The Jar on First Avenue

Fill a jar with marbles and press down the lid. At some point the loose heap stops behaving like a heap and becomes a solid. Physicists call this jamming. In June, the Nobel laureate Giorgio Parisi and Francesco Zamponi posted a proof of an identity that they and three colleagues had been unable to prove since 2014: two exponents governing such packings add up to exactly one. The theory describes idealised spheres in infinite dimensions, and the authors say that an AI model essentially derived the proof itself.

The picture behind that sum deserves a trip to First Avenue. A jammed packing is not merely stuck. It sits at the edge of stability, with barely enough contacts to hold, many of them carrying almost no force, and many neighbours separated by almost no gap. None of this is a law of diplomacy, because states, unlike marbles, can choose. As an image, though, it beats the word everyone reaches for.

That word is paralysis. Pakistan used it in the General Assembly’s veto debate last month. Malaysia’s foreign minister, citing the same failure, wants the veto abolished. But a paralysed body has lost its signals, and the Security Council receives all of them. Nothing moves because everything is pressing on something else.

Watch the race to succeed António Guterres, whose term ends on 31 December. On 5 November the council held its eighth straw poll. Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, who would be the first woman and the first Jew in the post, led with 12 votes of encouragement and three of discouragement, according to leaked tallies. The only coloured ballot so far, on 16 October, showed her and her two nearest rivals each carrying two discouragements from permanent members. Feridun Sinirlioğlu, nominated by Ankara on 30 October, drew three votes of encouragement and eight of discouragement. Another marble went into the jar.

Load in a packing does not spread evenly. It runs along chains while neighbours idle, and some marbles carry nothing at all and simply rattle. The UN’s chains run through five vetoes and one very large chequebook. In August, with the UN putting Washington’s debt at about $5 billion, the State Department told Congress that it planned to pay $850 million, and Washington is leaving more than 30 UN bodies. The heaviest chain in the jar is going slack while the lid stays on.

The physics is unkind to both camps of reformers. Add permanent seats with vetoes and you add constraints, which is why Pakistan’s warning about more paralysis is sound. Abolish the veto and the danger is subtler, because the veto was the price of getting the heaviest marbles into the jar. The historian Geoffrey Roberts puts it bluntly: “without the Big Three there would be no UN”. The League of Nations, which America never joined, showed what a body without its great powers is worth. A veto blocks action, but it also gives a great power a reason to stay. Take that reason away and the strongest may simply walk out. The image holds that far: disordered solids can give way in avalanches, sudden rearrangements that can dwarf whatever set them off.

Which brings us to the marble that believes it rattles. In March 1955, in a cabinet debate over seizing the Gaza Strip from Egypt, David Ben-Gurion, then defence minister, answered Moshe Sharett’s view that the state owed its founding to the UN. According to Sharett’s diary, Ben-Gurion shouted that only the daring of the Jews had founded the state, not some resolution of the “Um Shmum”. The phrase has outlived both men. In January, after the American exit from 66 international organisations, Israel said it would sever contact with seven international bodies, most of them part of the UN, including four it had already cut off.

The grievance is not invented, and Israeli diplomats press it with reason. But a rattler bears no load and needs no neighbour, and Israel is no rattler. By one count, 49 of 93 American vetoes up to late 2024 concerned Israel. Few countries lean so heavily on a single chain, and the campaign against the veto bears directly on it. Those who watched 14 to 1 votes on Gaza will call that the case against the jar, and they have a point. A jammed system shelters the protected and abandons the unprotected with the same indifference. It does not do justice. It only holds.

That is why Um Shmum, a fine line for a defence minister with an army behind him, makes a poor structural position. Israel has more to lose from an avalanche than almost anyone in the building, and every weak contact it opens makes the packing a little less predictable.

The sensible reforms are the unglamorous ones that shift load without pulling marbles. Since 2022 a veto has obliged the General Assembly to meet and debate it, and 17 vetoes had triggered such meetings by last December. It is a pressure valve. The veto stays, the great powers stay, and whoever casts it goes first on the list of speakers. Nothing has collapsed. The next secretary general, whoever survives the coloured ballots, will inherit a jar and should treat it as one.

On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, to partition Palestine. It met then in the New York City Building at Flushing Meadows, a World’s Fair pavilion leased to the new organisation. The delegates left for Manhattan long ago. The building went back to being an ice rink and is now the Queens Museum, whose best known exhibit is the Panorama, a scale model of the five boroughs. Some 900,000 tiny structures stand there in perfect order. Nothing in that city will ever collapse. Nobody lives in it.