It's interesting to me that this has become such a common internet talking point. A while ago, I finished reading a history of the UN (the one by Stanley Meisl

It's interesting to me that this has become such a common internet talking point. A while ago, I finished reading a history of the UN (the one by Stanley Meisler), and I definitely got the impression that the founders of the UN wanted it to be more than just a forum. E.g. here are some passages I hilighted from Chapter 1: "Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2) "The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9) "Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19) More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding. I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design. [Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.] That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.