History.

The modern god-head. Or what Tocqueville knew as “Providence”. Ah well, a just desert, I suppose.

Yeah, forgot. They also got the satellite votes too of course, East Germany et al.

Nothing I haven’t been saying for literally decades.

Yeah, man, but it’s a dry heat.

–Bill Paxton, “Aliens”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AapC30kL0yQ

Niketas Choniates;

I enjoyed your comment. Full-bodied. Pithy. 🙂

An Irish friend once explained to me the real purpose of the EU was to prevent Germany from running amuck again.

By that standard the EU has been successful too … so far.

The issues you raise were raised at the time and are commented on in these chapters. Long story short, Stalin was not willing to join the UN if there was any possibility that the Western powers could use it to force him to do anything he didn’t want to do, and explicitly said so, referencing the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations in 1939 (over their invasion of Finland) and asking what guarantees would prevent such a thing from happening again? The leaders of the Western powers recognized this and were willing to go ahead anyway, and so created a structure that Stalin was willing to join. One leader (Jan Smuts) commented:

Should a World Organization be formed which does not include Russia she will become the power centre of another group. We shall then be heading toward a third World War. If the United Nations do not set up such an organization they will stand stultified before history. This creates a very grave dilemma and we must at all costs avoid the position into which we may be drifting…

On the merits the principle of unanimity among the Great Powers has much to recommend it, at least for the years immediately following the war… A brakelike unanimity may not be so bad a thing to have where people are drunk with new-won power. I do not defend it; I dislike it; but I do not consider it at present so bad an instrument than on this issue the future of world peace and security should be sacrificed…

The UN was really only intended to prevent WWIII and it has, perhaps in spite of itself, so far succeeded. That it doesn’t accomplish much more is regrettable, and that it’s more or less an expense account scam is disappointing though unsurprising, but the leaders who founded it only intended it to do so much, and probably would be surprised to see it still around so many decades later.