The United Nations as Legitimating Instrument
The most common criticism of the United Nations is that it is incapable of taking decisive action on its own. It can act only if some member nation, or a coalition of member nations, is willing to take the initiative. Above all, the United Nations has no standing military force whatsoever under its direct control. It is entirely dependent on its member nations for troops, the so-called "blue helmets."
These facts provide the basis for the argument that the United Nations is ineffectual. The implicit (and often explicit) corollary is that since the United Nations has no power in its own right, it can -- and perhaps should be -- ignored, in favor of direct unilateral action. Alternatively, intervention action may be taken either by some other body (such as NATO) that is better organized for operations of a military character, or by ad-hoc coalitions of states brought together to carry out action to achieve some particular objective.
All of these criticisms of the United Nations are true in some degree. The United Nations does in fact lack military means of its own. In that sense it cannot organize and deploy any sort of intervention force in its own right. At most it can deploy a peacekeeping force made up of troops contributed by member states. Moreover, members are generally reluctant to provide troops that will be under United Nations command, if the size of the force is large, or the risks involved in deploying them are believed to be substantial. (These conditions, naturally, tend to go together.)
In such cases, troops are provided only while remaining under the national command authority of the nation that provides them, though perhaps operating within a command structure headed by a general of some other member state among those providing troops -- generally the largest of such states. In cases of this sort, which characteristic of larger United Nations-au...