Commentary: The US assault on the UN rests on a tragic misunderstanding

BERLIN: “Better together”. That’s the optimistic theme that Annalena Baerbock, the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, chose for this year’s global gathering, the 80th. United States President Donald Trump instead confirmed in his speech what I keep hearing from the cognoscenti here at UNGA: The likelier trajectory points toward “worse apart”.

As is his wont, Trump heaped contempt on the UN as on other countries and people he disdains. “The two things I got from the United Nations,” he sneered, are “a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” (Apparently, neither device worked to his satisfaction.) And while he, the peacemaker-in-chief, was allegedly out ending seven wars, “sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help”.

This is today the sound of America – the co-founder, host and eight-decade underwriter of the UN system – eating its children like Cronus. And the stony faces and occasionally audible gasps are those of the assembled world dreading the fate of what diplomats call the “international community minus one”. 

The US may or may not exit the UN as it once orphaned the League of Nations. But it’s bad enough that America has morphed from the system’s main benefactor into its spoiler.

Part of the tragedy is that this hostile US turn toward its own creation rests on a profound misunderstanding.

A FECKLESS, BLOATED BUREAUCRACY

Many American conservatives, and especially MAGA types, view the UN largely as Michael Waltz, Trump’s new ambassador to Turtle Bay, described it in his confirmation hearings: At best, as a feckless and bloated bureaucracy that burns through American tax dollars to churn out woke verbiage instead of keeping world peace. At worst, as an antisemitic and anti-American cesspool.

This UNGA provided fodder for these narratives. The controversy over Israel and Palestine is escalating, with some of America’s closest Western allies – including Britain, Canada, Australia and France – recognising Palestinian statehood, as more than 140 of the UN’s 193 members already do. 

This pits them against Israel and the Trump administration, which even revoked the visas of Palestinian leaders who had planned to attend. Beyond the Middle East, the UN and its Security Council seem to stand idly by as wars and atrocities torment the world from Sudan to Ukraine.

What threatens to tip these crises into an existential threat for the UN is the political and financial assault from Washington, historically the UN’s biggest funder. The US is responsible for providing 22 per cent of the UN’s regular budget, which it has yet to pay.

Instead, the Trump administration has already clawed back about US$1 billion and vows to keep cutting, in what amounts to the international analogue to its domestic DOGE-ing earlier this year. Notably, America has in effect defunded the UN’s humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.

Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from UN institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, UNESCO (the agency that looks after education, science and culture) and the Human Rights Council. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me that “there’s not one international organisation that he says anything good about. Not one. Whatever chance he can, he pulls us out.”

The administration’s selective boycott of the UN’s many wheelhouses goes further. Ten years ago, the UN adopted 17 so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – from ending hunger and poverty to educating girls in poor countries and giving people cleaner energy. As of this year, the US officially “rejects and denounces” these goals as lefty-woke-DEI bilge.

THE HYPOCRISY OF BLAMING THE UNITED NATIONS

In contrast to his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump also shows no interest in reforming the most dysfunctional part of the UN system, the Security Council. It still has the same five veto-wielding members as it did in 1945. And although France and Britain haven’t made use of their privilege since the end of the Cold War, the US, Russia and China nowadays wage war-by-veto, blocking all attempts to address conflicts and threats from the Middle East to Ukraine and the Korean peninsula. 

Just last week, the US vetoed a resolution, embraced by the 14 other members, that called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all hostages.

The council is widely considered unreformable because neither America nor Russia and China would ever contemplate giving up the veto privilege that gums up what could be an international peacekeeping organ. Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group, told me that Trump in fact likes this status quo because it “matches his worldview of a handful of great powers conducting the real business while little countries get out of the way”. 

The hypocrisy consists in then blaming the UN, rather than the great powers, for failing to maintain international order.

It suits the mighty to use the UN as their scapegoat, Anjali Dayal at Fordham University told me: “We call that laundering dirty politics. The UN is very good at laundering their dirty politics for them.” The UN’s apparent failure to pacify the Syrian civil war over the past decade is an example. The simple explanation was that Russia did not want the UN to act in Syria, Dayal says, but to much of the world it looked as though the UN was failing Syrians.

Americans are not the only ones who “get this the wrong way round,” Gowan told me. “The UN does not shape the world. The world shapes the UN.” 

When the Cold War was ending and something resembling harmony briefly reigned, the great powers on the Security Council often agreed, as in condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Later during the 1990s, American diplomats such as Strobe Talbott rhapsodised that “the United States defines its greatness not as an ability to dominate others but as an ability to work with others in the interest of the international community.”

WHAT DONALD TRUMP AND MAGA DON’T GET

Such breathless idealism sounds otherworldly today. But the American leaders who midwifed the UN as World War II was still raging were sombre realists, not utopians. In April of 1945, four months before he dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and with the old and failed League of Nations still on the books, Harry Truman exhorted delegates to the San Francisco Conference to create the UN to “provide sensible machinery” to settle disputes without “bombs and bayonets.”

This world-weary and worldly-wise pragmatism is reflected in the UN’s unofficial motto, a quote by an early secretary general that today graces the hallway through which delegates walk into the general assembly: “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”

This is what Trump, Waltz and MAGA don’t get. 

Truman would never have harangued the international community that America is First, or obstructed every effort to better the lot of humanity by asking what’s in it for the US, not in coming decades but during this news cycle. Truman understood what eludes Trump: that the alternative to cacophony is violence, and violence in the modern world can mean nuclear hell. 

That’s why every US president saw America’s interests as overlapping with those of the world and the UN. Until Trump.