Quiz question: What country surpasses Haiti, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo as a deadbeat and rogue nation?
Answer: In the halls of the United Nations, it’s the good old U.S.A.
The Trump administration is delinquent in U.N. dues, while 141 countries — including those mentioned above — are fully paid up. And while other countries at least pretend to advance peace in the spirit of the United Nations, President Trump used his U.N. speech to threaten to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into hell.” It was a rare instance of a world leader taking to the U.N. podium to muse about whether to commit what sounds like genocide.
All this underscores a tragedy of our era: Some 130 armed conflicts are underway around the globe, more than double the number in 2009, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a growing share of the challenges afflicting us are international and require multilateral solutions, yet the major powers are marginalizing the United Nations and rendering it even less effective than usual.
Fuel prices are surging. Trump’s Iran war has spread to Yemen and the Red Sea. Russia is engaging in so-called gray-zone attacks in Europe. There is a risk of war with China over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Drugs, epidemics, artificial intelligence, computer hacking, terrorism, human trafficking, climate change, the toll of war in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza, looming famine in Somalia — all these challenges demand cooperative responses, and the United Nations is an obvious forum to develop them.
Yet for many of these problems, the United Nations is becoming almost irrelevant.
Trump last year derided the United Nations as full of “empty words,” and he had a point. The United Nations is a timid Tower of Babel that is more effective at issuing paper than at solving conflicts; hell is a U.N. meeting.
Many times over the years I’ve wanted to beat my head against the wall in frustration with U.N. bureaucracy. In 2009, when I was covering the Darfur genocide with George Clooney, the U.N. pulled our security escort, for fear of being associated with any criticism that Clooney might make of Sudan for committing genocide. When Bosnians, Rwandans and Yazidis were slaughtered, the United Nations dithered.
“The cost is measured in lives,” said Nadia Murad, a Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Yazidi region in Iraq was surrounded by ISIS fighters in 2014 for nearly two weeks. “No one came to help us,” she told me, and she ended up kidnapped by ISIS and was raped for months. Her mother and six brothers were murdered.
Yet if the United Nations is periodically paralyzed, it’s also vital and sometimes a godsend.
“I have also seen U.N. staff remain in places after everyone else has left, doing work no one else is willing to do,” Murad said. “That work is indispensable. That is precisely why the U.N. must do it better.”
Critics can denounce United Nations workers as “fatally arrogant parasites,” as President Javier Milei of Argentina put it a few days ago, but I’ve been held at gunpoint alongside courageous U.N. humanitarians in the Central African Republic who were trying to bring assistance to a desperate area after other aid workers had fled. I’ve seen frontline U.N. workers living out of cargo containers in Somalia, sleeping in tents in South Sudan, driving down perilous roads in Congo and standing up to gunmen in Yemen — risking their lives to save children from war, rape and disease.
One of the heroes of the 20th century was James P. Grant, who led UNICEF and in 1982 engineered the child survival revolution. He and his team employed vaccines and better treatment of diarrhea to save 25 million lives in his lifetime, and countless millions since.
When have critics of the United Nations done anything half so noble?
When have critics of the United Nations put their lives on the line for others, like the 136 U.N. employees who died in the line of duty last year? Or like the 73 U.N. staff members currently held prisoner by the Houthis in Yemen?
Today in the Democratic Republic of Congo, United Nations workers are combating the Ebola outbreak. In Somalia, they are feeding starving children. In Gaza, they are distributing aid. If the United States was distinguished during the Gaza war by providing 2,000-pound bombs that Israel used to destroy neighborhoods, the United Nations stood out for trying to achieve peace and get aid through Israeli checkpoints.
What’s the opposite of United Nations multilateralism? It’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s Trump’s attack on Iran. It’s Elon Musk “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” as he put it, by one count costing more than 750,000 lives. So for all my impatience with plodding U.N. bureaucracy, I’ll take the United Nations any day over great-power jingoism and caprice.
At stake is not just the U.N. itself but the broader global architecture. Trump’s swipes at NATO are a gift to Russia. His assault on the International Criminal Court is a gift to warlords. His withdrawal from the World Health Organization is a gift to viruses.
Sure, bash the United Nations; it often deserves it. But my guess is that millions more children would die every year if it weren’t for UNICEF, the World Food Program, the U.N. Refugee Agency and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. On balance, that seems a defensible record, no?
Understand also that the U.N. is a crumbling pillar of what is left of this geopolitical global order that the United States helped create after World War II and that has so benefited us and the world. And note that one reason for the infuriating U.N. paralysis and timorousness is that great powers throw their weight around, often vetoing constructive action and, in the case of the United States, slashing budgets as well.
I fear that the paralysis may get worse.
The United Nations is supposed to choose a new secretary general this year, and this is a moment when the world needs a charismatic, outspoken leader who could use the bully pulpit and tackle the globe’s security and humanitarian crises. Sadly, that seems exactly what the United States, China and Russia are determined to avoid.
There is growing concern that Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin may be unable to agree on any of the current candidates for secretary general, and that they will settle on some innocuous dark horse nonentity so mild and inoffensive that the United Nations will be further marginalized and weakened.
The result would very likely be more Ebola outbreaks, more war, more paralysis in confronting the common threats to humanity — and more darkness descending on our planet.
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