Daily Inspiration Quote by Lakhdar Brahimi

"Of course" does a lot of work here. Brahimi isn’t cheerleading the UN; he’s quietly staking out a realist’s defense of an institution that’s constantly accused of being toothless. The line lands like a diplomatic shrug: everyone knows the UN lacks armies of its own, often lacks unity, and routinely gets ignored by great powers. So why bother? Because moral authority is the one kind of power the UN can reliably manufacture and export.

Coming from Brahimi, a career mediator in Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria-adjacent crises, the phrase reads as field-tested, not theoretical. He’s signaling what diplomats learn early: legitimacy is currency. A UN mandate can’t force compliance, but it can brand actions as lawful or rogue, humanitarian or predatory. That label shapes alliances, domestic politics, and the afterlife of a war in tribunals, sanctions regimes, aid flows, and historical memory. Moral authority becomes a leverage point precisely because it’s scarce and broadly recognized.

The subtext is also a warning aimed at member states: when they bypass the UN, they’re not just dodging procedure; they’re burning down a shared source of legitimacy that they’ll need later when the tables turn. And it’s a reminder to skeptics that international order isn’t maintained only by coercion. It’s maintained by stories powerful actors are forced to tell about themselves. The UN’s moral authority is the script supervisor of global politics: it can’t stop the scene, but it can make the transgressions impossible to edit out.