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| (Illustration by Zachary Balcoff/The Washington Post; Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post; Bebeto Matthews/AP; Jeenah Moon/Reuters; AP; iStock) |
| The United Nations “was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell,” the organization’s second secretary general once said. But what happens when it’s stuck in purgatory? As world leaders gather in New York City for the U.N. General Assembly eight decades after the U.N. emerged out of the ashes of World War II, the institution faces interlocking fundamental crises of funding and relevance. The United States, long its largest underwriter, is in the process of backing away, and conflicts, which the U.N. was meant to prevent, stubbornly proliferate as what analysts describe as “drift” and “malaise” set in. The U.N.’s chief decision-making body, the Security Council, is paralyzed by great power rivalries and can’t stop ruinous wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. The mammoth ecosystem of U.N. agencies face sweeping budget cuts that would shed thousands of jobs, as countries rethink their funding commitments, the U.S. chief among them. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, who is heading into the last year of his tenure, has become the beleaguered town crier of Turtle Bay. His lectures and entreaties — on the existential peril posed by a warming planet, on the onset of brutal famines, on the failure of collective action to address yawning social inequities or end intractable conflicts — seem to be ignored. His efforts to restructure U.N. institutions, including plans to cut some 20 percent of the workforce in 2026, involve real pain for the U.N. system but garner little outside interest or praise. But at the U.N. General Assembly, it’s President Donald Trump who will soak up much of the attention. In his first term, Trump liked to grind his MAGA ax from the chamber’s dais, declaring year after year that the national self-interest of fellow member states must supersede the “globalist” agendas of unelected bureaucrats. But only in his second term has Trump has brought down the hammer, cutting U.S. contributions to the U.N. and scaling back U.S. involvement. The administration’s gutting of USAID was a blow to the international humanitarian system, which has been propped up for years by U.S. involvement. Cindy McCain, executive director of the U.N.’s World Food Program, said her agency is having to “take food from the hungry to feed the starving.” Trump has also yanked hundreds of millions dollars from the U.N.’s peacekeeping missions and refugee agency. And he has pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency, the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization, while abandoning, for a second time, the U.N.-brokered commitments linked to the 2015 Paris climate accords. At congressional hearings in July, Michael Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser who last week was confirmed as the U.N. ambassador, said the U.N. had “drifted from its core mission of peacemaking” and decried the “radical politicization” of some of its agencies. The Trump administration has placed sanctions on officials at the International Criminal Court, which is legally independent of the U.N., for its prosecution of war crimes charges against Israeli leaders. But the mood among U.S. Republicans has shifted well beyond their long-standing complaints about U.N. bloat and bias. In February, a group of GOP lawmakers introduced legislation to scrap U.S. funding of the U.N. altogether.
“The U.N.’s decades-old, internal rot once again raises the questions of why the United States is even still a member,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who introduced the bill in the House. “The U.N. doesn’t deserve one single dime of American taxpayer money or one bit of our support; we should defund it and leave immediately.” Even if a withdrawal is not truly in the cards, the U.S. under Trump seems keen to batter away at the U.N. agenda. It has turned its back on the lofty development goals agreed upon by U.N. member states a decade ago, in part out of objections to perceived climate and gender “ideology” baked into the targets. The Trump administration also denied visas to Palestinian officials who routinely attend U.N. deliberations, an act of interference in the functioning of the international organization that compelled some critics to suggest staging U.N. meetings away from the United States. In rhetoric and deed, Trump has rejected the spirit of multilateralism that animates the U.N. He revived an era of gunboat diplomacy in the Americas, pressed punitive tariffs on rivals and allies, and seems to think, as Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, put it, that the U.S. does not “need anything from foreigners except for a very mercantilistic trade relationship.” “You do not have a government in the U.S. that is at all interested in finding global solutions to global problems,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International. She said it would be inaccurate to view Trump’s posture at the U.N. as one of “retreat.” “They are not retreating, they are destroying,” she said. “They don’t want it to work.” | ||||||||||||||||||
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| The U.N. headquarters in New York on Sept. 21. (Lukas Coch/EPA/Shutterstock) |
| For much of the U.N.’s history, the U.S. has wanted it to work. It was conceived by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other Allied leaders as an international organization that could thwart another calamitous world war. The Cold War, while it lasted, fomented frictions within the halls of the U.N., but the organization picked up steam amid a wave of decolonization that multiplied the ranks of its membership. In his first term as president, Ronald Reagan lashed out at the U.N., withholding or deferring U.S. funding while pulling out of UNESCO in 1983, which Trump would do as well, over its supposed anti-Western leanings. (The U.S. returned under President George W. Bush in 2003.) But by his second term, Reagan’s position had mellowed, and he used the U.N. system to help advance talks with the Soviets. By 1988, as Cold War tensions lessened, Reagan had come to appreciate the U.N. as “a constructive force in a dangerous world,” The Washington Post reported at the time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a new influx of member states. Analysts see the 1990s as a kind of heyday for the institution, as the U.S. basked in its status as the world’s peerless superpower and much of the international community seemed to be rowing in the same direction. It was a short-lived moment, and even then, the U.N. system could not prevent genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Through all these decades, U.S. administrations recognized value in steering international affairs through the platform of the U.N. With its chief headquarters set up in New York City, it summoned world leaders to America’s shores, and its budget drew significantly from the largesse of U.S. Congress. In 2023, the U.S.’s $13 billion contribution provided for a quarter of the U.N.’s collective budget. “We had the vision to create global institutions after a global cataclysm, and saw it in America’s enlightened self-interest to support and nurture them, however imperfect, over time,” said Jeffrey Prescott, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served as ambassador to the U.N. agencies for food and agriculture in the Biden administration. “There’s no question that as the U.S. pulls back,” it “leaves a dramatic void.” No clear taker has emerged to fill the vacuum. The U.N. is leaning more on private sector and philanthropic partnerships, and looking to other governments and donors to pick up the slack. Guterres is ending his decade at the helm with a bruising program of austerity and retrenchment. Still, China looms larger than ever. That wasn’t always the case for the veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council. A couple decades ago, “what China thought on most issues” at the U.N. “was not really a major concern,” Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, told me. China has taken the lead in supporting the World Health Organization, in a bid to offset Trump’s cuts. It’s also stepped up its leadership in U.N. peacekeeping missions, and marched a battalion of blue-capped Chinese peacekeepers at a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square this month marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Chinese diplomats have seized on Trump’s turn against the U.N. to cast themselves as responsible custodians of the international ordered. “Unilateralism, driven by some countries, is wearing its ugly hat and yielding severe blows to the authority and effectiveness of multilateralism,” Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the U.N., said at an event last week. “China gains a certain amount of clout, at a moment when the U.S. is stepping back,” Prescott said. “This is not a sign that Beijing will immediately take over, but they have a chance to underscore how they’re in it for the long haul.” You are reading an excerpt from a longer column by Ishaan Tharoor. Click here to read the full essay: |