The motorcades have mostly gone, the legions of police have resumed their regular duties, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s grievance-filled address to the U.N. General Assembly is one for the history books. But the question lingering in United Nations corridors remains the same as it was when the U.N.’s 80th anniversary summit began: What does the future hold for the United Nations, particularly its development, humanitarian, and human rights operations? And what will it look like without the financial support of the American taxpayer?
Trump did little to answer those questions, delivering sharply contradictory messages during his first visit to the U.N. since his reelection last November. On the one hand, he assured U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres that he is “100%” behind the world body. On the other hand, he repeatedly bashed the U.N., questioning its very relevance. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”
For U.N. delegates, staffers, and outside observers, the shock and awe of Trump’s denunciations of globalism were tempered by the lack of a clear plan for dismantling the sprawling entity, allowing a glimmer of hope that Washington might find its way back to at least tolerating it. In the meantime, governments, NGOs, and other advocates of multilateralism used the occasion to imagine international cooperation in the shadow of an increasingly distant superpower.
“Trump was the usual bundle of contradictions,” said Richard Gowan, the head of U.N. advocacy at the International Crisis Group. “The general mood around the U.N. as of Wednesday was relief that Trump’s bark was bigger than his bite.”
“I sensed that officials from countries that still value international cooperation felt a little liberated by Trump’s ramblings,” he added. “It is now pretty obvious the U.S. is going to remain a semi-detached and sporadic player in U.N. debates. Other countries will not wait on Washington before taking steps to shape multilateralism in future.”
Indeed, U.N. member states have struck agreements without the U.S. on a number of international accords, including the pandemic treaty, the Compromiso de Sevilla, and the global High Seas Treaty, which creates a large swath of protected ocean areas. A day after Trump declared climate change a “hoax,” China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, announced at a U.N. climate summit that it would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants by up to 10% by 2035. The majority of U.N. member states are expected to adopt a nonbinding declaration aimed at curbing chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart disease, in October, despite the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to it last week.
The course of multilateralism has a way of advancing even in the face of U.S. opposition, Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Espen Barth Eide told Devex in an interview in the Vienna Cafe at U.N. headquarters. The U.S., for instance, never ratified the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, but it has “actually been respecting the rules.” In the case of Trump’s decision in his first term to announce the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, states such as California, Illinois, and New York took the lead in curbing emissions. “It didn’t really matter,” he said. “The emissions went down in the U.S. anyways, and clean energy went up.”
From Day 1 to Day 4: Read the on-the-ground coverage from our reporters at UNGA80.
For three days, we hosted scores of current and former U.N. leaders, NGOs, and development influencers at the Devex Impact House on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. Here’s what they are saying about the future of development and humanitarian affairs at a moment of extreme crisis in the sector.
• “I’m ready for MAGA 2.0, make America good again. We can’t be great if we’re not good. If we’re not good to our neighbors around the world, if we’re not good to one another.” — David Beasley, former executive director of the World Food Programme.
• “It’s an interesting time for all of us in the humanitarian and development space and I do believe that all of us need to be speaking out about how important it is for the world and for America’s self-interest.” — Henrietta Fore, the former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• “Change does not necessarily equal reform, and neither are really required for the U.N. to do some amazing and very important and valuable things.” — Anthony Banbury, former head of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response.
• “We believe that the leadership of a woman at the helm of the United Nations in itself conveys a message of a revitalized U.N., bringing different perspectives on many issues and specifically on the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals].” — Susana Malcorra, former Argentine foreign minister, former senior U.N. official, and founder and current president of GWL Voices for Change and Inclusion.
• “The sustainable development goals are not just numbers and policy frameworks. It’s a promise to people of a life of dignity, opportunity, and eventual transformation.” — Navid Hanif, U.N. assistant secretary-general for economic development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
+ Catch up on the Devex Impact House interviews and conversations on the sidelines of UNGA80.
Mike Waltz, the new U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and his team still appear to be coming to grips with social media apps.
Waltz this week took over the X, formerly Twitter, handle of Linda Thomas-Greenfield, with its nearly 400,00 followers, but his staff didn’t remove the former ambassador’s tweets.
At first glance, it created the disorienting impression that Waltz was referring favorably to former President Joe Biden’s foreign policy and announcing plans to wrap up his term as U.S. ambassador. “Today was my last day at @USUN New York office, and the team surprised me on my way out,” read one tweet from Waltz’s account.
A closer look, however, revealed a video of Greenfield leaving the U.S. mission to the U.N. through a gauntlet of staff cheers and hoots.
The State Department and the U.S. mission to the U.N. did not respond to a request for comment.
Background reading: Trump nominates Mike Waltz to serve as UN ambassador
Turkey has nominated its U.N. ambassador, Ahmet Yildiz, for the post of U.N. high commissioner for refugees, pitting him against a slate of European candidates, including the apparent front-runner, Switzerland’s former ambassador to Thailand, Christine Schraner Burgener.
The appointment of Yildiz would place an official from a country with the world’s second-largest population of refugees, around 3 million. “I’m ready for it,” he told a Turkish news outlet. “One of the visions is to make the organization more visible, because not many people know about the UNHCR, what they are doing. That's why sometimes it is easy for some skeptics to criticize the organization instead of investigating the causes.”
Read: The UN's changing of the guard
First there was escalator-gate, then teleprompter-gate, and volume-gate. Now, the U.S. is demanding a U.N. investigation into interpreter-gate, a technical cock-up resulting in Trump's UNGA address temporarily going silent, replaced by the voice of the Portuguese interpreter.
The Trump administration suspects a possible conspiracy aimed at embarrassing the U.S. president and has ordered an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service. The U.N., meanwhile, said there is an innocent answer to each incident, and that the U.S. delegation bears some of the blame. In the latest case, one U.N. official told Devex a Portuguese interpreter inadvertently pressed a button that sent his interpretation to the floor, as well as the U.N. webcast.
On X, Mike Waltz demanded the U.N. provide “clarity” on why the interpretation abruptly shifted to Portuguese mid-speech, “compromising the delivery of America’s message on the world stage.”
The UN80 Initiative has highlighted the need for the U.N. to streamline an organization that has been weighed down by the proliferation of redundant, duplicative mandates.
But the U.N.’s current financial crisis has little to do with its own bureaucratic shortcomings. The U.N. is straining under a massive liquidity crisis, brought on by $1.5 billion in unpaid U.S. dues to the world body. Complicating matters, the U.N.’s two largest contributors, China and the United States, pay their dues late in the year, squeezing the U.N.’s cash reserves.
“The cash shortage that the secretariat is facing right now [is primarily] the result of two member states, the top two financial contributors, the United States and China, who collectively provide 42% of the regular budget,” said Eugene Chen, a former U.N. official and senior fellow at the U.N. University Centre for Policy Research, who fears the cuts will further undermine U.N. ability to fulfill its mission. “If the problem you're facing is that you are missing 42% of whatever your budget is, shrinking the overall budget is actually not the solution,” Chen said in a discussion at the Devex Impact House.
“These are scary times for everybody, but at the same time, it is so important for all of us that the UN is fit for purpose and future-ready,” Ayaka Suzuki, the director of strategic planning in the U.N. secretary-general's office and the lead on the UN80 Initiative, said at Devex Impact House. “Basically, we're running out of money, so we need to cut positions. That is not by choice, right? That is the situation we have to deal with.”
Watch: UN faces ‘austerity vs. reform’ dilemma as funding crisis deepens
Read: UN80 and the incredible shrinking United Nations (Pro)
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One of the more quixotic proposals being discussed on the sidelines of UNGA involves the reform of the 80-year-old U.N. Charter to reflect the changing geopolitical realities of the modern era.
Heba Aly, the director of the Article 109 coalition, a charter provision that provides the basis for reform, told Devex that her outfit is not offering specific proposals for the reform, though it envisions a U.N. that can fulfill its “core purpose of maintaining peace and security,” and enable the U.N. to address emerging challenges such as climate change and artificial intelligence, and distribute power among governments more equally.
Last week, Aly hosted former Irish President Mary Robinson, former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, former Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, and Gambia’s U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Muhammadou M.O. Kah, for a talk on the initiative at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Most of these former world leaders initially questioned the wisdom of opening up the U.N. Charter for revision, fearing repressive member states would use the process to reverse hard-fought gains on security, development, and human rights.
“I was kind of skeptical at first,” De Croo said. “My diplomats used to say, ‘You know, you’re better off with what you have, and you never know what you might end up with.’” But the state of the U.N., he added, “couldn’t be worse than what we have for the moment, at least on the total irrelevance related to the issues that matter.”
“I thought then that there were too many voices that would try to move in the wrong direction, try to lead us astray,” said Robinson, another early skeptic. But the U.N. Security Council, she added, has now “become completely disgracefully dysfunctional and that is undermining the whole U.N. and everything it stands for.”
But there remains deep skepticism about the virtue of renegotiating the charter.
“A very important point for me is that the norms and principles [enshrined in the U.N. Charter] are not going to get any better,” Norway’s Eide told Devex. “I mean, they’re actually great: there shall be human rights, thou shall not start wars, thou shall cooperate. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that. So don’t touch it.”
“I remember in better times, there were people saying, ‘let’s rewrite the human rights charter.’ Don’t touch it. I mean, don’t let the current gang get their hands on it,” he added.
That said, Eide favors U.N. reforms, noting the importance of expanding the U.N. Security Council, which reflects the balance of power in 1945, when most of today’s African nations were not members of the U.N., let alone the Security Council.
Norway and Mexico, meanwhile, are leading an effort to advance Guterres’ UN80 reform initiative and austerity plan in intergovernmental negotiations.
Eide said that Guterres’ plan, which calls for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, “points in the right direction. But we could do much more.”
“You need to instill a sense that it’s a real crisis,” he said. “Our resources are not at all aligned with the number of mandates. So you need to deal with the mandates, which is either to scrap them, to consolidate them, to merge them. … I would say I’m sure you could do with cutting one third of the organization in principle.”
“This is not a magical number, but it’s just like [an] order of magnitude,” he said.
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