What Is the UN Worth to Small Countries if It Cannot Reliably Restrain Powerful Ones?

On 3 January 2026, US forces entered Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas. The White House called the mission Operation Absolute Resolve. Maduro was taken to the United States to face federal criminal charges.

Washington described the action as a targeted law-enforcement operation and defended it at the United Nations partly under Article 51 of the UN Charter, invoking self-defence. That justification is disputed. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he remained deeply concerned that international-law rules had not been respected in the 3 January military action, while legal experts questioned whether the recognised exceptions to the Charter’s prohibition on force applied.

Venezuela was not the only place where questions about power and sovereignty had become unusually concrete.

Earlier in the year, President Donald Trump had pressed for US control of Greenland, a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, and had suggested both economic pressure and the possible use of force. He later ruled out military action. On 22 September, the United States, Denmark and Greenland signed an agreement expanding the American military presence while ending the push to acquire Greenland as US territory.

Two days later, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley stood before the United Nations General Assembly.

Her speech moved across war, climate change, debt, artificial intelligence, Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, slavery and reparations, connecting what might otherwise look like separate international problems through an argument about power.

Mottley described a world suffering from what she called “a crisis of responsibility”: states possess extraordinary knowledge and capacity, yet repeatedly fail to turn them into collective action. She argued that reform of the international system could not be separated from questions about who possesses power, who is represented and who bears the consequences when institutions fail.

For a country such as Barbados, those questions are not theoretical.

When international rules fail, powerful countries can fall back on power. Smaller states have far fewer alternatives.

That raises a harder question than whether Mottley gave a persuasive speech.

What is the United Nations actually worth to small countries if it cannot reliably restrain powerful ones?

What the UN promises

The founding rules are unusually clear.

The UN Charter is based on the sovereign equality of its members. It requires states to settle disputes peacefully and prohibits the threat or use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence, subject to the exceptions recognised by the Charter.

Those principles matter differently depending on how much power a country possesses outside the UN.

If international restraint fails, a major power may still possess an enormous military, a huge domestic market, control over important technologies and finance, strategic resources, powerful alliances and the ability to impose costs on other countries.

Barbados does not possess those things at remotely comparable scale.

Neither do most UN members.

The bargain offered by a rules-based international order is not that it abolishes differences in power. It is that those differences should matter less than they would in a world governed primarily by force.

Yet the institution charged with maintaining international peace was itself built around a major inequality.

The Security Council has five permanent members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. On substantive decisions, the Charter requires the concurring votes of the permanent members: the basis of what we call the veto.

That becomes especially important when one of those five states is itself accused of breaking the rules.

Can the UN punish a permanent member?

In theory, the Charter provides serious sanctions against member states.

Article 5 allows a member to be suspended from the rights and privileges of membership after Security Council enforcement action and upon the Council’s recommendation.

Article 6 allows a state that persistently violates the Charter’s principles to be expelled by the General Assembly — again, only after a recommendation from the Security Council.

Under the ordinary operation of the Council’s voting rules, that creates an obvious structural problem.

A permanent member accused of seriously violating the Charter can use its veto to prevent the Council recommendation required for its own suspension or expulsion.

The problem extends beyond membership.

The Security Council can impose sanctions and other enforcement measures when it determines that there is a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression. But substantive Council action remains subject to the same permanent-member veto structure.

This is not a problem unique to the United States.

Russia demonstrated it after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A Security Council draft intended to end the Russian military offensive received 11 votes in favour but failed because Russia, itself a party to the conflict and a permanent Council member, vetoed it.

The weakness, then, is not simply the behaviour of one government.

It is built into the institution.

What can the rest of the UN do?

The General Assembly provides a partial answer.

All 193 members sit there with one vote each. Barbados formally has the same General Assembly vote as the United States.

When the Security Council is paralysed, the Assembly can become more important.

After Russia vetoed the February 2022 Security Council resolution, the Council used a procedural vote — which could not itself be vetoed — to convene an emergency special session of the General Assembly. The Assembly subsequently adopted a resolution demanding that Russia end its use of force and withdraw its troops.

The General Assembly has also created a mechanism requiring a debate after a permanent member uses its veto, increasing public and diplomatic scrutiny of such decisions.

These mechanisms matter.

They allow governments to establish international positions, organise collective political pressure, create records of state opinion and confer or deny legitimacy.

But the General Assembly does not simply inherit the Security Council’s enforcement powers when the Council is blocked.

That limitation is now being acknowledged at the highest levels of the organisation.

Opening the 2026 General Debate, the President of the General Assembly said that although the Security Council has demonstrated its effectiveness when it can act, “when the Council is unable to act on important matters, the effectiveness of our Organization as a whole is called into question.”

This is the institutional problem into which Mottley’s speech fits.

Mottley wants power inside the UN changed

Mottley called for reform of the Security Council, pointing to the absence of permanent African representation and the lack of assured representation for Small Island Developing States.

Barbados also joined 123 other member states supporting the Franco-Mexican initiative, under which permanent members would voluntarily restrain use of the veto in cases involving mass atrocities.

One of the figures Mottley used to make this case does not hold up.

She said Small Island Developing States constituted one quarter of the world’s states.

UN DESA currently classifies 37 UN member states as SIDS. That is around 19 per cent of the UN’s 193 members. Other UN classifications also include non-UN members and associate members of regional commissions, but on a comparison of UN member states, Mottley’s quarter figure is too high.

The numerical claim should be corrected.

The representation problem remains.

And a case close to Barbados demonstrates why international legal institutions retain real value even when the wider system is imperfect.

Guyana shows what the system can provide

Guyana and Venezuela are contesting sovereignty over the Essequibo region.

Guyana has taken the dispute to the International Court of Justice.

The Court has issued provisional measures while it considers the case, including measures aimed at preventing Venezuela from changing the situation in territory currently administered by Guyana.

The Court cannot make Guyana as militarily powerful as Venezuela.

It cannot guarantee that every judgment will be obeyed.

But it provides something that matters greatly to a smaller state: a mechanism through which a territorial dispute can be contested through law rather than settled according to which country can deploy greater force.

That is real value.

It also shows why declaring the UN system simply worthless would miss the more complicated reality.

It works unevenly.

Power is not only military

Mottley extends the same argument into climate finance.

Small island states can be unusually exposed to climate disruption while having little influence over the global emissions producing it.

Then another imbalance appears.

Rebuilding after storms, floods and other climate shocks costs money. Governments that cannot finance reconstruction domestically may have to borrow.

UN Trade and Development reports that public debt among the SIDS covered by its assessment increased from $48 billion in 2010 to $90 billion in 2024. It warns that heavy debt burdens can reduce the resources available for climate adaptation.

Research published in Oxford Open Economics found that climate vulnerability increased the average cost of sovereign debt for a group of vulnerable developing countries by about 1.17 percentage points, after accounting for conventional economic factors.

The researchers describe the risk of a vicious cycle: climate vulnerability increases financing costs, making investment in resilience harder and potentially increasing vulnerability to future shocks.

For a small state, the problem is therefore not simply that climate change causes damage.

It may have little control over the emissions creating that damage and little control over the price international markets charge it to recover.

This is why Mottley treats international finance as part of the same argument about power.

But one of her strongest-sounding statistics does not survive examination.

The $62 billion figure

Mottley told the General Assembly that the roughly 1.2 percentage-point borrowing penalty facing climate-vulnerable countries generated an estimated $62 billion more a year in excess interest payments.

The peer-reviewed study behind the widely circulated $62 billion figure says something different.

It estimates that 40 V20 countries paid more than $62 billion in additional interest over the period from 2007 to 2016 because of climate vulnerability.

That is a ten-year historical estimate, not $62 billion every year.

There may be a newer calculation behind Mottley’s annual figure, but the published research usually associated with the statistic does not establish it.

Her wider argument does not need the inflated figure. The borrowing penalty itself is measurable.

Climate exposes another limit of sovereignty

The latest UN Environment Programme assessment estimates that even full implementation of current national climate pledges would put the world on a path towards roughly 2.3°C to 2.5°C of warming this century. Policies actually in place imply about 2.8°C.

For a pathway consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, global annual emissions in 2035 would need to be around 55 per cent below their 2019 level.

Barbados can reduce its own emissions.

It cannot determine the global temperature by itself.

Its exposure therefore depends heavily on decisions made by much larger economies.

International agreements matter because national sovereignty alone cannot solve a problem whose causes cross borders.

Haiti shows rules without capacity

Haiti reveals another weakness.

Here the Security Council did act.

On 30 September 2025, it authorised a multinational Gang Suppression Force with up to 5,550 personnel, intended to work with Haitian security forces, protect critical infrastructure and support humanitarian access.

Mottley’s argument is that security, political renewal, elections and economic recovery cannot be separated.

The problem in Haiti is not simply whether an international mandate exists. It is whether member states supply enough personnel, money and operational support to make the mandate meaningful.

For a vulnerable state, an international decision with insufficient capacity behind it offers limited protection.

The veto problem is one way international action can fail.

Failure to implement what has already been agreed is another.

AI raises the same question before the rules are finished

Mottley also applied the argument to artificial intelligence.

She acknowledged AI’s potential in healthcare, agriculture, education, disaster prediction and public services, while warning that it could reproduce existing hierarchies of access and power.

Her concern was not simply the technology itself. It was who gets to shape its rules.

She argued that AI governance could not be left solely to corporations or a small group of technologically advanced states, saying that a technology affecting every country should be governed by rules those countries have had an opportunity to shape.

The evidence here is necessarily less settled than it is for sovereign debt.

But the distribution-of-power problem is familiar: countries that did not build a technology may still have to live with decisions made by those that did.

Cuba tests Mottley’s explanation

Mottley also criticised restrictions on trade, finance and fuel affecting Cuba and argued that external pressure was worsening hardship there.

There is evidence for that narrower claim.

US sanctions and restrictions affecting energy supplies are contributing to pressure on an economy already dealing with severe inflation, currency depreciation, power shortages and scarcity.

But outside pressure does not explain Cuba’s economic crisis in full.

The country also faces longstanding structural weaknesses, deteriorating infrastructure, monetary problems and failures of domestic economic policy. Its government has introduced substantial market-oriented reforms in response.

Mottley is therefore on firmer ground saying sanctions intensify Cuba’s problems than she would be saying they caused them all.

Testing her argument should not mean looking only for evidence that supports it.

And then Mottley goes back to the origins of power

Her most ambitious argument concerns slavery and colonialism.

On 25 March 2026, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 80/250, declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. The vote was 123 in favour, three against and 52 abstentions. The resolution also refers to the enduring consequences of those systems.

Barbados has particular historical significance.

In 1661 its legislature enacted what historians describe as the first comprehensive slave code of the Anglo-Atlantic world, a legal model that influenced later slave legislation in other English colonies.

CARICOM governments approved a revised Ten-Point Reparations Manifesto in July 2026 as part of their continuing reparatory-justice programme.

Mottley goes further than those documented facts.

She argues that the mentality which created and sustained slavery can still be seen in inequalities within modern international institutions and global finance.

That is harder to establish.

Historical research can trace laws, institutions, accumulated wealth and economic relationships from colonial systems into later periods. Contemporary evidence can demonstrate unequal representation and unequal access to finance.

Those findings can support an argument about historical continuity.

They do not establish that a single unchanged mindset connects seventeenth-century slavery directly to every inequality in twenty-first-century international institutions.

At that point Mottley is offering an interpretation of history and power.

The Code Noir had not been repealed

One historical claim is easier to test.

Mottley said France’s Code Noir of 1685 had been repealed in 2026. Her speech transcript records the claim that it “was only repealed this year.”

France is attempting formally to repeal the historical legislation.

But when Mottley spoke on 24 September, the process was not complete.

The National Assembly adopted the repeal proposal on 28 May. The French Senate records it as legislation still in progress, with public debate scheduled for 20 October 2026.

The repeal had therefore not completed the French parliamentary process.

There is another distinction worth keeping clear. Slavery in the French colonies was abolished in 1848. The current legislation concerns the formal repeal of historical legal texts associated with that system; it does not mean the Code Noir remained an operative system of enslavement until 2026.

The wider historical question remains important.

Historical arguments become weaker, not stronger, when symbolic details are overstated.

So what is the UN actually worth?

The answer is not that the UN is worthless to small states.

It gives them a forum in which they formally possess a voice.

It provides courts and legal processes through which disputes can be contested without immediately resorting to force.

It creates treaties, standards and mechanisms for cooperation on problems that no small country could solve alone.

It provides humanitarian agencies, development institutions, peace operations and diplomatic channels.

The General Assembly allows countries possessing little military power to combine political weight.

And when the Security Council does agree, it has powers individual small states could never reproduce.

The President of the General Assembly made the distinction clearly this week: the Security Council has demonstrated that it can act effectively, but when it cannot act on major questions, the credibility of the organisation as a whole suffers.

The deeper problem is that the UN is weakest at one of the moments when a small state may need it most:

when the state accused of breaking the rules is itself a great power.

The Charter says states are sovereign equals.

Its enforcement architecture does not make them equally powerful.

A permanent Security Council member can block substantive Council action. Suspension and expulsion require a Council recommendation. The General Assembly can condemn, debate, mobilise opinion and recommend collective action, but it cannot simply take over the Council’s enforcement authority.

This is not an accidental gap in the system.

It is part of the structure written into the Charter.

And it applies whether the permanent member in question is the United States, Russia, China, France or the United Kingdom.

The point of Mottley’s speech

Seen this way, the subjects in Mottley’s speech stop looking disconnected.

Security Council reform is about who can exercise international power.

Guyana is about whether law can substitute for military strength.

Climate finance is about countries bearing costs they have limited ability to control.

Haiti is about whether international commitments mean anything without the capacity to implement them.

AI is about who writes the rules governing emerging forms of power.

Reparations are Mottley’s attempt to connect the distribution of power today with the systems that produced it historically.

She does not prove every part of that argument.

Her speech contains factual errors. The annual $62 billion borrowing-cost figure is not supported by the research usually associated with it. Her SIDS number is too high. Her statement about the Code Noir repeal was premature. Her proposed historical connection between the mentality of slavery and contemporary institutions is an interpretation rather than a demonstrated causal fact.

But correcting those claims leaves the central institutional problem untouched.

In January, the UN Secretary-General expressed concern that international-law rules had not been respected during a US military operation inside another UN member state. Washington defended its actions using law-enforcement and self-defence arguments. The Security Council could debate the operation.

Its capacity to impose consequences on a permanent member was another matter.

Russia’s use of its veto after invading Ukraine had already demonstrated the same structural contradiction from another permanent seat.

International institutions cannot make Barbados as powerful as the United States, or Guyana as powerful as a much larger neighbour.

That is not their purpose.

Their more realistic purpose is to make differences in raw power matter less.

That is why their failures look different from Bridgetown than from Washington, Moscow or Beijing.

For a great power, an ineffective international institution can be an inconvenience, an obstacle or a constraint it tries to work around.

For a small state, that institution may be one of the few protections available.

The question is not whether the United Nations has value to small countries. It plainly does.

The harder question is whether a system intended to make power matter less can remain credible when the states with the greatest power are also the hardest for it to restrain.