The United Nations Security Council was designed to be the world’s last line of defence against catastrophe. In practice, it has become one of the clearest illustrations of how power, when concentrated without accountability, tends toward paralysis.

Since 2014, the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — have exercised their veto power 78 times. Each veto killed a resolution outright, regardless of how many of the other 14 members supported it. A single country, acting in its own interest, can halt the entire apparatus of international response.

The veto was not an accident of design. It was a deliberate concession made in 1945 to bring the major powers to the table. The architects of the UN understood that a security council without the great powers was meaningless. What they did not fully anticipate was a world in which those great powers would increasingly find themselves on opposite sides of every significant conflict.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Russia has accounted for the largest share of vetoes in the past decade, blocking resolutions on Syria, Ukraine, and several humanitarian corridors. The United States has repeatedly vetoed resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine. China has joined Russia on several votes. The result is a council that meets, deliberates, and then does nothing — while the situations it was convened to address deteriorate.

This is not a new problem, but it is a worsening one. During the Cold War, the veto was used frequently as a blunt instrument of superpower rivalry. After 1991, there was a brief period of relative cooperation. That period is now clearly over. The geopolitical realignment of the 2010s and 2020s has restored something close to the Cold War dynamic, but without the rigid stability that bipolarity sometimes provided.

What does 78 deadlocks in a decade actually mean in human terms? It means that resolutions calling for ceasefires were blocked while civilians remained under bombardment. It means that humanitarian access was denied while international bodies argued procedurally. It means that accountability mechanisms for alleged war crimes were shut down before investigators could reach the scene.

Reform proposals exist. The most discussed would expand the permanent membership, reduce the scope of the veto, or require that any veto be accompanied by a formal written justification subject to General Assembly review. None of these proposals has come close to adoption, because amending the UN Charter requires — among other things — the approval of all five permanent members. Each of them has an obvious incentive to preserve their own veto.

The Security Council is not broken in a mechanical sense. It functions exactly as its rules specify. The problem is that those rules were written for a world that no longer exists, by powers who assumed their own continued alignment on the fundamentals. That assumption has not held.

What remains is an institution that retains enormous symbolic authority and very little practical leverage — capable of passing resolutions when the major powers agree, and incapable of acting when they do not. In an era defined by great power competition, that second condition is becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Seventy-eight vetoes in ten years is not a malfunction. It is the system working as designed — and the design failing the world it was meant to protect.