You may have seen this room before. Every September, the leaders and diplomats of 193 countries gather in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. It's the biggest forum in the world for people to come together to build relationships, negotiate deals, and solve problems. That's the goal of multilateralism, to peacefully solve common issues through the cooperation of many countries, but a gathering of world leaders like this is not without criticism. Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should, too often it's actually creating new problems for us to solve.

But are those criticisms accurate? What purpose does the UN serve? And what would happen if it went away? Let's unravel the role of the United Nations. So, we've seen the general assembly meet, but what does the UN actually do? It's little bit difficult to answer the question "What does the United Nations do?" One might almost say, "What do they not do?" But what happens in the building in New York? It's a forum for diplomacy, it's a forum for states and state representatives to talk to one another in person. It provides, through its bodies, processes through which these conversations can happen. But it's not just a place for world leaders to meet and discuss goals. The UN has many bodies that provide vital resources globally.

It also provides a lot of life-giving aid to people around the world. This includes food, shelter, medicines. There are a number of specialized agencies that are kind of scattered throughout the world. Things like the High Commissioner for Refugees, the UNHCR, the Human Rights Council, UNICEF, which is the UN Children's Fund, the World Food Program. Those are all organizations whose size and scope reveal just how big the United Nations is and the work that it does has been ambitious since the beginning.

One big purpose is the opening words of the United Nations Charter, which is "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The UN was founded in 1945, against the backdrop of two World Wars and the deaths of tens of millions of civilians. That explains why, in the opening provisions of the charter also, there is an absolute prohibition against the use of force. With those more than 80 years of nation-building and resource sharing, there's a need for both a lot of funding to make things happen and the people to do the work, which brings its own set of issues.

There are a lot of valid criticisms of the UN. It is a huge bureaucracy, and in a huge bureaucracy it is very easy to mis-spend funds. And one of the most common criticisms of the UN is that it wastes money, and it uses a lot of money to maintain presence all over the world, to fund peacekeeping operations, assistance programs that are very expensive. That bureaucracy also is itself its own massive civil service, and funding all of those employees has also been the subject of criticism.

On top of that, there's the ongoing issue of the UN Security Council... where there are five permanent members of the council who can veto any issue brought before them. And so, that fail-safe, which was a way to ensure participation in the Security Council, is also one of its biggest crutches. It's also one of the reasons why the UN is unable to reach consensus and actually come up with real solutions to solve problems. The UN Secretary himself echoes those concerns. It's the member states that, divided, do not allow the UN to work properly.

One of those permanent members is the United States, whose approach to international relations has headed in a new direction under the Trump Administration. The US withdrew from a number of international agreements. They include not just the Paris Agreement, but also the underlying UN framework convention on climate change. That means that the United States signals that it is no longer interested in even being at the negotiating table, which is significant because the seat at the table in the case of the United States has been kind of a driver's seat with gas pedal, brakes, everything that has really had significant influence on how that regime moved forward.

With this criticism and this change in one of the biggest players in this international body, you might ask how successful has the UN been in meeting its own goals? It's a complex question as to whether the UN is effective. One of the goals of the UN was to prevent the outbreak of a third World War, and on that score the UN has been successful. We have not had a third World War since the founding of the United Nations. Now, has it been effective in de-escalating conflict? Of course not, and wars have broken out and continue to break out. The UN also strives to be a mediator between states in the escalation of a conflict, and oftentimes it is unable to pull back a single state from going to war.

The UN didn't exist forever. The effort to maintain international peace, that has been a goal of international diplomacy for a long time. If we lived in a world in which there was no UN, we would find other ways to coordinate multilateralism and to work together. It's difficult for me to imagine a world without the United Nations. It is so deeply intertwined with so many things that are necessary for functioning international relations that it seems difficult to contemplate that we would just pull the plug on all of that.