In 2019, when the 15 ambassadors on the United Nations Security Council traveled to Washington for lunch with U.S. President Donald Trump, they thought they’d meet the unpredictable, unfiltered, and vocal critic of multilateralism they’d seen on TV. Instead, the ambassadors encountered a different version of the billionaire-turned-politician.
Trump and his then-U.N. ambassador, Kelly Craft, began with a statement on the need to reform NATO and be tougher on Iran. But once the meeting moved to a private setting, the tone shifted. Trump allowed each ambassador to speak, and he listened attentively. Several diplomats who spoke to Foreign Policy said Trump was calm, engaged, and appeared genuinely interested in what they had to say.
In 2019, when the 15 ambassadors on the United Nations Security Council traveled to Washington for lunch with U.S. President Donald Trump, they thought they’d meet the unpredictable, unfiltered, and vocal critic of multilateralism they’d seen on TV. Instead, the ambassadors encountered a different version of the billionaire-turned-politician.
Trump and his then-U.N. ambassador, Kelly Craft, began with a statement on the need to reform NATO and be tougher on Iran. But once the meeting moved to a private setting, the tone shifted. Trump allowed each ambassador to speak, and he listened attentively. Several diplomats who spoke to Foreign Policy said Trump was calm, engaged, and appeared genuinely interested in what they had to say.
“I found it surprising for a president who was not known for his sympathy for the United Nations to invite the members of the Security Council to the White House, and he and his staff did it with a lot of hospitality,” Christoph Heusgen, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and Germany’s ambassador to the U.N. at the time, said. Heusgen added that he was surprised by how much time Trump dedicated to the ambassadors, who usually do not get that much face-to-face time with presidents.
With a second Trump term looming, concerns are rising over the future of the U.N. and multilateralism. While Trump didn’t say much about the U.N. during his election campaign, the organization has been bracing for drastic budget cuts and an antagonistic administration. However, some hope that Trump’s previous interactions with the U.N. suggest he may not be as hostile to the organization as he seems in public.
“For ambassadors, he gave us a lot of time,” Heusgen said. “You don’t do that if you say the U.N. is worthless.”
Craft embodied the friendly but inexperienced face of the Trump administration for many in the international community. In 2021, she invited U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to her home state for the Kentucky Derby.
“It is worth saying that Trump and Guterres had a surprisingly good relationship,” Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s U.N. director, said. “Guterres worked very hard in 2017 and 2018 to build up some personal connection with Trump, and he succeeded, which, if you think about it, is pretty bizarre because Guterres is a lifelong socialist and a devout Christian, and Mr. Trump is definitely not a socialist, and he’s a very odd sort of Christian. Yet, somehow, they hit it off.”
Many high-level U.N. officials even said that the Trump administration was easier for the U.N. to access than President Joe Biden’s, especially after the relationship between Washington and the U.N. deteriorated following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the war in Gaza.
“Biden did not even extend the courtesy of an official White House visit to the secretary-general when even Trump did so during his first term,” Eugene Chen, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, said. Still, a spokesperson for the U.N. chief said that Trump and Guterres haven’t spoken since the November election.
The diplomatic landscape has also changed since 2020, and Israel’s war in Gaza may have worsened Trump’s view of the U.N. With two years left in Guterres’s term, Gowan believes that getting along with Trump may not be the secretary-general’s top priority either.
Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice for U.N. ambassador in his second term, constantly evinces her dismay at what she sees as an anti-Israel bias at the U.N. However, diplomats told FP that they believe she is somebody they can work with despite her limited foreign-policy experience. “The sense is that it could have been much worse,” said a European diplomat.
Many U.N. diplomats and officials hope to bank on their previous relationship with Trump to staunch the bleeding. But others point to the unpredictable nature of Trump’s first term and that he now has many new faces surrounding him. If some U.N. agencies think they know what to expect, others hope for the best but plan for the worst.
“The overriding mood is one of resignation,” Gowan said. “There’s not a sense of outright panic or the confusion that was everywhere in 2016. Now, there is a sense that we have seen this show before, and it will be tough, but things are so dire already that we may just as well head into the storm.”
Policy-wise, U.N. agencies like the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) have little hope of getting a single dollar from the United States in 2025.
As with many other multilateral organizations, Trump’s grudge against the U.N. appears to be the perceived disproportionate amount of money Washington pays to it, making up about a quarter of the organization’s budget. Consequently, the U.N.’s main concern is financial.
Unlike in 2016, the U.N. has known for a while that a Trump return was possible and has been planning in case of another U.S. disengagement from the organization. But the organization has said its financial situation remains dire.
“Over the last few years, the secretary-general, I think, has been very frugal in managing the money because we’ve been over the last few years, living in a liquidity crisis which has forced us to be very responsible with how money is spent,” Stéphane Dujarric, Guterres’s spokesperson, said on Nov. 6. During Trump’s first term, diplomats recalled that Washington paid less money but still paid on time, while it is currently the opposite for the Biden administration—leading to a dire cash flow problem at the U.N.
UNFPA has been regularly defunded by Republican administrations due to a Reagan-era doctrine. A spokesperson said the agency expects the U.S. contribution to the organization to go from $200 million in 2024 to zero in 2025.
“I think, for us, it’s always devastating because it’s like a light-switch moment,” Sarah Craven, director of UNFPA’s Washington office, said. “It’s definitely the funding, but it’s also the collaboration at the technical and political level.”
Other likely U.S. disengagements include the Paris Agreement and the Global Compact for Migration; UNESCO, which is the cultural, educational, and scientific branch of the U.N.; and the Human Rights Council.
Some high-level Biden-approved appointees at the U.N. could be put under pressure in 2025, including World Food Program chief Cindy McCain and U.N. Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) Catherine Russell. When asked if she intended to stay, Russell, a former member of the Biden-Harris transition team, said, “Yes, as far as I know.” Trump is expected to push for his own candidates for these top jobs, like most new U.S. administrations do.
Amy Pope, another Biden official who has led the International Organization for Migration since 2023, congratulated Trump on his victory. She doesn’t have to run for reelection until 2028.
Other countries stepped in to make up for the financial gap during Trump’s first term, but many say COVID-19-era debts and higher military spending due to Russia’s war in Ukraine make it less likely this time around. “We’re looking at all of our U.S. funding very carefully and trying to ensure that we don’t have to cut services or shut short programs,” Klaus Simoni Pedersen, UNFPA’s chief of public funding and financing, said. But, Pedersen added, the branch is cognizant of the “tight financial picture for member states.”
During Trump’s first term, China filled the void left by the United States and the number of Chinese officials leading U.N. agencies rose to four out of 15. As such, some hope the Trump administration may try to strike a careful balance between frugal finance and global influence.
“Elise Stefanik and [Secretary of State-nominee] Marco Rubio have historically been more of China hawks,” Chen said. “It’ll be interesting to see whether this China hawkishness diminishes a little bit over the course of Trump’s term and whether that may then lead the United States to reconsider some of these provisions that are in place, to continue funding UNESCO, for example, to counter the China threat.” In other words, many hope Trump will simply ask for more influence in return for his U.N. payments to avoid China stepping into the vacuum like before.
While many of the Trump administration’s potential cuts and hostilities about the U.N. are speculative and diplomats’ perception of Trump’s appreciation of the U.N. may be wishful thinking, the consequences could become very real, very soon, UNFPA warned.
If support “falls away, well, you will see more unintended pregnancies, more unsafe abortions or, and also, clearly, more women who will be subjected to gender-based violence,” Pedersen said.
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