I am in New York this week for the U.N. General Assembly. At various events over the last few days, I’ve already had the opportunity to chat with former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak; Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares; and Trump’s designee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, Jacob Helberg, among many others.
Of course, a main topic of discussion was U.S. President Donald Trump’s nearly hourlong U.N. speech on Tuesday morning. Some media outlets have tried to fact-check the speech, but this misses the point. Whether or not climate activists want to “kill all the cows,” for example, was not central to Trump’s message.
The serious argument that resonated most with me was Trump’s claim that the United Nations is not living up to its founding purpose to resolve global conflicts. It may have been impolitic to deliver that message directly to the UNGA, but that does not make it untrue.
After all, if world leaders were creating global institutions from scratch today, they would never land on the U.N. as currently structured. The U.N. Security Council (UNSC), the primary body responsible for global peace and security, is an artifact of the 1940s. Then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned the four wartime allies—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China—serving as the world’s four police officers. France was later added to make up the five veto-wielding members of the UNSC.
After all, these countries had just worked together to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan; maybe they could work together to solve other threats to global peace.
But it was not to be. The Cold War pitted Washington and Moscow on opposite sides of a half-century ideological struggle, meaning that Moscow vetoed nearly everything Washington wanted to do.
As a result, the UNSC has arguably executed on its founding mission only two times in its history, at the dawn and dusk of the Cold War.
When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Moscow boycotted the UNSC, allowing the West to pass a UNSC Resolution (UNSCR) authorizing military force to defend Seoul and restore its territorial integrity. Moscow learned the lesson that it is better to obstruct the U.N. than to ignore it.
The U.N. worked again in 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing and U.S. President George H.W. Bush envisioned “a new world order.” Iraqi President Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait, and the U.N. authorized an international coalition to expel the invaders.
But when counting up UNSC successes, that is about it. The list of conflicts the UNSC was unable to address is much longer. The most egregious recent failure was when Russia chaired a UNSC meeting on the situation in Ukraine while Russian forces were simultaneously initiating a full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.
With a new Cold War emerging that again pits the permanent members of the UNSC against one another, it is unlikely the UNSC will agree on anything meaningful anytime soon.
The U.N.’s special agencies used to do good work even if the UNSC was gridlocked, but that is becoming less and less true. Instead, these bodies are simply becoming other arenas in which great-power rivalry plays out. Autocratic great powers are using their influence in these bodies to turn them against their intended purposes. China used its influence in the World Health Organization, for example, to prevent an effective investigation into COVID-19’s origins, making a future outbreak more likely. And the U.N. Human Rights Council often includes a literal rogue’s gallery of regimes that work to ensure the body does not condemn their own abhorrent human rights practices. It is this dysfunction that led the Trump administration to cut its funding and withdraw from both bodies earlier this year.
Thankfully, the Cold War ended peacefully. But one downside was that there was insufficient tumult to wash away the U.N., in the same way the League of Nations was washed away by World War II. As a result, we are stuck in 2025 with an international order tailored for the 1940s.
Even at its best, the UNSC’s successes hinged on American power. It was ultimately the U.S. military that restored the sovereignty of South Korea and Kuwait.
Now, with the U.N. hamstrung, American power will be even more essential to solving current international security crises.
Trump had a point, therefore, when he argued in his speech that he has been more effective than the U.N. in addressing recent challenges. Thank goodness Washington did not wait for a UNSCR before it executed Operation Midnight Hammer in June of this year to keep Tehran from the bomb.
Perhaps the biggest unresolved global conflict in the world today, however, is the war in Ukraine. Trump made news Tuesday when he said that NATO should shoot down Russian jets that enter its airspace and that Ukraine could potentially take back all of its territory.
The latter statement, in particular, is characteristic of Trump’s negotiating style. Usually, when he wants 10, he demands a million. If he would settle for a cease-fire along the current lines in Ukraine, then why not start by demanding that Russian President Vladimir Putin give back all the territory?
For some time, it has been clear that the world will need to put more pressure on Putin to get him to negotiate in good faith. Trump has inched in this direction in recent months, agreeing to provide weapons to Ukraine—paid for by Europe—and placing secondary tariffs on India for buying Russian energy. There is much more the West can and should do, however, to pressure Putin, including signing congressional legislation to place “bone-crushing sanctions” on Moscow and seizing Russian frozen assets.
The world will wait to see whether Trump’s statements at the U.N. represent a shift in America’s strategy for the war in Ukraine. Will the West, led by Trump, finally put in place the real pressure that will force Putin to the table to stop the killing in Ukraine?
Let us hope so.
We all know that if Washington does not act, the United Nations is not going to swoop in and save us.
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