Filenews 25 September 2025 - by Andreas Kluth
"Better together". This is the optimistic theme chosen by Annalena Baerbock, the new president of the United Nations General Assembly, for this year's 80th World Leaders' Meeting. U.S. President Donald Trump instead confirmed in his speech what I keep hearing from insiders here at the UN General Assembly: The most likely course points to the "worst country."
As usual, Trump sowed contempt at the UN, as well as at other countries and people he despises. "The two things I got from the United Nations," he quipped, are "a bad escalator and a bad autocue." (Apparently, neither of them worked the way he would have liked.) And while he, the chief peacemaker, reportedly ended seven wars, "unfortunately, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help."
This is the impression given today by America – co-founder, host and guarantor of the UN system for eight decades – eating its children like Saturn. And the stone faces and the occasional gasping are those of the gathered crowd who are terrified of the fate of what diplomats call the "international community minus one". The U.S. may or may not leave the UN, just as it once orphaned the League of Nations. But it's bad enough that America has gone from being the system's main benefactor to a mire of it.
This UN General Assembly gave food for such narratives. The dispute over Israel and Palestine is escalating, with some of America's closest Western allies – including Britain, Canada, Australia and France – recognising Palestinian statehood, as are already more than 140 of the 193 members of the UN. That pits them against Israel and the Trump administration, which even revoked the visas of Palestinian leaders who were scheduled to participate. Beyond the Middle East, the UN and its Security Council seem to be idly watching the wars and atrocities that torment the world from Sudan to Ukraine. Play Video
What threatens to turn these crises into an existential threat to the UN is the political and economic onslaught by Washington, historically the UN's largest donor. The US is responsible for providing 22% of the UN's regular budget, which it has not yet paid. Instead, the Trump administration has already taken back about $1 billion and promised to continue the cuts, in what amounts to the international analogue of domestic Doge-ing earlier this year. In particular, America has effectively defunded the UN's humanitarian and peacekeeping operations.
Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from UN institutions such as the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, UNESCO (the organization that takes care of education, science and culture) and the Human Rights Council. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told me that "there is not a single international organization that he says anything good about. Not a single one. With any opportunity he can, he takes us out."
The government's selective boycott of many UN bodies does not stop here. Ten years ago, the UN adopted 17 so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – from ending hunger and poverty to educating girls in poor countries and providing people with cleaner energy. As of this year, the U.S. officially "rejects and denounces" these targets as left-woke-DEI.
Unlike his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump also shows no interest in reforming the most dysfunctional part of the UN system, the Security Council. It still has the same five veto-wielding members as it did in 1945. And although France and Britain have not exercised their prerogative since the end of the Cold War, the US, Russia and China are currently waging a veto war, blocking any attempt to deal with conflicts and threats from the Middle East to Ukraine and the Korean peninsula. Just last week, the US vetoed a resolution, which was adopted by the other 14 members, and which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the release of all hostages.
The council is widely considered unreformable, because neither America nor Russia and China would ever think of giving up the veto privilege that prevents what could be an international peacekeeping instrument. Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, told me that Trump is actually satisfied with this status quo because it "fits his worldview, according to which a handful of great powers do the real business, while small countries step aside." The hypocrisy consists in then blaming the UN and not the great powers for the failure to maintain international order.
It suits the powerful to use the UN as a scapegoat, Anjaly Dayal of Fordham University told me: "We call this politics laundering. The UN is very good at whitewashing their dirty politics for them." The UN's apparent failure to bring peace to the civil war in Syria over the past decade is one example. The simple explanation was that Russia did not want the U.N. to act in Syria, Dayal says, but for much of the world, it seemed that the U.N. was letting the Syrians down.
Americans aren't the only ones who "don't get it right," Gowan told me. "The UN does not shape the world. The world shapes the UN." When the Cold War was ending and for a while there was something that seemed like harmony, the major powers in the Security Council often agreed, as in condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Later, during the 1990s, American diplomats such as Strobe Talbot rhapptized that "the United States defines its greatness not as the ability to dominate others, but as the ability to cooperate with others in the interest of the international community."
Such idealism sounds eerie today. But the American leaders who gave birth to the UN, while World War II was still raging, were dark realists, not utopians. In April 1945, four months before he dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and with the old and failed League of Nations still in existence, Harry S. S. Truman urged delegates to the San Francisco Conference to create the UN to "provide a reasonable mechanism" for resolving disputes without "bombs and bayonets."
This world-disillusioned and wise pragmatism is reflected in the unofficial motto of the UN, a phrase of an old secretary-general that now adorns the corridor leading to the General Assembly: "The United Nations was not created to lead humanity to heaven, but to save humanity from hell."
This is what Trump, Waltz and MAGA do not understand. Truman would never rebuke the international community by declaring that America is First, nor would he block any effort to improve the fate of humanity by asking what is in the interest of the United States, not in the coming decades, but in the short term. Truman understood what eludes Trump: that the alternative to cacophony is violence, and violence in the modern world can mean nuclear hell. That is why every US president saw America's interests coinciding with those of the world and the UN. Until Trump.
Adaptation – Editing: Lydia Roubopoulou
