The United Nations (UN) is a global organization with almost all of the world's independent countries as members. The UN was founded on 24 October 1945 in San Francisco, California. The UN headquarters are located in New York City.

It has branch offices in Geneva in Switzerland, The Hague in the Netherlands, Vienna in Austria, and Nairobi in Kenya, while UN agencies are deployed in different parts of the world. In 2011, after the division of Sudan into North and South, 193 countries became members of the organization.

The founders of the UN had high hopes of preventing conflicts between nations and making future wars impossible. However, this did not happen due to the dependence of some countries' economies on the arms industry. In recent years the United States of America (US) has raised doubts about the UN’s role and influence in the world, and questioned its effectiveness in preventing arms proliferation and promoting disarmament. The US has also highlighted the UN’s inability to prevent the spread of poverty, stop wars, and solve international disputes, especially with the presence of the veto of major powers.