The US is dooming the UN

The Star

12 hours ago

SAY you are president of the United States and you've been clear that you put America First and that you disdain 'globalists' and all their organs of international multilateralism, chief among them the United Nations. How do you go about discrediting those institutions?
One option is to withdraw the US formally. For example, Donald Trump began his second term by announcing that he'll pull the country out of parts of the UN system, including its Human Rights Council, the World Health Organisation and the Paris Agreement on climate change. That just about hobbles these conventions, since fighting, say, pandemics or global warming without American participation seems futile.
But the attack doesn't need to be so blunt. You could also nominally remain a member of an institution while ignoring, undermining or sabotaging it. The US still belongs to the World Trade Organisation, for example, even though Trump has inverted its foundational idea by launching a trade war on the world. America also remains, for now, the backbone of Nato, although Trump has undermined its credibility by casting doubt on the US commitment to Article 5, the alliance's mutual-defence clause and thus its reason for being.
Something similar is happening at the UN. In 2015 all its members, including the US, adopted an updated mission statement in the form of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These were meant to be answers to humanity's biggest problems, from ending hunger and poverty to improving health and education and reducing inequality. Even though progress on most of these efforts is running behind schedule, it's hard to fault the intention.
And yet the US now does. In March, it formally rejected the SDGs. It was a bizarre spectacle. The task fell to a mid-level diplomat named Edward Heartney, and the occasion was a vote in the General Assembly to adopt an 'International Day of Peaceful Coexistence'. An anodyne ritual, you might think, but you'd be wrong.
Heartney got up and delivered a philippic against the 'soft global governance that is inconsistent with US sovereignty'. Such 'globalist endeavours... lost at the ballot box', Heartney went on – referring to the US election in 2024 – which is why America 'rejects and denounces' the SDGs.
The audience, more used to hearing such outbursts from rogue states, was stunned. Mark Leon Goldberg, a veteran UN watcher, told me that even Heartney, a career foreign service officer, looked as though he had a gun to his head and was recording a hostage video.
And yet, the speech set the tone for what was to come. The US now regularly gums up every proceeding it can. In June, it cast the only no vote (compared with 169 in favour) against a Mongolian resolution to introduce a World Horse Day. Why? To protest against those SDGs, of course, and everything that 'impinges upon state sovereignty as a soft form of global governance'.
America's opposition to the SDGs is more than symbolic. This past week, almost all member states are gathering in France for the UN Ocean Conference to make progress on SDG No 14, on saving the world's oceans and seas (which are in at least as much trouble as our atmosphere). The Trump administration is boycotting that meeting. Instead, Trump recently ordered a push to mine international seabeds for minerals, one of the things the conference is most urgently trying to regulate.
He and the Republican Congress are also planning to defund the UN system and other international organisations. Since the US has been the largest contributor to UN coffers since the organisation's founding in 1945 (its share of the regular budget was 22 % in 2024), the cutbacks will force the UN to shrink or close programmes (even if it becomes more efficient, as it should).
Reform of the UN's Security Council – an aspiration of the Biden administration – is also off the table.
The US, like Russia and China, instead exacerbates its dysfunction: In June, 14 of the council's 15 members voted for a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza; the US vetoed it.
Goldberg hopes that the nomination of Michael Waltz as the US ambassador to the UN might provide some relief: Waltz was Trump's national security adviser until May and with his high profile might be 'able to explain the value the UN gives to American security interests'. I doubt it. Waltz's move to the UN was meant as a demotion. If anything, it confirms that Trump views the institution as a dead end.
Cumulatively, this trend away from multilateralism, which Trump didn't start but is turbo-boosting, is already changing the world, and for the worse. 'There hasn't been a binding international agreement on any matter – any transnational issue of importance' for years, laments Shivshankar Menon, a former national security adviser of India; 'we're a world adrift'.
The historical echoes are ominous. The UN's forerunner was the League of Nations. Conceived by leaders such as then US President Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, it was meant to prevent a second. But Wilson's own country then failed to ratify the treaty after Republicans in the Senate turned isolationist.
Without American support, the League was powerless to stop the aggression of fascist Italy, Japan and Germany, and gradually became irrelevant as the world went up in flames. Even so, it was formally dissolved only in 1946, when the new UN – finally backed by the US – took its place.
Say you're that American president again and, like Trump, you want to be remembered as a 'peacemaker'. Wouldn't you start by broadening your understanding of the UN's reason for existing, and of the bleak scenarios if the UN went the way of the League?
If Waltz wants to redeem his career and legacy – a long shot – he should muster the courage to educate the White House that the United Nations isn't America's enemy, but potentially its best friend, if not its last best hope. — Bloomberg Opinion/TNS
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.