Trump and the future of the UN

During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres was honored with not one, but two White House visits. This time, he can’t even get the Trump on the phone, Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, told Devex during a recent Pro Briefing on the future of the United Nations — which also featured Natalie Samarasinghe, the former CEO of the United Nations Association-UK. The change reflects the rapidly diminishing standing of the U.N. in the eyes of a White House that sees little value in the multilateral agency’s plans for ending initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, to eradicate world poverty and keep the peace in conflict zones. The neglect is palpable. It didn’t start that way. Trump’s first cabinet pick as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. was Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, a choice that signaled the new administration cared about what happened here. But since then, U.S. attention has drifted. Stefanik dropped out. No ambassador has been named for the U.S. mission in Geneva, and the selection of former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to the top U.S. job at the U.N. appears to be something of a demotion. It’s also unclear when he will take up his new post. U.N. officials, meanwhile, are straining to interpret a series of White House executive orders to make sense of what the U.S. wants the U.N. to be. So far, U.S. diplomats have invested considerable energy in rooting out references to gender, disinformation, and diversity, equity and inclusion in U.N. mandates. They have also highlighted the need for the U.N. to focus on peace and security matters. But how they are going about has left some at the U.N. scratching their heads. For instance, a recent, preliminary White House budget, known as a skinny budget, recommended ending U.S. funding for U.N. peacekeeping missions. But earlier this month, the U.S. approved extending the mandate of a U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan. “U.S. positioning has been completely incoherent,” Gowan said. “There are fairly obvious contradictions between the U.S. saying there should be no funding for peacekeeping, but it is essential that we keep peacekeepers in South Sudan.” For Samarasinghe, Washington’s overwhelming focus on the bottom line has resulted in the pursuit of savings over solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. “I don’t think anyone would disagree that change … needs to happen,” she said. “But at the moment the focus is really being driven through the lens of cuts, as opposed to what types of change we need. It’s a question of form over function.” She also has doubts that the current U.N. cost-cutting measures will appease Washington’s critics of the U.N. “I think ultimately you can never please the people who just want to cut,” she said. “If you say we’ve cut by 20% they’re probably going to come back and say, ‘Well, why didn’t you cut by 40%?’” Samarasinghe also voiced concern about the stress that a retrenchment by the U.S. and other Western donors will have on relations between the global north and south. A year ago, the U.S. and Europe, keen to win broader support for their efforts to support Ukraine, labored to strike a kind of “grand bargain” with the global south, pledging reforms of the international financial system, more money for development, and climate adaptation that better met the needs of the global south. Much of that effort is now in doubt, as European governments move money from humanitarian and development priorities to defense. The United States, meanwhile, has made it clear that it wants the U.N. to focus its energy on matters of peace and security, not climate or development. “We’re going to further erode the trust … if we stop talking about all the things the developing countries really care about,” she said. Gowan pushed back on concerns that China is poised to mount an effort to supplant the U.S. as the most influential player at the U.N. “I have heard Western diplomats saying ‘Look, if Beijing wants to buy the U.N. now on the cheap, it can — it’s available, it’s on Etsy, or whatever,” Gowan said. “Beijing could, if it wanted to throw a few billion dollars at the U.N. and really change the power structure here,” he added. “But there isn’t much sign that it wants to do that. In the meantime, he added, the financial crisis has altered the skills the U.N. may need to lead the organization, after Guterres steps down at the end of 2026. “Two years ago, the big debate was: Who was going to reform the international financial system? … And the answer was Mia Mottley from Barbados,” he said, referring to the Caribbean prime minister and brainchild of the Bridgetown Initiative. “Now the question is: Who can run the international system out of a burger van on 44th Street? Because it’s pretty much all that is going to be left,” Gowan added. “Everyone is going to be campaigning on how much they can shrink the U.N. and how tiny they can make it.”