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[smjjames]

When was the last all-out war between major powers? It was before the UN existed. It's very hard to prove a negative.

It's predecessor did exist, sortof....

Just shows how unworkable and obsolete the UN really is

What do you propose on replacing it with?

[Loud Whispers]

What do you propose on replacing it with?

A rubber duck, some chocolate and a roll of yarn

[Shadowlord]

"Rubber ducky, you're the one, you make bathwartime lots of fun"

[Vilanat]

So in other words, we can look at the actual mechanisms commonly used in the UN, rather than say "well they don't prevent war!" or some other abstract thing. How do we know they haven't prevented war? When was the last all-out war between major powers? It was before the UN existed. It's very hard to prove a negative.

Correlation does not imply Causation.

When was the last all-out war between major powers? before the Nuke.

[Orange Wizard]

When was the last all-out war between major powers? It was before the UN existed. It's very hard to prove a negative.

It's predecessor did exist, sortof....

The League of Nations was impotent and irrelevant enough to make the UN look potent and relevant

[Loud Whispers]

No major powers have fought in outright war against one another since Elvis Presley began his musical career, you can't prove that without Elvis Presley we wouldn't have had WWIII.

[Sheb]

Except for all these times major power did fight but that we choose to ignore.

Anyway, the UN does maintain some nice programs, and is a nice place for countries to talk to each other. That's useful.

[Loud Whispers]

I don't recall a US invasion of Russia

[Sheb]

If you define major power as only Russia and the US, you might have a point.

[Orange Wizard]

If you define major power as only Russia and the US, you might have a point.

US is a superpower. Reasonable arguments can be made for Russia, China, India, Brasil, and the EU as superpowers as well. Great/major powers would include that list, plus the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

The war we've seen involving major powers hasn't been against other major powers; closest I can think of would be where the opposing side was supported by another major power but not actually fighting, like the Vietnam/Indochina wars (I'm not sure if that actually counts given the date), or the current clusterfuck in the Levant.

IMO the UN has done fuckall to prevent wars, though to be fair I don't really expect anyone to be able to prevent war short of Christ descending from heaven.
I'd say the institution is irrelevant but it does have a certain air of legitimacy around it, which is better than nothing. Plus all the extra-political stuff they do is pretty useful.

[Sheb]

There has been war between China and India, and the Sino-Soviet border clashes.

[Reelya]

Both those border conflicts had one thing in common - China. Who was not a UN member at the time. So, it might be ironic coincidence, but the only major-power conflicts that people have brought up, both involve a non-UN member. I'd add the Korean War here as well, as their was shooting between US and Chinese forces. And possibly add the Vietnam War here as well, 320,000 Chinese troops were deployed in North Vietnam, and about 1,000 were killed by US bombing runs.

The Chinese membership was held by Taiwan from 1949-1971. The Sino-Soviet conflict directly lead to Mainland China being accepted into the UN in 1971.

However, my point wasn't that the UN prevented WWIII or any of that, it's that we flat out don't know what would have happened if we had no UN at all for the post-WWII era. The world would probably look a lot different, butterfly effect and all that, that's a no-brainer. And probably not in a good way.

[Teneb]

If anything, the UN at least keeps the major powers bickering and fighting inside the UN, rather than outside it.

That said, the UN is pretty irrelevant for the many small countries though.

[Shadowlord]

Voltaire was right, though. Given a set of all possible Earths, there are bound to be both worse ones and better ones, by whatever metric you choose.

[Frumple]

Should one invent a time machine, to go back in the past to change it in the hopes of a better future would only make things worse.

Bullshit. Some things may have uncertain consequences, but there's a lot of bloody things in the past that would have undeniably lead to a better future if they hadn't happened. You really think stopping NASA from ignoring the gouge on Columbia would have made things worse? There's whole masses of pointless suffering the past that could have done nothing but improve the situation currently had they not happened.