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The international community urgently needs new tools, ideas and initiatives to meet the common threats and challenges faced by the United Nations’ 193 member countries. The world body’s 75th anniversary, marked on United Nations Day on 24 October, presents an opportunity to chart a path to the partnerships we need to meet the challenges we will face in the years and decades to come. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic—the costliest and most far-reaching crisis since World War II—the need for institutional renewal and recovery is obvious.

Among the most ominous threats and challenges, beyond pandemic disease, are a rapidly changing global climate, violent conflict and large-scale displacement in fragile states, and sophisticated cyberattacks. What these challenges have in common is that they are beyond the ability of any country to resolve on its own. International cooperation is crucial, but that cooperation is being jeopardised by a resurgence in nationalism which threatens the very structure of the international order built three-quarters of a century ago.

Rising nationalism raises a significant risk that the UN system’s structure and institutions, essential but in need of repair and rejuvenation, may instead be left to decline, decay and even collapse. Such an outcome would be tragic, not just for those institutions but for all of humanity.

We believe there is another path. To help promote cooperative responses to today’s most pressing global problems, we are delighted to lend our support to the Roadmap for the future we want and UN we need, presented last month to the president of the UN General Assembly at the UN75 Global Governance Forum. Having defended our countries’ foreign policies as their representatives in New York, and having shaped them at the helm of our respective foreign ministries, we know from experience that original ideas from external stakeholders can help move complex multilateral organisations towards positive-sum outcomes.

Individuals and organisations from across global civil society have an opportunity, during this year’s commemoration of the UN’s founding, to help create ‘The future we want, the United Nations we need’, the anniversary’s umbrella theme. The secretary-general’s Global Conversation has already engaged over a million people worldwide through surveys, formal polling and hundreds of dialogues. Such discussions and debates serve as a reminder that the UN system has, over the past several decades, offered lifesaving support to vulnerable people, safeguarded basic human rights, advanced sustainable development and prevented a Third World War.

If all member states act upon the UN75 Declaration properly and with the support of global civil society, they can nurture a renewed spirit of international cooperation with two mutually reinforcing goals: institutional strengthening and a robust, ‘green’ recovery from the pandemic.

In particular, we, alongside other partners, call upon world leaders to raise the ambition of the declaration’s 12 commitments. They should agree to augment each with carefully developed proposals and action plans to bolster institutional capacity, improve policy and strengthen public–private partnerships, all of which will be further developed in the follow-up report from the UN secretary-general mandated by the declaration.

We also advocate a world summit on inclusive global governance, as called for in the Stimson Center’s recent UN 2.0 report. To be held by September 2023, the summit would seek to upgrade and equip the global governance system to address major issues facing the international community, and to usher in a new compact with citizens to enhance and rebuild confidence in their multilateral institutions.

In the lead-up to this 2023 leaders’ meeting, two G20 summits, akin to those held in London and Pittsburgh to chart a way forward from the 2008 global financial crisis, should be convened in 2021, focusing on coordinated macroeconomic, social and environmental policies to promote a durable recovery from Covid-19. These discussions among the leaders of the largest economies should be synchronised, in turn, with a broader Covid recovery strategy that seeks the endorsement of all 193 UN member states and support from international financial institutions, the World Trade Organization and other global and regional bodies.

In 2015, when our Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance presented its UN70 report, Confronting the crisis of global governance, both the headlines and trendlines foreshadowed the return of virulent nationalism, fuelled by surging migration, economic inequality and leaders who dehumanise others and seek to divide rather than unite. Five years on, enlightened leadership is needed more than ever, supported by ideas and political pressure from civil society worldwide. By reviving cooperation to meet today’s many challenges, we can ensure that ‘the future we want’, for today’s younger generation and all future generations, becomes the future we get.

Watching mob violence in the streets of America, I recalled an encounter in Kosovo in 1999. Driving through the country one day in a UN vehicle, I stopped at the house of a man who, some months before, had been dragged from his house by Serbian paramilitaries and made to kneel on the dusty road and was poised for execution in front of his seven daughters.

It was at the height of the civil war in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian authorities were embittered foes. The shrill politics of extremes and the whip of war had already unravelled most of former Yugoslavia. Kosovo was the last chapter, and both sides were exacting revenge. Some of the same Serbian paramilitary groups that had committed crimes in Bosnia were marauding in the restive Yugoslav province.

A jeep-load of regular Serbian soldiers rounded the corner. An officer dismounted, arranged his men gun to gun against the paramilitaries and arrested the would-be executioner. ‘That soldier saw me for who I am’, said the man, while his daughters listened on. The Serbian officer hadn’t seen him as an Albanian, but as a father, a farmer and a man. That simple statement sits in sharp contrast to the multiplying tribalisms of pre-election America in 2020.

Moreover, the sentiments of this discreet scene are reflected in and magnified by the 20th century’s most edifying and vital document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the founding ethical and legal tenet of our times. International law that has flowed from the declaration has served as a guarantor of safety and peace for billions of people, despite regular flouting by dictators and génocidaires. Our first rule, the foundation of the modern life, is that we see each other as human.

Australia was one of eight nations that negotiated and drafted the declaration under our chief negotiator, H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt. There were also a Lebanese, a Chilean and a Russian (72 years ago, it was all men). China’s negotiator, Peng Chun Chang, believed that Europe’s Enlightenment philosophers and the notion of the universality of rights were in part the intellectual sprigs of the Confucian philosopher Mencius.

We forget that the UN was the child of humankind’s bloodiest conflict. The world was exhausted by the Second World War and the excesses of totalitarianism (Mao was still to come), so the UN was a liberal enterprise constructed to deal with matters of hard power through consensus and what the political philosopher Joseph Nye eventually termed ‘soft’ power. As the UN’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, famously said, the UN ‘was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell’.

Lots of Australians have continued to work for the UN. On the ground and at the sharp end of that work, it’s often dangerous. My UN colleagues have been harassed, shot at, assaulted, bombarded, expelled, humiliated, raped and murdered. I’ve lost colleagues in accidents and to bombs, and one was strangled in his bed. Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on a peace mission in Congo in 1961. We laud our armed forces, but almost never our unarmed forces, of which Australia has thousands already deployed.

The UN is a Tower of Babel, with all that that implies. Engaged in matters of soaring ambition, often you might labour prosaically alongside people with jarring cultures, or accents you don’t understand, or whose systems of government you fundamentally oppose. Yet, in conditions of stress and shared enterprise, great friendships are formed, lasting alliances are forged and a sense of human solidarity is amplified.

The UN’s bureaucracy is a network of improbable complexity. It’s easy to sneer at and very often frustrating, but, despite the towering aspiration of this malformed creature, it does produce gold. More than 100,000 troops serve in 14 peacekeeping missions. Agencies such as UNICEF, the High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights and the World Food Programme temper the misery of the most vulnerable.

The UN is the jack-of-all-trades repairperson we don’t like to think about. As with assumptions about electricity or water flows, or the absence of diseases like polio or smallpox, we ignore the power cables and pipes until the taps run dry and the lights go off, as it might have if the World Health Organization hadn’t largely functioned to coordinate a global response to Covid-19. In a world where the old pillars of vertical power alone are creaking with obsolescence and complex juvenile networks soak power up, the UN remains the best place to tackle global affairs.

Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans knew the weaknesses and ‘exhilarating’ strengths of the UN. He helped negotiate what he called the most robust arms-control treaty on weapons of mass destruction—the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. After genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur, he was a proponent of the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine that, in theory (as Syria sadly demonstrates), is a red line when rulers try to eradicate their own people. International laws and norms protect us through the very act of negotiating those laws, as well as mutual vigilance over their observance.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne’s recent speeches flag a renewed Australian commitment to the UN. This reflects the pandemic’s revelation of our complex, interwoven global fragility, from our systems of health, welfare, security, transnational business (including our university industry), communications, pleasure-seeking and government to the fragility of our own bodies. Neat post–Cold War assumptions about a world order crafted from neoliberal economic and political triumphalism are dead.

Those assumptions were a bad and simplistic bet, and now we pay the debt. Two decades of expeditionary warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan that excluded a rising China and a moribund Russia bled the US of wealth and credibility. It also obscured the sickening of the international system we thought we knew. Yet America’s reaction to a bloodied nose and diminishing economic and military power while China rises and Russia rebounds has been a corroded commitment to the UN. That vacuum has been logically filled by China, now the UN’s second largest contributor, with a new influence in agencies such as the WHO.

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian politician and intellectual, has said that the political question is always, ‘Who will protect me now?’ In an exponentially complex world, how do those of us distracted by raising children and paying mortgages answer that? Newly risen populists exploit the Ignatieff question and our distraction with a facile bait and switch. Because no single government can provide solutions to universal complexity, populists bait us with fear of our present and switch in a fear of other tribes. Fear leads to the politics of extremity as we stop seeing people for who they are.

Australia has much to gain from a robust UN and much to lose from its impairment. To use just one example of complex challenges, the world must have refreshed migrant and refugee agreements that account for huge and permanent flows of displaced people in the 21st century, which is quite different from the era of refugee treaty instruments of 70 years ago. Australia must balance the management of our sovereign borders and the intakes we need to keep us prosperous with our liberal humanist obligations to those we recognise as equally human, but out of luck.

Covid-19 is just a single adverse event. Unlike the misfortune of an earthquake, a three-month fire season, a tsunami or low-level Middle East wars, this once-in-a-century event has provided fresh insight into the complex civilisational impact that a contagion of greater transmissibility and lethality, or a solar flare or asteroid, or an epic nuclear disaster, or a human-made bacteriological or chemical storm (such as the widespread dispersal of Russia’s chemical agent Novichok) would have on life on earth.

The relatively moderate impact of Covid-19 has alerted us that our neatly organised lives can be switched off in a blink. The great post-pandemic challenge will be to build new resilience into the globalised systems of consensus—the ‘rules-based order’—that we increasingly rely on to physically protect us. This encompasses agreements on nuclear weapons proliferation, climate change, international crime and extremism, space and cyber warfare, corruption and finance, water resources, fishing, and virtual propaganda battles fought over social media outlets that leave our very grasp of reality spinning.

A sense of reality in a complex world is critical. Good propaganda, as Nye once said, is not propaganda, and power and resilience in the 21st century are closely related to ‘whose story wins’. You can’t speak authentically of peace when you promote war, or free trade when you stymie it, or human rights when you cage your own populations en masse. People will eventually call you out. Middle-power countries of modest ambition, whose rhetoric is matched by fact, must constrain our leviathan trade and alliance partners through multilateral organisations in order to shape the world for our own security.

Australia is a UN poster child with a winning story, and it’s not just about Kylie Minogue or Paul Hogan. Our story is about an authentic 21st-century national resilience, as evidenced by our systemic and political management of the Covid-19 contagion. This resilience includes luck, such as iron ore deposits, but also consensus politics spawned by our social temperament, an educated population, a great health system, a first-class bureaucracy, and the fruits of an immigration flow that has fuelled our economy and hardwired us to every other continent. We’re close to what we preach.

Yet we also lag. Australia has a huge corps of Australians who have quietly and expertly built resilience into the international system over decades. Yet this highly trained network is unmapped, scattered and currently untapped for its collective soft-power intelligence and sharp-power impact. In the dozens of conflict and disaster zones I’ve been involved with through multiple UN agencies, I was contacted just once by an Australian embassy when there was a perceived and very public threat to life.

In this line of work, you find yourself exposed to disease, thirst, mischance and lots of people with twitchy trigger fingers, but working for the UN or in the multiplying international agencies such as ActionAid or the International Rescue Committee is not an act of altruism. You’re the face of your country, at a coalface of international cooperation, performing exciting work, imbued with meaning, and often with real and immediate impact on lives out of luck.

Less understood is the impact this work has on global resilience and, ultimately, the safety, security and resilience of the Australian homeland.

Experience in the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) highlights many of the operational challenges in implementing the UN’s agenda of women, peace and security (WPS). As I reflected on my recent UNMISS deployment as a military gender adviser, two critical aspects came to the fore: the UN’s credibility challenge in advocating for women’s participation in peacebuilding, and the tensions between fulfilling a mandate to protect civilians and supporting the implementation of a peace agreement that increases the risks to women and girls.

South Sudan became independent in 2011, following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended 20 years of civil war in Sudan. UNMISS was then established to succeed the UN Mission in Sudan, but in 2013 violence quickly re-emerged between the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, led by President Salva Kiir and comprising mainly ethnic Dinka fighters, and the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO), led by former vice president Riek Machar and with mainly Nuer fighters. A power-sharing peace agreement was signed in August 2015 but failed when heavy fighting broke out again in July 2016 in the capital, Juba.

The 2015 agreement was revitalised in September 2018. It provided for a quota of 35% women’s participation in the implementation committees and was signed by Amer Manyok Deng as the representative of the women’s bloc. The quota reflects ‘the importance of [women’s] equal participation and full involvement’ in peacebuilding and ‘the need to increase their role in decision-making’, which was stressed in UN Security Council resolution 1325 (2000). Implementation of the quota has been slow, although Angelina Teny, for the SPLM-IO, chaired the Defence and Security Committee from late 2018.

UNMISS’s mandate gives it four main tasks: to protect civilians, to create conditions conducive to the delivery of humanitarian assistance, to monitor and investigate human rights violations, and, currently, to support the implementation of the revitalised peace agreement. In advocating for the 35% women’s participation quota in that agreement, however, the UN has created a significant credibility challenge for itself that’s apparent to local authorities and communities.

The UNMISS civilian component has 26% women, the police approximately 20%, and the military only 4%. At the leadership level, despite the appointment of Police Commissioner Unaisi Vuniwaqa (Fiji), women’s participation is lower again. Only one female military contingent commander has served in UNMISS (Lieutenant Colonel Katie Hislop, British Engineering Task Force 2017). Anecdotally, there are few military women in roles that are visible to the local population and in senior operational planning or staff roles, and their overall visibility to the local community as part of UNMISS is more limited than that of men serving in the mission.

The UN’s uniformed gender parity strategy focuses on increasing the proportion of women in missions, but its numerical approach gives insufficient weight to where and how women are employed. This negates the Security Council’s assertions that deploying more women increases community engagement and the mission’s ability to implement the WPS agenda. Rather than just percentages, emphasis also needs to be placed on deploying women into visible UNMISS decision-making roles, particularly at colonel level and above. A force leadership that normalises female participation provides a credible basis for advocacy, as well as a model for contributing militaries that don’t yet have their own senior female officer cohort.

Operationalising women’s participation is more than a practical challenge for WPS and reflects on mission credibility. A similar challenge arises for UNMISS for the protection of civilians, which is another pillar of WPS and a key mandated task.

UNMISS’s responsibility to protect civilians specifically includes the protection of women and children from conflict-related sexual violence. Campaigns of such violence have continued following the peace agreement, including a reported mass rape near Bentiu in September–December 2018. Importantly for operational planning, an investigation by UNMISS and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that the risk factors for organised sexual violence in Bentiu included large numbers of fighters in ‘stand-by’ mode awaiting the implementation of the peace agreement and the presence of armed youth militias. Those risks are likely to increase further when the cantonment of forces proceeds as part of the peace implementation. Thus, the processes that were intended to facilitate peace between the main security actors have increased the risk of violence for others. Counterintuitively, as violence between some armed groups decreased with the peace agreement, the risk of sexual violence against civilians went up.

It’s difficult for UNMISS to reconcile its mandates both to protect the population from sexual violence and to support the implementation of the peace agreement. This problem has been compounded by the fact that the perpetrators include government forces that are parties to the agreement. An added level of complexity is the persistent denial of UNMISS freedom of movement by government forces, which was criticised in Security Council resolution 2459 (2019). The UN’s 2013 policy on human rights due diligence only partially addresses this problem by requiring peacekeepers to avoid supporting human rights violators in their operations.

It’s particularly difficult to strike an operational balance between these competing tasks when UNMISS’s mandate offers limited direction beyond requiring the mission to prioritise the protection of civilians in the use of resources. The risk is that the security of women and girls is subordinated to the implementation of the peace agreement on the assumption that their short- to medium-term increased risk will be reduced in the longer term if peace is achieved—but when the implementation of the gender-specific aspects of the agreement is also slow, that mitigation seems increasingly unhelpful.

While these challenges are significant, it shouldn’t be assumed that they undermine the relevance or utility of WPS, although they do call for creative approaches and an explicit balancing of mandate interests in the pursuit of peace and security for all.

On 17 October, the Morrison government announced a review of Australia’s support for the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to determine whether it remains ‘fit for purpose’. There are compelling reasons for Australia to continue to support the deal, and significant implications if it does not.

Three fundamental bipartisan foreign-policy principles of successive Australian governments are a firm commitment to the rules-based international order, the United Nations, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The JCPOA intersects with all of them.

Signed in July 2015 and implemented in January 2016, the JCPOA is an international arms control agreement, endorsed by the UN Security Council as resolution 2231. As such, it falls very clearly within the parameters of the rules-based international order. And while Australia isn’t a signatory to the JCPOA (the original signatories were the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU), it is a party to the deal through its membership of the UN.

The non-proliferation-related objectives of the JCPOA were to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability, both for the duration of the deal and beyond. Its control mechanisms, most of which are subject to agreed sunset periods of between 10 and 25 years, include regular and comprehensive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and built-in safeguards which ensure that Iran neither has, nor is able to acquire, the quantity or quality of uranium, or the physical means of enriching that uranium, to make a nuclear weapon.

Notwithstanding the limitations of agreed sunset clauses, the JCPOA also includes in its preamble and general provisions Tehran’s explicit reaffirmation ‘that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons’.

The explicit reciprocity within the deal for Iran’s compliance was the lifting of a wide range of sanctions by the UN, and especially the EU and US, covering trade, finance and investment. On implementation, Australia, like other non-signatories, also lifted its UN-related sanctions.

What the deal doesn’t include is mandatory restrictions on Iran’s development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons. These are voluntary. Nor does it include any provisions relating to Iran’s non-nuclear military activities, regionally or elsewhere.

As a package, all of the original signatories and the UN regarded the JCPOA and its objectives and control mechanisms as ‘fit for purpose’. But like all agreements, its functionality and durability are underpinned by trust.

Iran has not breached that trust. Its compliance with its obligations has been repeatedly verified by the IAEA during all inspections since the JCPOA’s implementation, despite US President Donald Trump’s announcement of his country’s withdrawal from the deal in May and the progressive imposition of old and new sanctions by Washington in August and November. Iran has voluntarily capped the range of its ballistic missiles at 2,000 kilometres, which is consistent with its perceived regional threats.

And despite the severe challenge to the JCPOA from Trump, all the other signatories have so far upheld their obligations under the agreement. In their joint statement on 24 September, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the EU agreed to implement legal and other means to try to normalise trade and investment with Iran and minimise the effects of US sanctions on legitimate businesses, to the maximum extent possible.

From an Australian policy perspective, the changes to the agreement that Trump has demanded are not minor. He has significantly moved the goal posts. He wants the sunset clauses to be removed, tougher compliance monitoring by the IAEA to ensure Iran can never develop a nuclear weapons capability, and mandatory restrictions on Iran’s missile program to eliminate any possible development of nuclear-capable long-range ballistic missiles. The last of these demands is widely seen as also seeking to control Iran’s conventional missile capability.

An added sting in Trump’s sanctions regime is the implementation of punitive measures against countries and businesses that continue to do business legally with Iran. Australian companies are among those that could be affected. A further complication of these sanctions for Australia is the negative effect on broader alliance relations, including America’s ties with Europe and the UK.

Trump’s new demands that Iran must cease what he has described as its malign and destabilising activities in the Middle East and elsewhere are unrelated to the JCPOA’s original objectives. These demands were first detailed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in his remarks to the Heritage Foundation in May. They are universally seen as an unrealistic wish list.

Trump’s concerns cut across an internationally endorsed agreement focused on non-proliferation objectives. They have breached the trust of other signatories, and are collectively seen as divisive and unrealistic. Some EU sources believe that Trump’s demands are largely intended as a lesson for North Korea in the hope of some transactional compromise. Reportedly, former US secretary of state John Kerry is being pursued by multiple parties as a broker in the search for any compromise. However, what Washington is currently demanding of Tehran is not seen as proportional or fit for purpose.

Given that the JCPOA is consistent with Australia’s foreign policy objectives, and provided the current signatories continue to meet their obligations, it’s difficult to envisage what the Australian government might see as a realistic alternative. To abandon support for the JCPOA in present circumstances would be inconsistent with Australia’s established foreign policy practice.

It would also raise questions of motive and reliability. Internationally, for example, would Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries see any such change as separate from the Jerusalem embassy issue? Australia would also need to weigh up very carefully the implications of such a change on its relations with other JCPOA signatories, including the EU itself and EU member states.

Whatever the outcome of the review, Australia’s principles and trust should not be compromised.