One phrase comes up frequently when diplomats review last week’s high-level week at the United Nations General Assembly: “It could have been worse.”
They are referring, unsurprisingly, to President Donald Trump’s return to the world organization, the first time he had been to a U.N. gathering since taking office in January. In his official General Assembly address, Trump treated leaders and representatives to a rambling lecture on the state of the world that lasted almost an hour, far more than the allotted 15 minutes. He was by turns self-promoting, humorous – riffing on the facts that a U.N. escalator had stalled just as he and first lady Melania Trump had stepped on it and that his teleprompter malfunctioned – and downright rude, telling his counterparts that “your countries are going to hell” due to uncontrolled migration. But U.N. insiders also found sources of relief in his speech, and even a few things they actually agree with.
The main reason for relief lay in what Trump did not say. Since taking office, the administration has pulled out of numerous multilateral agreements and withheld funding for the organization. U.N. officials worried that he would use his speech to announce further measures to weaken the institution, such as formally cutting ties with UNHCR, the refugee agency. But while Trump was highly critical of the U.N., he did not reveal any new specific policies to damage it. (There is a rumor among diplomats that the president actually skipped some paragraphs in his prepared text that contained more concrete actions targeting the U.N., as grumbling about escalators was more fun.)
In rhetorical terms, Trump’s three main attack lines were that the U.N. is underperforming on peace and security, facilitating illegal migration, and perpetuating a “fake energy catastrophe” by warning of climate change. The part that quite a few U.N. members agree on is that the organization is struggling with crisis management, having done little or nothing to prevent or halt wars from Gaza to Myanmar. Trump complained that the U.N. had offered him no support in his efforts to make peace in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere. This was somewhat disingenuous, as Trump had not spoken to the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres all year prior to his trip to New York, the U.S. has routinely vetoed Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and U.S. Permanent Representative Michael Waltz only just arrived in Manhattan. But most member States think the organization has to focus more on peacemaking as a matter of urgency, and they fault Guterres for taking a cautious approach to crisis diplomacy.
The Secretary-General got the message and, during a surprisingly affable bilateral meeting with Trump soon after his speech — Trump even asserted then that the United States is “behind the United Nations 100 percent” – Guterres lauded the president’s efforts to end “horrible suffering.” Guterres has in the past emphasized the need for the U.N. to be an impartial political player, so he needs to avoid looking like he is a sidekick to Washington, but his office would be wise to push some cases where U.S. and U.N. peace efforts may align. One potential example is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the United States and Qatar recently brokered a deal to end hostilities between the government and Rwandan-backed rebels. This agreement is already splintering, but as my colleagues at the International Crisis Group recently noted the U.N. – which has thousands of peacekeepers in the country – “can play an active role in monitoring a ceasefire in areas where it more or less holds, in the hopes that such areas expand over time.”
Potential Wedge Issue?
While there may be some agreement on the need to bolster the U.N. as a peacemaker, Trump’s stance on migration and asylum could turn into a major wedge issue inside the organization. The president accused the U.N. (presumably meaning UNHCR and/or the International Organization for Migration) for helping more than a half million migrants come to the United States in 2024, adding that “the U.N. is supposed to stop invasions, not create them, and not finance them.” His remarks set the scene for a Sept. 25 event alongside the General Assembly and hosted by the United States on curbing asylum applications, where Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau argued that “sovereign states, not transnational bodies” should decide whom to let into their borders and whom to repatriate.
Trump’s and Landau’s remarks were in line with the administration’s domestic policies. But in focusing so hard on migration and asylum, the administration is also focusing on an issue that will resonate with its admirers and populists abroad. During Trump’s first term, his administration allied with partners such as Hungary to undermine the negotiation of a non-binding U.N. Compact on Migration that was meant to facilitate cooperation on regular migration. Although most countries eventually signed up to the pact, it became an object of scorn — and a source of propaganda — among right-wing groups, especially in Europe. In 2018, the Belgian government imploded in a row over whether to endorse it.
If the Trump administration continues to press for a rewrite of global asylum rules — or simply urges other countries to distance themselves from U.N. refugee and migration work — it will likely sow more division between progressives and conservatives abroad. Indeed, Trump made a point of playing up the supposed dangers of migration in Europe. Poland’s recently elected right-wing President Karol Nowracki, who opposes the more liberal government of the country’s prime minister and parliamentary majority, reciprocated in his own speech a day after Trump by agreeing that “ideological madness” had taken hold in the European Union, leading to “bad decisions on migration.” It seems a fair bet that ugly arguments over human mobility loom over the U.N. in the years ahead.
While Trump devoted a good deal of time to his final main theme – that clean energy is a hoax and everyone should invest in “clean, beautiful coal” – most U.N. members assumed in advance that the president would dismiss global warming. U.S. diplomats are already boycotting U.N. meetings on climate change and issues like preserving the oceans. Those governments that continue to worry about these issues already calculated that they have to work without Washington.
Silence Signifying Nothing?
While Trump expiated on peace, migration, and energy, it was notable that he did not take swipes at the U.N. over some other topics on which his administration has been disruptive in New York and Geneva. He did not even mention the Sustainable Development Goals — an initiative that the United States now rejects — or the U.N.’s work on issues like diversity and reproductive rights, which the United States has been vociferously objecting to in U.N. committees.
One topic that the U.N. would have liked to hear more about from the president was money. The U.S. still has not paid any of its annual dues into the U.N. regular budget and peacekeeping budget for 2025 (adding up to more than $2 billion) and remains in arrears for 2024. The administration also has proposed a budget for 2026 that covers only a fraction of the amount that it will owe the organization. Trump did not offer any conditions for coughing up more cash.
U.S. officials did, however, hint at ways that Washington intends to approach U.N. funding as part of the Security Council’s negotiations over Haiti that took place in parallel with the high-level week. The U.S. has been lobbying other Council members to approve a new Gang Suppression Force to deal with Haitian armed groups, to be partially paid for from the U.N. budget. Last week, U.S. diplomats indicated that they would be willing to disburse some of what they owe for the costs of existing blue helmet missions in places like DRC and Lebanon if the Council comes to terms over Haiti.
This was a bonus for U.N. officials who have been working on plans to pare back peacekeeping operations, but it sends a signal about how the United States will treat its mandatory financial obligations to the organization. Washington is at best liable to be a sporadic and transactional funder, offering limited resources in return for favors, ignoring U.N. finance rules.
Trump also did not offer any substantive remarks about Secretary-General Guterres’ recent “UN80 initiative” aimed at cutting costs and proposing institutional reforms to deal with the organization’s dire financial situation (which is partially because of Washington’s aid cuts and freezes). In this, Trump was not alone – many leaders talked about the value of the U.N. but avoided the details of reform. While the Secretary-General had released a paper on institutional matters — including merging some U.N. entities and setting up new coordination mechanisms for others — immediately before the high-level week, even U.N. specialists had not had time to absorb it properly before leaders descended on Manhattan. In private, U.S. officials told some foreign counterparts that Guterres, who has already tabled proposals to cut the U.N. secretariat staff by a fifth in 2026, will need to propose even more economies before the United States is happy.
So, while Trump did not announce any new concrete measures regarding the U.N., his meandering speech did give a picture of how the United States will behave in New York and Geneva. Washington seems set to take an instrumental approach to the organization on peace and security — using it where it wants and dismissing it elsewhere — while picking fights over refugees and migrants and barking from the sidelines on climate change and most other issues.
Although the speech could have been worse for the U.N., it was not exactly great. Nonetheless, many diplomats and civil society types I chatted with in New York last week were oddly upbeat. Trump’s speech may have been quite confusing, but it offered clarity to observers from other parts of the world that if they want to make the U.N. system work, they will need to do it their own way rather than bank on a return of U.S. leadership. And if necessary, they will have to work around U.S. obstructionism.
