A fundamental reassessment of the United Nations has been long in coming. Trump may give one when he addresses the body.
F or years, the United Nations has been dining out on a reputation built in the heady days following the end of World War II, when it was created to save future generations from the scourge of war, promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, advance economic development and higher standards of living, and promote comity among nations. There have been successes over the past 80 years, such as the elimination of smallpox, but they are shockingly rare considering the resources and respect the U.N. commands.
Today, September 23, Donald Trump will take the podium before the United Nations General Assembly for the fifth time. In previous speeches, he called out the organization for underperforming, whether on its failure to address Iran’s nuclear weapons program, bias in the International Criminal Court, or the unwillingness of the World Health Organization to condemn China for its lack of transparency and cooperation that made the Covid pandemic much more costly.
In this speech, the president will likely again highlight the failures of the multilateral system. At the same time, he should outline a new U.S. relationship with the United Nations — a selective approach that funds what works and abandons the wide swaths of the world body and its satellites that do not.
The world is awash in threats to international peace and security. Yet, the U.N. is paralyzed, unable to effectively deter Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, China’s assaults on Philippine sovereignty in the South China Sea, or Al-Qaeda’s march across Africa. The rise of rogue states, proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, mass migration, drug trafficking, and global terrorism — all are on the U.N. agenda, but tangible progress in effectively addressing these threats is largely absent.
Longstanding conflicts in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and elsewhere are not being resolved despite expensive U.N. peacekeeping operations that have been in place for years, sometimes decades. Opposition from China and Russia prevents the U.N. from acting substantively to arrest the chaos in Haiti. A humanitarian disaster far worse than Gaza is happening in Sudan, yet it receives far less attention.
The World Health Organization proved close to useless in the face of a pandemic, the very challenge it was built to solve. The International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have been misused to advance political campaigns against Israel. Internal accountability has broken down, with whistleblowers targeted for retribution before abusers, whether in peacekeeping operations or U.N. bureaucracies.
The U.N. seeks to be a forum for resolving global problems through consensus, but its efforts on sustainable development, climate change, human rights, artificial intelligence, and other matters do less to resolve these matters than to echo lowest common denominator positions — and, always, demand more money — with little prospect of actually shaping these matters constructively or meaningfully.
And then there’s the U.N.’s obsession with Israel.
In the nearly two years since the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, too much of the U.N. system has revealed itself to be irremediably antisemitic, hostile not simply towards the Jewish state, but towards the Zionists that represent the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews. Incontrovertible evidence makes clear that the international humanitarian system was not only taken advantage of by Hamas, it has been complicit. Documents reveal that the World Food Program, International Committee of the Red Cross, and NGOs were aware of Hamas’s militarization of Gaza’s medical facilities and failed to report these violations of their neutrality and then, later, condemned Israeli military actions targeting these facilities.
The U.N. also unreservedly backs the recent assertions of famine in Gaza, ignoring evidence that the Famine Review Committee lowered thresholds for famine, used unrepresentative sampling, excluded data from Israel, and applied other distortions in order to reach the predetermined conclusion that famine was occurring. This, of course, is on top of voluminous evidence of anti-Israel bias in the Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly.
In sum, across the board, it is highly questionable whether the output of the U.N. is worth the investment of time, funding, and support.
United Nations partisans will argue that there is no replicating the organization. Often, they will contend that “global problems need global solutions” or point fingers at member states, warning that things might be worse without the U.N. Such defenses have elements of truth, but none justify complacency with a continued status quo.
This point is underscored by the parts of the U.N. that do perform well, such as the Universal Postal Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the International Telecommunication Union. The common denominator? Narrow, defined missions with clear purposes.
There is a desperate need for reform across the U.N. system to refocus the organization on its core tasks, enhance accountability, prioritize outcomes, and eliminate unnecessary activities and duplication. But there are a few prospects for these kinds of reforms. Accordingly, the proper approach for the United States to the United Nations in the 21st century is à la carte.
There is no reason for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to exist, and certainly no reason for the United States to fund it. Organizations like the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, that perpetuate the problem and foment Palestinian extremism, do not merit U.S. funding; they need to end. There is no need for the majority of peacekeeping operations to exist and the others need thorough review to make sure they are focused on achievable mandates.
A fundamental reassessment of the United Nations has been long in coming. President Trump launched the initiative with his executive order calling for a review of all international intergovernmental organizations and treaties to which the United States is a party to determine which are in the U.S. interest.
This is long overdue. For decades, too many elements of the United Nations have failed to reflect either U.S. interests or values. The time has come for the United States to pay for that portion of it that still works — and abandon what remains.