Can the UN save itself from irrelevance?

As the UN turns 80, MAP CEO Nader Mousavizadeh discusses the three defining crises at the heart of the organisation’s current challenges.

Article by the Financial Times

Since the UN was founded in October 1945 amid a burst of idealism in the aftermath of the second world war, its cannier leaders have understood that their principal power stemmed from the pulpit: they can publicly shame and scold the member states.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the flamboyant second secretary-general, who died in a mysterious plane crash in 1961 while mediating in the Congo, was the most artful exponent of this approach. When he spoke, the world listened. It was he who uttered the words that on the UN’s better days still enshrine its mission. “The UN was created not to lead mankind to heaven,” he said. “But to save humanity from hell.”

The current secretary-general, the more cautious António Guterres, likes on occasion to maintain that tradition of speaking out. Last week he summoned a press conference at the UN headquarters and lacerated Israel over its offensive in the Gaza Strip. His language was stark and stripped of trademark UN diplomatese.

“We are seeing massive killing of civilians . . . And we are seeing dramatic obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid,” he said. “The truth is that this is something that is morally, politically and legally intolerable.”

The world, however, seems no longer to be listening. The wars raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan have underlined an impression that the order enshrined in the UN charter is in tatters, current and former UN officials concede. The UN often appears a mere spectator to a world where increasingly might is right.

“Guterres does say quite bold things. But he is now dismissed as on the sidelines and not a player,” says Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, a former head of the UN Development Programme who was also deputy secretary-general under Kofi Annan in 2006. “The briefing room in Kofi’s day brimmed with journalists. Now it’s more mausoleum than press room.”

For UN officials, criticism is nothing new. American conservatives have long seen the UN as a brake on US power and accused it of being too partial to the views of the global south and progressive causes. Developing countries have in turn accused it of being at times biased in favour of the west. As the UN has expanded — it has over 40,000 mandates, according to its own figures — it has also gained a reputation in the field as a bureaucratic behemoth ill-equipped for a fast-paced world.

But as world leaders meet in New York this week for the annual UN General Assembly, there is a sense that on its 80th anniversary the UN is facing its most intense pressure yet over its purpose. Even the pope has joined in the critiques. Earlier this month, in his first interview since his election as head of the Catholic Church in May, he said “it seems to be generally recognised” the UN has lost its ability “to bring people together”.

At the heart of the crisis is the deadlock in the Security Council, the body charged by the UN charter with overseeing international peace and security. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered the idea of the inviolability of national borders and led to paralysis at the Security Council, where it — along with the US, China, Britain and France — has veto-wielding status. And now Donald Trump’s combatively unilateralist US administration is, in different ways, flouting and undermining the world body’s founding prescriptions and values.

“The UN at 80 is facing two crises at once, within and without,” says Nader Mousavizadeh, a senior UN aide to Annan in the late 1990s. “The crisis within stems from 20 years of decaying authority, decaying capability and decaying impact, particularly among those it is most needed for, the poorest, and people in conflict zones.

“The crisis without stems from a return to great power conflict and competition, and a paralysis in the Security Council not seen in 50 years,” he says. “And this is at a time when a founding member, the most important power in the world, America, acts in every way as if the UN is an irrelevance, except when it considers it an active obstacle.”

Externally the UN faces a third challenge, he adds, posed by emerging would-be competitor groupings — driven by the powerhouses of the global south as well as traditional supporters in Europe, with Canada, whose frustration with an unreformed UN is leading them to plan new partnerships for development and global health. “For the UN, this triple crisis is existential,” says Mousavizadeh, now chief executive of Macro Advisory Partners.

Against this dire backdrop for its 80th birthday, the UN secretariat is unveiling the UN80 programme for reform. The proposals include consolidating some of the UN’s scores of entities and programmes, and swingeing cuts to budgets.

Allies of the UN talk bullishly of the crisis as an opportunity for much-needed changes. They hope this will pave the way for a slimmer, more streamlined organisation which is refocused on defending the core values of its founders.

But there is a gloomier scenario in the air: the lot of the League of Nations, the ill-fated post-first world war precursor of the UN, which drifted to the international sidelines as it failed to prevent the slide to the second world war.

Sigrid Kaag, a former deputy prime minister of the Netherlands who has had several roles at the UN, including as special co-ordinator of the Middle East peace process, does not mince her words. “The UN is at a point of irrelevance. That is its predicament. The dream might live on but no one looks at the news and says: ‘What happened in the UN?’

“Can it be rescued? Yes. But it’s a matter of will,” she says. “And it’s not about recreating the UN of the past; it requires a whole different structure — and a different approach.”

Any serious structural UN reform will have to gain the backing of the 193 member states, but the most important actor, as throughout the UN’s history, will be the US.

Not only did it shape the organisation in 1945, it has been its primary funder — even as it has chafed at and sometimes ignored its prescriptions. Trump’s address to the General Assembly on Tuesday comes at an especially fraught time in relations between the UN and its host.

“The US has had double standards throughout the UN’s existence,” says Malloch-Brown. “But it has continued to underwrite it and sought to describe its foreign policy as in accord with the UN’s principles even when that has been a stretch.” But now, he adds, not only is “the whole international rules order virtually gone” but Trump’s America First dealmaking approach has strained the relationship with the UN close to breaking point.

While former US President George W Bush was famously at odds with Annan over the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the two still spoke regularly during Bush’s two terms in the White House; Bush even hosted a farewell dinner for him.

“I’m not sure Trump ever speaks to Guterres, except when he goes to New York to give the speech,” says John Bolton, who served as Bush’s ambassador to the UN and was national security adviser in Trump’s first term before becoming an outspoken critic. Many in Trump’s administration and allies on Capitol Hill want to see the administration go much further to distance the US from the UN. 

So far this year, Republican lawmakers have introduced more than 20 pieces of legislation targeting the UN, and US participation in it. Proposed measures have ranged from prohibiting foreign aid to countries that vote with America “less than 50 per cent” of the time to bills that would mandate a complete US withdrawal from the UN and a closing of its headquarters.

And then there is Israel. This has long been one of the biggest bones of contention for Washington in its UN relationship. “Israel sees the UN as a hostile force, including the secretariat and a large number of the member states,” says William Grant, who served at the US mission to the UN during Barack Obama’s administration. “So the US role has often been to try to defend and fend off attacks against Israel.”

The global outcry over the civilian cost of Israel’s 23-month war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’s attack on October 7 2023, has accentuated the tension. “The Trump administration has taken that critique [of the UN] to a new level,” says Peter Rough, director of the Center on Europe and Eurasia at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank.

If the UN did not get its “act together”, Trump warned in February, “they’re going to end up losing their credibility like other organisations and then they’re going to be nothing”.

It is also almost dogma for Republican administrations to complain about the UN but make little effort to alter Washington’s relationship. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the UN, famously suggested the US would like to leave the UN but it was just “not worth the trouble”.

Bolton, a veteran UN critic, agrees. Better “to try and fix it” and to slim it down, he says, and eliminate agencies that have been “politicised” or go beyond the UN’s original purpose.

Trump and his team are at times willing to nod to the UN’s ideals. Trump said in February he still believed in the UN’s “tremendous potential”. But he also noted that “not everybody” in his administration agreed. Eugene Kontorovich, an international law expert at the Trump-aligned Heritage Foundation, predicts the administration will have no interest in working with the UN on reform.

It will “almost certainly” continue to withdraw from UN engagement and funding, viewing many of the UN’s functions — including aid — as actions that could be just as easily carried out by “another non-legacy, non-global institute”, says Kontorovich. That the US remains a member is, he adds, purely the product of “bureaucratic inertia”.

For the majority of the member states, the priority is to reform the Security Council where the group of five veto-wielding members reflects the architecture of 1945. India, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria and other rising powers all have claims on a seat at the UN high table.

But diplomats accept that for now it will stay as it is given there is no chance of agreeing on who to promote. Instead the focus is how to reform the UN’s agenda and operations, although inevitably the targets are hotly contested.

The major faultline is whether to focus on peace and security and cut back on humanitarian initiatives; or whether to hold fast to commitments to sustainable development and combating climate change and inequality, but just find ways of doing them more simply. 

Guy Ryder, the UN’s under-secretary-general for policy who is chair of the UN80 task force, says the secretariat is clear the UN has to remain focused on all three of its original pillars: peace and security, development and human rights. “There is no question of marginalising or jettisoning one in favour of the others,” he says.

The UN, he accepts, has become “an archipelago of entities” and “a very complicated system”. But he says Guterres “is determined in these rapidly changing times that the UN is taking an extremely cold look at how we can do better”.

All of this is happening as the UN faces an enforced double fiscal squeeze, leading to sweeping cuts in its staff and programmes. The two largest donors, the US and China, have in particular built up vast arrears in their contributions. Trump has also cut swaths of US funding for foreign aid, with other donors following suit.

Guterres has called for a 20 per cent reduction of staff in some agencies in 2026. The secretariat is slashing 15 per cent of its budget and almost 19 per cent of its staff in 2026. Aid groups warn this threatens large numbers of lives, though privately UN workers also say that many agencies are bloated and poorly run.

In this bleak context, old allies of the UN are racing to find ways of reviving it. Norway, a tireless advocate for the UN, is steering with Mexico a coalition of countries seeking consensus on how the UN can uphold its founding values while simplifying its mission.  

“We need to turn this financial crisis into an opportunity to consolidate, to reduce the number of programmes,” says Norway’s foreign minister Espen Barth Eide. “We have to show tough love. Sometimes a big reform is easier than a small reform.”

Diplomats from the global south insist the UN cannot reduce its commitment to development and tackling climate change. But some ex-UN officials and European allies of the UN argue implicitly that the US may be right in pushing for it to shed some humanitarian mandates.

“Other actors should take on more of the UN’s responsibilities,” says Kaag, the former Netherlands deputy premier who is now co-chair of the UN Foundation. “You can’t be in the game of thinking you will be around forever. The UN doesn’t have to do it all. It could be smaller and more selective. It can still establish global norms but it doesn’t have to be part of all the doing.”

Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs from 2021 to 2024, who has been fiercely outspoken about the human cost of the Israeli assault on Gaza, urges the UN to be bolder in its thinking. “UN80 is about finding efficiencies rather than reform,” he says. “Yes, you need to cope with cuts, but you need to do it with a vision of what the UN is supposed to be. We are not seeing that.”

“This isn’t a funding problem. It’s a relevance problem,” he says. “It’s about getting the right people out there in the world’s crises engaged in mediating and in activist diplomacy.”

At this desperate juncture, much hinges on next year’s choice of a new secretary-general. Guterres and his predecessor Ban Ki-moon have presided over two difficult decades of growing great power rivalry, but internal critics say they have been too risk averse.

The UN needs more of “an activist diplomat”, argues Kaag. “The UN can be so quiet at the moment you would not know it’s involved.” History, however, suggests the veto-wielding powers are unlikely to endorse an interventionist figure.

New York is alive with debate over how to rethink the UN. Malloch-Brown points to how China and the rising powers of the global south are looking to play more of a leadership role as the US disengages, and highlights an energy in the General Assembly as a counterpoint to the stymied Security Council. He can envision how a pruned and more focused UN could yet play a vital role in the world.

But he has no illusions about its current plight. “In many ways the UN is the walking dead,” he says. “It never quite falls over and yet it is still a corpse.”