Shrink the UN

The United Nations, international officials sometimes joke, is always in crisis. Since its inception in 1945, the organization has had to navigate deep geopolitical tensions, devastating humanitarian disasters, and periodic budget shortfalls. But as world leaders gather in New York for the annual General Assembly high-level week, the UN appears to be in particularly bad shape. China, Russia, and the United States, three of the five veto-wielding powers that dominate the Security Council, have prevented it from acting on wars in Iran and Ukraine and civil conflicts in Myanmar and Sudan. Poor countries complain that donor states have not met their UN pledges on development spending. And the Trump administration halted most U.S. funding to UN activities last year, forcing the organization to cut back on its peacekeeping and relief efforts.

With challenges mounting, an upcoming leadership transition may decide whether the UN can stabilize itself and perhaps even regain some credibility—or slide further into decrepitude. Current Secretary-General António Guterres plans to step down at the end of the year, having struggled to reverse the organization’s political fortunes in his decadelong tenure. He has spent much of his last two years in office grappling with staff reductions and other cost-cutting measures to ensure the UN secretariat does not go bankrupt on his watch. His has been a thankless task, but diplomats and UN officials hope a new leader will be able to take a longer-term approach to refreshing the institution and keeping governments committed to multilateralism.

The small crop of candidates to succeed Guterres include senior UN trade official Rebeca Grynspan, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi, and Guyana’s Ambassador to the UN Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett. Regardless of who wins, Guterres' successor will need to develop a new playbook for revitalizing the organization. Any serious effort must acknowledge an unpleasant reality: as long as the world remains competitive and chaotic, the UN’s ability to forge wide-ranging international agreements will remain constrained.

The next secretary-general’s best hope may thus be to relinquish some of the organization’s previous lofty ambitions and slim down, prioritizing international crisis prevention and conflict resolution, the efficient provision of humanitarian aid, and achievable international development goals. A UN that jettisons time-consuming diplomatic processes and inefficient bureaucracies for a few core functions may disappoint ardent advocates of global governance. But it also may be the only version of the organization still viable in an era of great-power competition and austerity.

LESS MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS

Since the end of the Cold War, UN chiefs have responded to moments of crisis by arguing that the institution should do more, not less. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the first secretary-general of the post–Cold War era, envisioned the UN as a supercharged global peacemaking body, but during his final years in office, after blue helmet peacekeepers failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995, the organization briefly retrenched. Beginning in the late 1990s, Boutros-Ghali’s successor, Kofi Annan, set out a new approach, establishing fresh poverty-reduction goals, battling AIDS, and launching UN peace operations in Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and several African countries. The U.S. war in Iraq, in 2003, split the Security Council and temporarily derailed Annan’s agenda, but he organized a global summit in 2005 to persuade governments to recommit to multilateralism and led the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission and the Geneva-based Human Rights Council the following year.

In the two decades since Annan left office, his successors, Ban Ki-moon and Guterres, have had to contend with a mounting catalog of crises, above all the Syrian civil war, which divided the Security Council for over a decade. As the number of conflicts, humanitarian crises, and natural disasters increased, so, too, did the UN’s budget. The combined revenue of all UN entities rose from $40 billion in 2010 to a high of $74 billion in 2022, driven in considerable part by greater humanitarian spending.

Ban and Guterres also repeatedly appealed to UN members to show greater solidarity. Ban championed the Paris climate change pact in 2015. Guterres convened a “Summit of the Future” in 2024, at which member states promised to cooperate on issues as varied as artificial intelligence and intergenerational justice. These agreements demonstrated vision and extraordinary diplomatic effort; the Paris accord won particularly widespread public support. But UN member states have often failed to honor the commitments outlined in past agreements, breeding a skepticism over the effectiveness of multilateralism that has in turn made it harder to get mistrustful members to sign onto new deals with binding legal force and solid enforcement mechanisms. UN negotiations have increasingly generated paperwork and processes rather than concrete results.

Over time, the gap between the UN’s ambitious self-conception and its actual track record has grown too wide for even the organization’s advocates to ignore. Presidents and prime ministers continue to turn up at the UN. Diplomats churn out resolutions and statements. But the organization now has to compete with alternative clubs of states, such as the G-7, BRICS, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s nascent Board of Peace, which offer spaces to debate and collaborate without going through the cumbersome procedures of UN diplomacy. A wave of populist and nationalist governments sweeping into power around the world have also taken issue with the organization’s commitments to universal values, especially with respect to the treatment of refugees and migrants, a line of attack that both Trump administrations have encouraged.

Trump’s greatest immediate impact on the UN, however, has been on its finances. In the early months of 2025, his administration froze almost all U.S. funding for UN humanitarian work and refused to pay into the organization’s core budget. Last year, it paid less than half of its expected contributions for UN peacekeeping.

These cuts initially looked like a coup de grâce for the wobbling organization, but now many diplomats see them as a necessary wake-up call to UN officials to start tightening their belts. Other funders such as China and the EU have refused to fill the financial gaps left by Washington, suggesting that skepticism extends beyond the White House. Many European countries have continued to cut humanitarian aid as they divert money to defense. Beijing is now on the hook for about a fifth of the organization’s core costs, second only to Washington, and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz has noted that the two powers have found a “kind of common ground” on cuts. The worst of the Trump cuts may have already passed—Washington has released roughly $4 billion for humanitarian work this year and just processed a $725 million contribution to the UN main budget—but the organization’s next leader will still need to get by with reduced means.

The incoming secretary-general will therefore face the knotty challenge of fulfilling the UN’s mission and regaining the trust of its members while continuing to economize. Contrary to the institutional instinct to renew itself by expanding its range of activities, the task ahead should be to find a more focused agenda for cooperation that skeptical states can buy into.

The candidates all acknowledge the need for financial discipline and a practical approach to global problem solving. None have outlined detailed proposals, but all agree that, in Grossi’s words, “the world does not need more declarations.” Striking a similar note, Grynspan has promised to “make the UN more useful, more agile, and more accountable” to its members.

Whoever gets the job will need to be more specific once in office. The secretary-general’s authority over the UN system is complicated by a tangle of different governance structures, budgeting processes, and institutional interests, and the long expansion of UN activities has left behind significant institutional redundancies. Three agencies in Rome deal with different aspects of agriculture and food security. The UN Refugee Agency and International Organization for Migration oversee efforts to help displaced people in the same regions, often competing for “market share” crisis by crisis. A small host of envoys, offices, and trust funds deal with different aspects of climate change. No two UN insiders have the same recipe for boiling down this profusion of entities, although all agree that consolidation is needed—just not in their own agency. The next secretary-general will therefore need to knock heads together and streamline how the UN raises funds, organizes crisis response, and deconflicts between the mandates of its constituent parts.

THE PRICE OF PEACE

Just as candidates see a case for consolidation, they also share the view that reform should center on reviving the UN’s role in peacemaking. In this they reflect the prevailing view among diplomats in New York that Guterres has too frequently neglected peace and security. In some of the major wars during his tenure, including those in Ethiopia and Sudan, he has concentrated on providing humanitarian access and stayed away from efforts to find political solutions, citing the office’s relative powerlessness.

The secretary-general’s reticence in the face of war is understandable. Splits among the Security Council members with veto powers have constrained the UN’s capacity to influence first-order political crises. Russia has used its veto in the Security Council to ensure that the UN has no political role in Ukraine. The Biden administration bristled at UN efforts to promote a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in late 2023, and Trump’s own cease-fire plan marginalized the UN in favor of his Board of Peace. Washington has paid scant attention to UN efforts to ease the humanitarian crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, having already blatantly disregarded the UN Charter’s prohibition on acts of aggression when it launched its war in Iran. China has quietly but effectively made it clear to member states that the UN should limit its role in Myanmar’s civil war.

Yet Guterres’s instinct to shrink away from peacemaking duties has also alienated many UN members who still believe that the UN should do more to help resolve conflicts where the veto power’s fundamental interests are not at stake. His tendency to emphasize global issues unrelated to conflict is also increasingly out of step with how many UN members assess the challenges that they face. In an era of expanding conflict, ambassadors in New York say their capitals want to know what the UN can offer in the way of security. They may value cooperation in other areas, but matters of peace and war take precedence.

The candidates vying to succeed Guterres acknowledge this reality. Despite having mainly worked on trade and development at the UN, for instance, Grynspan has said her “priority will be to restore confidence in the UN as a trusted convenor in theaters of conflict.” But it is easier to promise to be a peacemaker than to resolve actual wars, not least when countries with veto powers are involved. And even in conflicts in which permanent members of the Security Council are not directly implicated, influential middle powers can make peacemaking a major challenge: the Gulf powers have largely sidelined the organization in Sudan.

To restore faith in the UN’s core mission, the next secretary-general must show both the veto-holding powers and the organization’s wider membership that it can play a useful role in averting and ending conflicts. It can do so with strategies and tools already on hand. During the Cold War, Secretary-General U Thant mediated between the United States and the Soviet Union, making possible the backchannel diplomacy that resolved the Cuban missile crisis. Over the decades since, the UN has built up unrivaled expertise on managing mediation processes, along with logistics and administrative structures necessary to mount large-scale peace and stabilization missions. The Trump administration acknowledged as much last year, when it lobbied the Security Council to mandate that the UN backstop a Gang Suppression Force in Haiti.

Although the UN can still get large numbers of boots on the ground where necessary, the demand for large-scale multinational peace operations—the hallmark of UN crisis management in the 1990s and early 2000s—is likely to remain low. Instead, the next secretary-general should focus on quieter, cheaper forms of crisis diplomacy, devoting time and energy to shuttling between the veto-holding powers and middle powers as an impartial source of advice and ideas. This work will involve more behind-the-scenes trust building than dramatic public breakthroughs. But if the UN’s next leader can convince the world that the organization is a reliable peacemaker, it may lay the groundwork for more ambitious work in the future.

PARTY’S OVER

A renewed focus on peacemaking does not mean the UN must abandon all other goals entirely. The organization’s leaders will, however, need to choose their priorities wisely. In 2015, UN members agreed an ambitious set of sustainable development goals, including a promise to end extreme poverty globally by 2030. After the economic shocks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Ukraine, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, they have little chance of reaching them. Diplomats are preparing to negotiate a new package of goals for the period after 2030. The 2015 goals involved 169 specific targets spread across 17 policy baskets ranging from “life on land” to peace, justice, and security, the sheer complexity of which has made it harder to rally political and public support for the main points of the agenda.

Many UN members will want to keep (or even add to) this diversity of initiatives. But the next UN chief may have to call for a tighter agenda centered on poverty reduction, climate change adaptation, and buffering countries against global economic shocks. Many diplomats from developing countries fret that richer states want to dump the development agenda altogether; the Trump administration has partially confirmed their suspicions by disowning the existing development goals. Agreeing on a shorter, better-defined list of post-2030 targets could help donors and developing countries find common ground.

A similar tempering of ambition may be necessary on global challenges such as climate change and the regulation of new technologies. The UN’s current preferred method of advancing agreements on these issues tends to involve a surfeit of conferences and statements. For example, 55,000 people representing states, private companies, and civil society groups registered to attend the UN summit on climate change in Brazil last year. Although these generous invitation lists may look inclusive, they are not a recipe for clear decision-making.

The next secretary-general will need to reflect on how to initiate policy on complex global problems without all the hoopla. Diplomats recalling the practices of successful secretaries-general emphasize that they developed major policy carefully with small numbers of diplomatic allies. Just as secretary-generals’ conflict-resolution work may involve more behind-the-scenes contacts and fewer large blue helmet deployments, their diplomacy around global issues may involve more quiet gatherings and fewer megaconferences. This has downsides: the UN can use global sentiment as political fuel, especially when powerful states are wary of acting. To be sure, there will be times when the secretary-general wants to rile up global public opinion. But low-key coalition building will just as often work better.

GENERAL REASSEMBLY

Experts pondering the future of multilateralism often wonder what it would take to get the UN back on track. Some believe that the institution’s internal contradictions will eventually force members to agree to a full-scale review of its charter, a drastic step that could just as easily exacerbate diplomatic tensions as it could ameliorate them. Others speculate that a major shock—a catastrophic AI-enabled attack on multiple countries’ infrastructures or a cascade of climate-related disasters—could jolt governments into recognizing the need for multilateral cooperation.

The next secretary-general should quietly plan for such scenarios. If and when one occurs, the better prepared the UN is the more relevant it will be. In the meantime, the incoming UN leadership needs to regain the trust of the government and peoples it serves by showing that it can make a dent in the global rise in conflicts, focus its diplomatic and operational efforts better, and offer a platform for pragmatic global problem solving. This slimmer UN may be the UN the world needs.

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