"Don't bother me with that UN crap," Henry Kissinger once chided an aide, crisply encapsulating the US's often dismissive view of a world body that it worked so diligently to establish 64 years ago.

Washington's cold war-era secretary of state was merely reflecting a popular US view, then and since, that the United Nations is at best an irrelevancy and at worst an unhelpful obstruction to the unfettered pursuit of US global interests.