By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

The Indian-origin parable of the six blind men describing an elephant spread to many cultures and civilisations centuries ago and is therefore a widely-known story. Upon first encountering an elephant, the men who had heard about but not actually come across it, each person projects from the particular part of the animal he explored by touch to offer a generalised description of the whole beast.

The one who felt the side said the animal was like a wall; another touched the tusk and said it was like a spear; the third took hold of the trunk and insisted it was like a snake; the fourth grasped a leg and concluded it was clearly most like a tree; the fifth, a tall man, felt the ear and said it was like a fan; and the sixth grabbed the tail and said the elephant resembled a rope.

The point of the parable is that specialists can similarly see in their area of expertise in granular detail yet be blind to the big picture. In previous articles, I have highlighted parallels between the 2003 Iraq war, nuclear disarmament, climate catastrophism, and Covid interventions (lockdowns, mask recommendations, and vaccine mandates).

All three are conveniently brought together in the book Our Enemy, the Government: How Covid Enabled the Expansion and Abuse of State Power (2023). As an aside, readers might note that the left-right ideological divide breaks down as an explanation for my opposition to the four sets of official policies.

Instead, in all four cases, my stance supports pockets of opposition and resistance to the consensus in the policy elite.

The two dots I'd like to connect in this article are the seemingly discrete reform agendas of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In his address on 23 September 2025 to the annual gathering of world leaders for the opening of the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump offered an exceptionally blunt assessment of the manifold failures of the organisation, including with regard to its primary purpose of ensuring international peace and security. The wide-ranging address was notable for one important omission.

Not once did Trump mention the Security Council, the organisation's most important organ with the legal authority to make decisions, up to and including going to war, that binds all countries. Yet, its congenital impotence and accelerating obsolescence and irrelevance are arguably the primary explanation for the UN's failure to reach its potential on preventing and ending wars that Trump complained about.

They are also centrally relevant to the discussion of a more powerful WHO or a replacement international health organisation. In the current architecture of global governance, the UN Security Council is both the ultimate and the only international entity with enforcement authority over sovereign states.

Furthermore, its authority extends to states that are not UN members, are not members of the Security Council when the decision to authorise enforcement by means of diplomatic, economic, and/or military sanctions is made, or are a member but vote against the authorising resolution. Except, of course, if the negative vote is cast by one of the five permanent members (P5), with the power of veto.

Cases can be decided by the World Court and the International Criminal Court (ICC) on the legal obligations and liabilities of sovereign states. But if they reject the judicial decisions and defy the courts, the only recourse to enforce them is the Security Council acting under chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Nor is the ambit of the veto power limited to actions by one of the P5. Any one of them can veto enforcement action to protect an ally or a client state.

Without Enforceable Compliance, International Law Is a Fiction

One of the early and sustained criticisms of the WHO in mismanaging the Covid pandemic was failure to hold China accountable for non-cooperation with the inquiry into the origins of the virus, in particular if it might...