We have come to New York to attend U.N. General Assembly meetings this year, like we did last year. Theoretically, every state in the U.N. has the right to vote. However, decisions made by the General Assembly are ultimately approved by the Security Council, where there are five permanent members with the right to veto. The victors of World War II — the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K. and China — are the five permanent members of the council.Hence, the U.N. is an instrument of status quo and hegemony that justifies and maintains the paradigm established after World War II. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who iterates that "the world is bigger than five," referring to these five permanent members, will undoubtedly express this fact again during his address to the assembly this year in relation to recent political and economic developments.
In fact, it is not only Turkey expressing that the U.N. is an institution that has lost its function. Donald Trump, the president of the U.S. which hosts the U.N. and is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, criticized the U.N. as a "club" for diplomats "to get together, talk and have a good time." In fact, we should take it as a very sincere confession rather than criticism. Trump, quite a realistic president, recently said that the U.N. should be credible, while President Erdoğan once again repeated that the U.N. should be reformed during the groundbreaking ceremony of the new Turkish House in New York a couple of days ago.
In order for the U.N. to be credible as President Trump said, its current operation system must immediately change. We have seen that the current system cannot find a solution to any problem. Look at what happened in Bosnia in the recent past, and what is happening in Myanmar and in Syria now. Certainly, the U.N. Security Council's failure to make a decision and a member state vetoing decisions for its own short-term interests has some role in these tragedies that go as far as genocide. In this case, the U.N. has become an institution that does not solve the problems of mankind, but aggregates these problems and ignores the problems of the poor and the oppressed.
Undoubtedly, institutions emerge and survive depending on the conditions of the economic and political system in the existing conjuncture. If the current economic and political system does not match the economic, political or even sociological realities of the world, that is to say, if the social reality transcends the political one, the existing institutions become the institutions of the previous social reality and are corrupted.
Today, we are experiencing the economic and political transformation of this social reality and the concomitant state of crisis all over the world. Now, those who want to maintain the old system in Asia, the Middle East and Africa are seeking new games to extend their declining period of time. In this regard, North Korea's "nuclear threat" is not a threat against humanity alone. Those who say that North Korea has done this tell all of us "Do not lift your heads, if you do, we will continuously fly missiles with nuclear warheads over your heads." Likewise, those who have turned the Buddhist priests into bald neo-Nazis in Myanmar are threatening the whole world with racist attacks and racist politics.
In this context, obviously, a game is being played in northern Iraq too. We know that what is being tried in northern Iraq has nothing to do with the principle of a nation's self-determination, but an insistence on creating a new hot conflict area like Syria in the region.
Well, which economic paradigm brings all this political corruption? What about the crisis of this paradigm?
When we came to New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly last year, Barack Obama was in office. During this time, elections were held in the U.S. and Trump became the new president. Trump is a businessman, and as I said above, he is a realistic president who is aware of the problems of the U.S. He has not yet transformed the politics to an "art" of winning time. He wants to get results immediately. Both his body language and rhetoric shows this. The traces of an economic crisis in the U.S. at the moment definitely stem from Obama's faltering policies that did not know what to do.
Trump sees that the U.S. is in an economic stalemate, and it is impossible to see this, no matter what data and analyses show. You will see this on a short tour of New York's streets. The difference between the New York that I saw this time last year and the one that I have been seeing this year tells me a single thing: The U.S.'s economic crisis has gone far beyond to be resolved through the institutions and policies of the existing system. If Federal Reserve (Fed) members, who will make a decision this week, stepped out of their garish offices and took a quick stroll in the streets, they would not even mention the word of balance sheet expansion. At this stage, the Fed cannot hike interest rates.
Does this situation point to a stalemate of war? For now, it would be unnecessarily pessimistic to answer "yes." In fact, developed countries still have a chance to renounce the scenarios of regional wars, coups and civil wars which they are building in order to impede Asian and southern countries that are rapidly keeping up with them. Developed countries, particularly the U.S., should leave aside the U.N.'s outdated functioning and initiate permanent, strategic and transformative collaborations with the rapidly developing countries in order to design the system in line with the current social and economic realities in the world. Certainly, this solution is an alternative that is stronger than a total war and the current course of things based on civil war scenarios. And Turkey is at the heart of this solution.