When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January and began to pull the United States out of United Nations agreements such as the Paris climate pact, some senior U.N. officials predicted that he might quit the U.N. altogether. Eight months later, Trump is set to speak to the General Assembly for the first time since 2020. While it is unlikely that he will announce that he is ripping up the U.N. Charter, diplomats and international officials expect him to continue limiting diplomatic and financial support to the world organization. Nobody is sure how the U.N. will evolve if the United States keeps it arm’s length.
While Washington has frequently had a troubled relationship with the U.N., it has always acted as the organization’s political and financial underwriter. U.S. leadership has been central to many of the U.N.’s flagship successes, from putting together the coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 to negotiating the 2015 Paris climate agreement. By contrast, the U.N.’s most difficult periods have often involved friction with Washington, as in the disputes with the George W. Bush administration over the 2003 Iraq War.
But these periods of tensions have tended to end with the U.N. and the United States making up. Two years after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein, Bush joined other leaders in New York at the 2005 World Summit, a meeting at which leaders signed off on significant institutional reforms such as the creation of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. This time around, reconciliation appears very far off.
The United States is already often acting as a semi-detached member of the institution. U.S. officials have boycotted a series of U.N. meetings on topics ranging from climate change to development financing. Diplomats from other countries talk about the “international community minus one” dealing with global problems in future.
Some think that this may actually make bargaining easier in some cases. Negotiators pushed ahead with an agreement on pandemic preparedness in May despite Washington quitting the process. By contrast, when U.S. representatives do turn up at a multilateral gathering, it can be a bad sign. Washington sent a team to a recent U.N. summit on a treaty on managing plastic pollution, and quickly started picking holes in the draft agreement.
If other states do not miss U.S. diplomatic interference, they definitely do lament a lack of U.S. funding for U.N. activities. After Washington shut off funding for most humanitarian activities, U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher warned this month that U.N. agencies have only managed to raise 19 percent of the $29 billion that they need to assist more than 100 million people this year. The United States has also failed to make its obligatory payments to the U.N.’s regular and peacekeeping budgets this year.
U.N. officials worry that—rather than exit the organization altogether—the U.S. strategy is now to stay inside the organization but only pay a minimal part, at best, of its financial obligations. Under U.N. rules, Washington could lose its vote in the General Assembly if it falls too far into arrears (as nearly happened in the 1990s). But its vote in the Security Council would not be affected, allowing it to block resolutions that it dislikes, such as condemnations of Israel.
If other powers see the United States retaining its privileges without paying its dues, pessimistic international officials warn, then they may follow suit. China, which is now meant to cover 20 percent of the organization’s core costs—compared to 22 percent for the United States—has already made a point of delaying its annual payments.
If the United States remains in the United Nations as a nonpaying spoiler, then it is not clear who could replace it as a de facto leader in the organization. In 2017 and 2018, when the first Trump administration began to take a series of swipes at the U.N., European countries including France and Germany positioned themselves as champions of multilateralism. This time around, European officials have made it very clear to the U.N. interlocutors that they lack the funds to fill the gaps that the United States creates.
China, which some diplomats had thought would seize the opportunity to gain more influence at the U.N., has also moved cautiously. Chinese diplomats say that they want to see Beijing fill more senior international posts in line with its growing financial obligations. But they are yet to pledge significant tranches of money to compensate for U.S. cuts across most parts of the U.N. system.
Middle powers and smaller nations may try to fill the leadership gap on a case-by-case basis. Brazil, which will preside of this year’s annual U.N. climate meeting in November, has proposed setting up a new council to coordinate efforts to address global warming. Brazilian officials have also been talking up the possibility of triggering a special review conference on the U.N. Charter (known as an “Article 109” conference, after the relevant charter provision) to talk about matters such as overhauling the Security Council. Mexico and Norway have put together a pioneer group of countries to talk about pragmatic U.N. reforms and the selection of the body’s next secretary-general.
One former senior U.N. official mused at a dinner in New York this spring, as Trump continue to roll out anti-UN. Policies, that we may see a shift from a “unipolar multilateralism” (where the United States could call all the shots) to a more “multipolar multilateralism,” in which a wider range of countries bargains over the future terms of cooperation.
It is possible that, if the United States sees other countries becoming more ambitious around the U.N., Washington will step in to assert control. U.S. officials have told representatives of some other major powers that, while former President Joe Biden was open to Security Council reform, the Trump administration wants to keep the forum just as it is. The administration has also demonstrated that, while it may not invest directly in the U.N., it still has ways to exert influence across the organization—most capitals are more concerned by U.S. tariff threats than finessing U.N. reform.
Of course, the U.S.-U.N. rift could also widen further, even to the point where Washington would seriously threaten to quit. A second retired U.N. official recently sketched out a scenario to me in which Israel—tired of facing constant criticism from U.N. forums and officials—could walk away from the organization and then lobby for the United States to do the same. It is also possible that supporters of the Palestinians could push to expel Israel, creating a similar outcome.
A third U.N. veteran who spoke with me joked that it is important not to let Trump read the original agreement between the United States and United Nations on housing U.N. headquarters in New York City, which states that the property will “be assigned and conveyed to the United States” if the U.N. moves elsewhere. That might sound all too tempting for a property tycoon who built a tower right beside the U.N.
If the United States ever were to abrogate the U.N. Charter—which does not contain an exit mechanism similar to that which guided the U.K. Brexit negotiations with the European Union—then it would certainly create opportunities for U.S. rivals. The Security Council would most likely approve Palestine as a U.N. member state as soon as the last U.S. diplomat walked out of the chamber. The United States would also face criticism on other fronts: While the first Trump administration was boycotting the Human Rights Council in 2020, African countries presented a resolution in Geneva criticizing structural racism in the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Nonetheless, even U.S. foes would see the country’s exit from the U.N. as a diplomatic calamity and a devastating blow to the global order. Russia has always valued the U.N. Security Council as the one space where it can engage with the United States on equal terms. With Washington gone, Moscow’s own permanent seat—and capacity to veto U.S.-backed resolutions on Ukraine or Iran—would suddenly be a lot less special. China would find itself on the hook for an even larger share of the U.N.’s costs. The Europeans would be the prime target for demands from the global south for more development aid. And while diplomats can see the “international community minus one” formula working for issues such as the pandemics agreement, they acknowledge that it is less likely to work on peace and security matters.
A U.S. exit would also create a precedent for other nations to reject U.N. membership, although it is unlikely that many would do so straight away. Only one state—Indonesia—has previously left the U.N. altogether, and it was readmitted after less than two years without a fuss. Membership has been synonymous with statehood in the post-1945 order. But if the United States went, then others would feel less compunction about doing so down the road. The U.N. could end up in a similar situation to the League of Nations, which states regularly quit when they felt that it was not serving their interests.
For the time being, the idea of the United States entirely leaving the United Nations remains—hopefully—a bad dream. The Trump administration may not like the U.N. much, but it does still find it useful now and again, in an instrumental fashion. While Trump gets ready for New York, Security Council diplomats are debating a U.S. proposal for the U.N. to mandate an enlarged international security force to battle gangs in Haiti.
Most likely, the United States will remain detached from a lot of the U.N.’s work but still turn to the Security Council or other bodies on a case-by-case basis. Other states will have to get used to leading on policy areas that Washington ignores. They may find living with the Trump administration at the U.N. to be a difficult business, but living without it would be a whole lot worse.
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