That the surgical U.S. targeting of a handful of nuclear sites rose to the level of a direct, public rebuke by Guterres makes for a glaring double standard.

In the aftermath of U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities this weekend, U.N. leaders put their long-running anti-U.S. bias on display.

“I am gravely alarmed by the use of force by the United States against Iran today. This is a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge — and a direct threat to international peace and security,” U.N. secretary general António Guterres wrote in a post on X Saturday night. He added that “member states” should “de-escalate” and abide by their obligations under international law, though he seemed to be referring primarily to the U.S. and Israel. The U.N.’s top human rights official, Volker Türk, echoed Guterres’s remarks and said that he is “deeply concerned” by President Trump’s strikes.

That the surgical U.S. targeting of a handful of nuclear sites rose to the level of a direct, public rebuke by Guterres makes for a glaring double standard, considering the patently belligerent and unlawful behavior he has overlooked from Beijing.

One would be hard pressed to find public remarks by Guterres that even question an act of the Chinese government. Guterres has never criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s escalating gray-zone aggression campaign against Taiwan, which features daily aerial sorties in the island’s air defense identification zone and the involvement of naval vessels. Nor did he and Türk speak out against China’s harassment of Philippines navy vessels near islands controlled by Manila last year. Those clashes came dangerously close to resulting in a shooting war between Beijing and a treaty ally of the United States, no doubt a matter of sufficient importance and urgency to merit a response by the U.N. chief. Türk, for his part, has unabashedly embraced China, traveling to the country for a “human rights” conference hosted by the Chinese government last year, even though his office said Beijing may be committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs.

Although it is hardly new — Guterres has run the U.N. this way for almost a decade — the newest manifestation of this double standard could have profound repercussions for the U.N. As the Trump administration wraps up a sweeping review of U.S. commitments to international organizations, the U.N. finds itself in a particularly perilous position. Pursuant to an executive order that President Trump signed on February 4, his administration “will determine which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to the interests of the United States and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed.”

With further U.S. funding cuts on the horizon, Guterres kicked off a cost-savings program, called UN80, in March. Its main component is a review of U.N. programming and staffing for redundancies. While the U.N. chief has denied that UN80 is a response to the Trump administration’s expected plans to gut U.S. funding for the U.N., the program is widely understood to be an effort to demonstrate to the new administration that it is a serious steward of public resources.

Deep cuts have already arrived at Turtle Bay via DOGE efforts to terminate U.S. support of superfluous programs; the House voted to codify billions in funding that went to U.N. organizations via multiple different accounts. The executive office of the secretary general understands that it can’t forestall most of the cuts that Trump’s team will make. Its best hope, instead, is to believe that by making a good faith restructuring effort, Guterres’s team can persuade the Trump team to maintain at least some small amount of current U.S. funding.

Critics of the U.N. already understand that the secretariat, which is supposed to be an impartial bureaucracy, is profoundly biased against the U.S. in general and against Trump’s foreign policy specifically. It is nonetheless noteworthy that Guterres is taking an extra step to remind Washington of this as the State Department wraps up its review of U.S. international engagement.