux Convention would have been superseded. It was not. The great powers, including the United States and the United Kingdom, continue to respect Turkey's special regime. They do so not because of any legal necessity, but because Turkey is a NATO ally. The rules that bind Iran do not bind Turkey.

 

A further illustration of this selective application can be found closer to home for the Western powers themselves. The United Kingdom and France enforce their own rigorous safety, customs, and environmental regulations on ships passing through the English Channel. While the legal fiction of transit passage is maintained on paper, in practice no foreign power challenges the right of the British Coastguard or the French Navy to board, inspect, or divert a vessel in the Channel. The United Kingdom enforces its laws. France enforces its laws. Iran, by contrast, is told that any attempt to enforce its national laws in its own deep channel would constitute an illegal impediment to transit passage. The disparity could not be starker.

 

The pattern is unmistakable. Turkey, a NATO member and an ally of the Western alliance, retains special sovereign control over the Bosphorus under a pre UNCLOS treaty. The United Kingdom, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and one of the original architects of the post war order, enforces its national laws in the English Channel without meaningful challenge from any quarter. Iran, by contrast, a nation that is not a member of the Western alliance and that has been subjected to sustained sanctions and regime change efforts, is stripped of its historical sovereignty and told to accept transit passage as the price of admission to a system it did not design and in which it holds no meaningful power.

 

This is not a neutral legal regime. It is a sophisticated act of sovereign dispossession, dressed in the legitimising language of freedom of navigation. Iran's deep channel, its geographic birthright, has been legally converted into an international corridor for the navies of the very powers that dismantled the League of Nations and now dominate the United Nations Security Council. UNCLOS did not regulate an existing international waterway. It created that waterway by confiscating Iranian sovereignty under the cover of multilateralism.

 

The Strait of Hormuz case, however, poses further consequences for Iran’s territorial integrity. Under the current regime, wherein the Strait is legally construed as part of an international body of water, any future war waged against Iran by Western powers and Israel would place Iran in an impossible legal position. Should Iran act to insist upon and defend its own territory in such a conflict, its actions would be swiftly labelled a breach of international law. This designation would, in turn, provide the West with the very legal and political pretext required to seize full control over Iranian waters (Suren-Pahlav, 2020).

 

Therefore, such contradictions only reinforce the fundamental truth: the United Nations does not represent the unity of the world's nations. It represents the continued domination of a post-colonial elite, safeguarded by structural mechanisms designed in the mid-20th century and never updated to reflect the actual demographics, politics, or ethical demands of the modern world. More than 70% of the global population resides in countries without any permanent representation on the Security Council. Entire continents, Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world, remain without a permanent seat, despite bearing the greatest burden of the UN’s peacekeeping operations and sanctions regimes.

 

To call this arrangement “united” is to traffic in deception. The United Nations may convene global summits, issue lofty declarations, and speak in the language of human rights, but at its core, it remains an undemocratic institution, designed to preserve the privileges of the post-war powers and enforce an international order built to serve their strategic and economic interests. It is not the successor to the League of Nations in name alone, it is its ideological and structural continuation.

 

 

A New Covenant: The Case for a Democratic Global Order

The time has come to confront a foundational truth long evaded by the so-called “international community”: that the United Nations, in its current form, cannot credibly speak for the world. It cannot advance justice while structurally privileging power. It cannot claim universality while remaining captive to the vetoes of five unelected states. It cannot uphold peace when its mechanisms are routinely manipulated to sanction some aggressions while excusing others. The UN has become not a neutral arbiter, but a stage upon which power performs virtue.

 

Any institution that operates on the principle that five states alone can dictate the terms of international legality, through the unilateral veto, ceases to be a forum for nations. It becomes, instead, an instrument of managed obedience. In a world that claims to have moved beyond empires, the United Nations preserves their logic beneath the veil of multilateralism. What moral authority can such an institution possess?

 

The only legitimate path forward is a reckoning: either the Security Council is democratised, stripped of its anachronistic veto power, and restructured to reflect the real political and demographic composition of the 21st century; or else, those nations with the political courage and moral clarity to do so must withdraw and form a new international covenant. One grounded not in post-war privilege but in post-colonial principle. One that is truly representative, accountable, and committed to collective justice, not selective enforcement.

 

Such a rupture is not unthinkable. If alliances such as NATO can wield military force in the name of collective defence, then so too can a new democratic league of nations act to uphold peace and security through principled deterrence. A standing force, under the authority of a reimagined, pluralistic global order, need not serve the interests of empire. It could protect the sovereignty of the weak against the predations of the strong. But this can only be realised outside a system rigged in favour of the powerful.

 

In this historic moment, a future democratic Iran, free from totalitarian-theocratic tyranny, could play a leading role. When Iranians finally dismantle the apparatus of religious repression and restore the rule of law, Iran will stand not merely as a reborn nation but as an heir to its ancient civilisational legacy. A people whose forebears shaped the very notion of codified justice, dating back to 2,500 years ago and the Cyrus Cylinder, must not be co-opted into silence by an institution that undermines those very values.

 

We cannot preach democracy at home while remaining a member of the most undemocratically structured institution in global politics. Nor can we speak of justice while participating in a system that obstructs it at every critical juncture. Iran must carry the banner of reform, not merely in its own borders, but on the world stage, leading the call for a truly just and democratic world order.

 

And finally, we cannot allow the banner of peace to be carried by those whose hands are drenched in the blood of history. The very nations that sit at the helm of the United Nations, who now preach humanity, law, and order, are the same powers that plunged the world into two global wars, that engineered genocides, orchestrated colonial massacres, enabled the Holocaust, and executed the systematic pillaging of continents. Their empires were built on mass graves and maintained through centuries of calculated brutality.

 

To entrust these actors with the guardianship of peace is not only naïve, it is obscene. It is to surrender the moral language of justice to its greatest abusers. No genuine order, no authentic democracy, no credible peace can be built upon the ashes of their crimes, still unatoned and still ongoing under different names.

 

This is not a utopian dream. It is a historic responsibility.

 

 

References and Bibliography

• El-Baradei, M. (2011) The age of deception: nuclear diplomacy in treacherous times. London: Bloomsbury.

• F.S. Northedge (1986) The League of Nations: its life and times, 1920–1946. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

• Human Rights Watch (2022) ‘Iran: brutal crackdown on protesters’, HRW Report, November.

• Hurd, I. (2013) International organizations: politics, law, practice. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• International Criminal Court (2023) ‘Warrant of arrest for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’. Available at: https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/CourtRecords/0902ebd1809d1971.pdf [Accessed: 10 March 2025].

• International Criminal Court (2024a) ‘Prosecutor seeks warrants in Israel–Palestine situation’. Available at: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-issuance-arrest-warrants-situation-state-palestine (Accessed: ).

• International Criminal Court (2024b) ‘Warrant of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu’. Available at: https://www.icc-cpi.int/taxonomy/term/672 [Accessed: 10 March 2025].

• MacMillan, M. (2001) Peacemakers: the Paris Conference of 1919 and its attempt to end war. London, p. 325.

• MacMillan, M. (2003) Peacemakers: the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and its attempt to end war. London: John Murray.

• Pedersen, S. (2015) The guardians: the League of Nations and the crisis of empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 7.

• Sands, C. (2006) Lawless world: America and the making and breaking of global rules. London: Penguin.

• Steiner, Z. (2005) The lights that failed: European international history 1919–1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 41.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2020) ‘Israel’s Strategic Doctrine and the Somalisation of Iran: Erosion of National Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity', suren-pahlav.com (5 September). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/somalisation-plan-for-iran-the-erosion-of-iran-s-national-sovereignty-and-territorial-integrity.html [Accessed: 10 March 2025].

• Taylor, A.J.P. (1991) The origins of the Second World War. London: Penguin.

• The White House (2025) ‘Imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court’, 6 February. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/imposing-sanctions-on-the-international-criminal-court [Accessed: 10 March 2025].

• United Nations (1945) ‘Charter of the United Nations’, United Nations Treaty Series, 1 (XVI), 24 October.

• United Nations Security Council (2002) Resolution 1441, UN Doc S/RES/1441.

• United Nations Security Council (no date) ‘Repertoire of the practice of the Security Council’, United Nations Digital Library, Voting Records.

• Weiss, T. (2008) What’s wrong with the United Nations and how to fix it. Cambridge: Polity Press.

• Wilson, W. (1932) ‘The Manchurian crisis and the failure of the League of Nations’, International Affairs, 7, p. 438.

• Zunes, S. (2003) ‘The United States and the United Nations: a history of vetoes’, Middle East Policy, 10(3), pp. 47–70.

 

 

To cite this article:

Suren-Pahlav, S. (2015) ‘The Chameleon's New Skin: How the League of Nations Became the UN to Serve the Same Masters?’, suren-pahlav.com (10 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-chameleon-s-new-skin-how-the-league-of-nations-became-the-un-to-serve-the-same-masters.html [Accessed: ].