Dear reader,I am sure you have spent these past months watching the world the way one watches a slow road accident. The year started with a weird coup. In January, in Venezuela, the South American country run for years by the socialist strongman Nicolás Maduro, American special forces flew in, seized him in his own capital, and delivered him to a courtroom in New York—on the orders of US President Donald Trump, who had decided that the Western half of the globe was his to police. Iran was first bombed in February and a dirty war was launched. In March, April, and May, the trend continued in varying degrees (sanctions against Cuba, renewed threats on Greenland, etc.). Now in June, the football World Cup is playing out in the US, its absurd glamour marred by controversies. Among all these events, the highest common factor is—the United States of America.One question kept nagging at me, I am sure many of you as well, through all of it. When a powerful country crosses a line, who is left to say no and make it count? Who is actually in charge? The honest answer that we know now with some certainty is nobody, and this should bother us more than it does, because we were promised and guaranteed otherwise.After the Second World War, after the death camps, after two atom bombs fell on Japan, the survivors built an institution that was meant to stop the next catastrophe. They called it the United Nations, and in 1945, 50 countries signed its founding charter (Poland’s signature that October made it 51 founding members). The covenant was plain and simple. Never again would the world simply stand and watch when atrocities occur. The UN’s second leader, a thoughtful Swede called Dag Hammarskjöld, once put the goal at its most honest. The organisation was not created to bring us to heaven, he said in a 1954 speech, but to save us from hell. Not paradise, then. Not justice for everyone. Only the avoidance of the worst.Cut to the present; we see that even that has slipped away from us.Why have things come to such a pass? I did some digging over the past weeks. Experts tell me that the reason lies in how the thing was built. The one body that can actually force a country to act—to halt a war, to let food through—is the Security Council. Some 15 countries sit on it, but five hold a power the others lack: the US, Russia, China, Britain, and France. Any one of them can raise a hand and kill a decision the other 14 want. That raised hand is the veto. So five governments, who together speak for a small share of the world’s people, can stop the rest of the planet where it stands. The mathematical formula was established in 1945, never updated, and still expects the world to bow to it.The veto hand goes up constantly. On the war on Gaza, the Council reportedly managed a ceasefire resolution only five and a half months into Israel’s deadly assaults, after the US had blocked four earlier tries. By the time anything was passed, on March 25, 2024, more than 32,000 people were already dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. And Israel said almost at once that it would ignore the resolution anyway, certain as it was, and correctly so, that its great patron would absorb the cost. In one recent year, the five permanent members cast eight vetoes, the most since 1986. That same year, the Council passed the fewest resolutions since 1991. Talking less, blocking more. That is not a body guarding the peace. It is one managing its own decline.We call the UN toothless, as though the teeth fell out on their own. They were pulled out, by the very governments that hold the veto, because a body strong enough to discipline the powerful would have to start with them. No empire builds a court that can put it on trial.Rwanda would vouch for that point. It is a small country in east-central Africa, and in 1994 it suffered one of the worst slaughters of the last century. A Canadian general, Roméo Dallaire, was there commanding a small UN peacekeeping force. Months before the killing started, he knew it was coming. He had an informant inside the militias and knew where the weapons were stored. In January he sent an urgent cable to headquarters in New York, warning that lists were being drawn up to register the Tutsis “for their extermination”, and asked permission to raid the hidden caches. New York said no. Instead, he was to be kept, in the words of one internal memo, “on a leash”. Three months later the massacres began. In 100 days, around eight lakh people were killed, many hacked to death by neighbours they had lived beside all their lives. Dallaire stayed on with a few hundred men he was forbidden to use, and watched. The weapons he had been asked to leave alone were among those used later in the genocide.The men in New York who gave the order were not monsters in the classic sense of the word, and that is the hard part. They were careful, reasonable officials worried about their mandate and about “repercussions”, doing what the system asked. The machine ran exactly as designed. It was built to protect itself before it protected the children hiding in the churches of Kigali. A great power watching a slaughter and choosing to do nothing is not rare; it is almost a pattern, and the journalist Samantha Power traced it across a century in her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. A title, you will notice, drawn from the same hell Hammarskjöld hoped we might escape.Where is the hope, then? Where is, above everything, accountability? It is not, for sure, in the structure as it stands. A Council frozen in 1945 will keep handing us the politics of 1945. The argument for reform (more permanent seats, veto kept on leash, a real voice for Africa, Asia, and Latin America) has been strong for 30 years, which is exactly why nothing has changed. The powerful do not surrender power because someone makes a good case. They never have.As things stand now, hope resides elsewhere, in slower, plainer places. Until reforms arrive and change the UN, the job of holding big powers accountable is done by journalists who risk their lives, by independent researchers and fact-finding missions, by archivists and fact-checkers, and by the small, motley crowd of activists who collect and keep the blood-stained statistics in the hope that a day will come when we start acting like humans who understand the gains of evolution and put an end to these atrocities.The UN’s independent commission of inquiry into Gaza, set up by the UN Human Rights Council, despite all its limitations, is one such effort at bookkeeping and accountability. It was headed by Justice S. Muralidhar, a retired Indian judge. This week Frontline carried two conversations with Justice Muralidhar on the report that was released on June 23, 2026, which found that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide, and that more than 20,000 children have been killed since October 2023. Iftikhar Gilani spoke to him in Geneva; Amit Baruah followed with a video interview from Delhi. Through these two interviews, you will get the shocking details of a modern-day genocide, and sense the helplessness of a system that was built to be the voice of the helpless.We realise many things, especially the importance of searching, finding, and documenting evidence. Dallaire’s cable survives because someone kept it; the veto tallies are public because someone counts them. Gaza’s dead have names and a number because someone, at real risk, is counting.The poor and the unprotected have never really had a great global body on their side. What they have had is the conscience of strangers and the stubbornness of witnesses. That may be the sturdier foundation in any case. Not heaven. Just the long unwillingness to let hell pass for the natural order of things.Until next week,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineA small scheduling update: The Frontline Weekly will appear every fortnight from the next edition. I’m hoping to make each issue worth the extra week. Thank you for your continued support.CONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS