Analysis · 2026-09-03

The most vetoed question at the UN is who gets to join it

Not war, not sanctions, not the Middle East. The subject the Security Council veto has been used on most often since 1946 is membership itself.

The Security Council veto is remembered for the things it stopped: ceasefires, condemnations, referrals to the court. But counted over the whole record — 272 occasions since 1946 on which a draft failed because a permanent member voted against it — the single subject that comes up most often is not any of those. It is the question of who is allowed to be in the room at all.

Admission accounts for 60 of the 272 occasions on record — about 22 per cent of every veto ever cast. That is more than the Middle East, more than any single conflict, and it is concentrated almost entirely in the organisation’s first fifteen years.

An instrument that changed hands

The membership vetoes are not spread evenly across the Council’s history, and they were not spread evenly across the permanent members either.

51 of them were cast by the Soviet Union before 1970, during the long deadlock in which each bloc blocked the other’s applicants and the General Assembly filled up only when a package deal in 1955 admitted sixteen states at once. The first on record is 1946-08-29 — Application for Membership (Transjordan).

Then the practice nearly stops, and when it returns the polarity has reversed: the admission vetoes of the 1970s are cast by the United States, and the most recent one on record is 2024-04-18, on Admission of new members. The same instrument, used for the same purpose, by the other side of the table. Nothing in the Charter changed; what changed was who had an applicant they wanted to keep out.

The full veto record