Summary
- The deeper story, the one that explains why so many nations felt that walking out was the only statement left to make, lies one floor away, in the Security Council chamber, and in a single word: veto.
- The UN has already taken small steps in this direction, introducing mechanisms that let the General Assembly debate a situation after a Security Council veto, though such resolutions carry political and moral weight, not binding force.
- The real question facing the international community is not the simplistic one “should the veto exist?” It is harder than that: can an institution built to represent the collective conscience of humanity remain credible when its most consequential decisions can still be stopped by five states, however justified their original claim to that power may have been?
By Ayesha Arshad
On the evening of 24 September 2026, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rose to address the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, something unusual happened in the world’s most famous diplomatic chamber: it emptied. Delegation after delegation stood and walked out. Others left their seats deliberately vacant, sending only a lone representative to sit where entire national delegations should have been. Outside, protesters gathered. Reports suggest representatives from nearly seventy countries, among them Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Iran, took part in the walkout or refused to occupy their seats.
It was a striking image. A nearly empty hall, built to house the collective conscience of the world, echoing instead with absence. But the walkout, dramatic as it was, is not really the story. It is a symptom. The deeper story, the one that explains why so many nations felt that walking out was the only statement left to make, lies one floor away, in the Security Council chamber, and in a single word: veto.
The United Nations was born out of the wreckage of the Second World War, founded in 1945 on a simple but ambitious promise: never again. Among its six organs, the Security Council carries the heaviest burden, the “primary responsibility” for maintaining international peace and security. Fifteen members sit on it: ten elected on rotation, and five permanent, the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France.
It is these five, the P5, who hold the power that increasingly defines how the world understands, or fails to understand, the UN’s effectiveness. For any substantive resolution to pass, nine votes are needed, and crucially, none of the five permanent members may vote no. A single “no” from Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, or Paris is enough to kill a resolution supported by every other member of the Council. That is the veto.
It is tempting, from the outside, to see the veto as an antiquated relic, an unfair privilege handed to the victors of a war fought eight decades ago. But the reasoning behind it was neither careless nor accidental. The UN’s architects understood a hard truth: an institution cannot force the world’s most powerful states to obey decisions they fundamentally reject. Rather than risk creating a body the great powers would simply ignore or abandon, the founders built in a safeguard, one designed to keep those powers inside the system, invested in its survival, rather than outside it, indifferent to its collapse. The veto was conceived as a tool for stability.
The question that has haunted the UN ever since is: stability for whom?
The mathematics of the veto contain a contradiction that grows sharper with every crisis. Fourteen of fifteen Security Council members can support a resolution, humanitarian ceasefires, protection mandates, ceasefire monitoring, and still watch it die because one permanent member disagrees. An institution built on the idea of collective action can be paralyzed by a single objection.
Nowhere has this contradiction been more visible than in the Council’s response to Gaza. The UN has itself documented the Council’s deadlock over the conflict, including the United States’ veto of a Brazilian-led draft resolution in October 2023. Each failed resolution raises the same uncomfortable question: when an institution created specifically to prevent mass suffering cannot agree on how to respond to mass suffering, what, precisely, is its veto power protecting?
This is where the empty seats of 24 September take on their real meaning. The walkout at Netanyahu’s address was not, technically, a Security Council event, it belonged to the General Assembly, a different body operating under different rules, without the veto’s paralyzing power. But treating it as an isolated protest misses the point. The empty chairs were not really about one speech. They were the visible residue of years of frustration with a system that so many nations feel cannot translate their collective will into action. The walkout did not demonstrate the veto itself, it illustrated the exhaustion that the veto, and the deadlock it repeatedly produces, has left behind.
A fair article cannot stop at outrage. The veto’s defenders make arguments that deserve to be taken seriously. Without it, the UN could theoretically pass resolutions directly opposing the will of a major nuclear or military power, a scenario that could invite confrontation rather than prevent it. The requirement for near-unanimity among the P5 also forces negotiation and compromise before a resolution can even reach the floor. And there is a blunter argument still: the Security Council was never designed as a democratic parliament representing 193 equal voices. It was designed as a peace-and-security mechanism resting on the cooperation of the states with the greatest power to disrupt that peace. Strip away the veto entirely, some argue, and you risk a UN the great powers no longer feel bound to respect at all, trading deadlock for irrelevance.
Between “keep it exactly as it is” and “abolish it entirely” lies a wide field of possible reform that the current moment makes newly urgent: restricting veto use in cases of mass atrocity, requiring more than one P5 state to jointly oppose a resolution before it can be blocked, expanding Council membership to better represent Africa, Asia, and Latin America, or demanding public justification whenever a veto is cast. The UN has already taken small steps in this direction, introducing mechanisms that let the General Assembly debate a situation after a Security Council veto, though such resolutions carry political and moral weight, not binding force.
The empty hall on 24 September was not proof that the veto is broken. It was proof that patience with the gap between the UN’s founding promise and its present performance is running out. The real question facing the international community is not the simplistic one “should the veto exist?” It is harder than that: can an institution built to represent the collective conscience of humanity remain credible when its most consequential decisions can still be stopped by five states, however justified their original claim to that power may have been?
The chairs will fill again for the next General Assembly session. Whether the Security Council itself can close the deeper gap they represent is the question the walkout leaves behind.
