Comment by bawolff
16 hours ago
> The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense.
They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things or serious things, it will reduce conflict. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Obviously world peace hasn't been achieved. It probably never will be. Nonetheless, that is the goal of the UN. They want to try to fix conflicts.
It aims at peace yes, but importantly it is an inter-national organisation, meaning it lives beside nations and doesn't have any formal power over them. In some cases the individual treaties negotiated at the UN result in the UN having some formal influence over member nations, but even then the concrete commitments are usually very limited. For examy the Paris agreement basically just says you have to make a few reports, with peer pressure being most of the enforcement.
In contrast the EU is (partially) a supernational organisation: in some fields the EU holds formal power over what happens in the member nations (because the member nations changed their national law to give EU that power).
We are getting a bit nit picky here, but formally it has all sorts of de jure powers (via the security council), just de facto not really.
But from a practical perspective you are mostly right, although i think its important not to underestimate the soft power the UN has on behind the scenes things, which people significantly under estimate.