The UN is in trouble, but it is still breathing

The United Nations is gathering in New York this week, hosted by a country that has withdrawn from the WHO, Unesco, Unrwa, the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Population Fund.

So what? It’s suffering, but not dead. In fact the UN remains the last, best hope for many countries outside the rich west, where President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are outliers in wanting it gone. It’s reeling from donor fatigue, structural defects and brutal geopolitics, all of which have contributed to its failure to keep peace in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. But even now the UN

• serves as a lynchpin of the international order;
• provides a unique meeting point for all 193 member states; and
• commands attention from major countries including Brazil and India, both lobbying for reform of the security council, and China, which wants a UN-backed AI regulator.

Not giving. The UN has always depended on US funding but next year Trump is expected to cut discretionary and peacekeeping funding to zero and pre-agreed ‘dues’ by 80 per cent. Germany and the UK also used to funnel substantial aid through the UN but have slashed their budgets. The upshot:

• 6,900 job cuts from a workforce of 35,000 and $500 million in savings to be found at the UN’s New York headquarters alone.
• “There will be fewer people fed,” says Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group. “There will be fewer people being vaccinated or sheltered by the UN.”

The beef. Bureaucracy, “anti-semitism” and a loss of faith in UN leadership.

• UN decision-making can make glaciers look quick. Its bureaucracy is partly a function of a charter requirement for annual reports on progress against more than 2,000 resolutions passed by the general assembly since 1945; and partly because of overlapping remits for multiple agencies, which the secretary-general António Guterres is trying to streamline.
• Claims of institutional anti-semitism have long been a talking point on the American and Israeli right. Trump’s first nominee for US ambassador to the UN (withdrawn before she could be approved) said she saw her role there as fighting for “western civilisation”.
• Guterres has failed to leverage UN influence in conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Syria and Myanmar and has presided over a widening gap between what UN agencies say they need and what they have to spend. Hence the cuts. Christopher Ankersen of New York University calls him a “damp squib”.

More defects. One reason Guterres has been unable to pass any major security council resolutions has been Russia’s veto as a permanent council member – reliably used to scupper any promising initiative in international diplomacy even before it invaded Ukraine.

Less clout. Few heads of state of major economies will be at this week’s general assembly. Its status as a location for world-historical events (“Gorbymania” in 1989, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s address on the 10th anniversary of 9/11) is a memory.

And yet for dozens of countries in Africa and Asia the UN is still seen “as the legitimate source of international cooperation and problem-solving,” says David Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary, now head of the International Rescue Committee.

Liberal, not illiberal. The UN was “designed and built in the west” says Princeton’s John Ikenberry. It’s based on and upholds a liberal, democratic rules-based global order, and, contrary to critics’ claims, its members in the Global South tend to object not to the rules but how they are applied.

Exhibit 1: the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 “without a permission slip”, which the Brazilian academic Oliver Stuenkel says showed America’s ability “to get away with things others do not get away with”.

What’s more… the UN headquarters has a smaller budget than the NYPD.

Photograph by Phil Moore/AFP via Getty Images