Trump and his lieutenants seem intent on pushing their vision for a pared-down U.N. “This institution desperately needs strong, effective leadership,” Mike Waltz, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said, during a Senate briefing this spring. That, in his view, means appointing a figurehead who will embrace U.S. priorities, including defunding programs whose focus is distinct from the “basics” of “peace and security.” Attention now falls on the race to succeed Guterres, which includes a crowded field of mostly Latin American officials. The Trump Administration hasn’t signalled a preferred candidate yet, but it will almost certainly veto more progressively minded contenders, such as Michelle Bachelet, a human-rights advocate and the former President of Chile, whom Republican lawmakers cast as a “pro-abortion zealot” in a letter to Marco Rubio earlier this year. Anjali Dayal, a professor of international politics at Fordham University and a longtime U.N. watcher, is concerned about a future leader whose ambitions for the United Nations get hamstrung by the projects and whims of the great powers. “The U.N. could face a kind of reduction toward obsolescence,” she told me. “In ten years, we could have a vestigial organization that doesn’t really serve many purposes in the world.”
A generation of U.N. dignitaries, like Guterres, believes in a post-Cold War internationalism, which, at its core, assumed that everyone understood that the world’s problems transcend borders and require shared solutions. That’s not, of course, how this White House sees things. It delights in being the king of the jungle. It dismisses the idea of a rules-based order or of any prevailing system in which countries can take American support for granted. It cheers nations, such as Poland and Japan, that are building up their defense capabilities and urges others to follow suit, even if that means gutting social-welfare programs. In an interview with the Times, Elbridge Colby, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, said that the Administration is moving beyond “the liberal international-order delusion” and returning “to the Cold War idea,” which entails “going back to the basics of building military readiness.” The U.N. once led global efforts to stop nuclear nonproliferation; now, amid the havoc of wars in the Middle East and the uncertainty posed by Trump’s actions, countries as different as Turkey and South Korea are contemplating building their own atomic-weapons programs.
“Our world is at risk of becoming a gangster’s paradise, in which rules matter far less than they once did—and raw power matters more,” Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in Foreign Policy. And Trump is troublingly well suited for the role of boss in such a world. His family enterprises are already intertwined with the White House’s foreign policy. He has shown greater willingness in his second term to coerce and bully long-standing allies than to confront putative adversaries. His imperial appetites are diverse: he has set about transforming Venezuela into a vassal petro-state, but still clings to visions of annexing Greenland and sees the renaming of bodies of water in America’s vicinity as acts of triumph. It’s the sort of erratic behavior that makes the country look like a rogue hegemon. According to recent polling by the Rockefeller Foundation, respondents in twelve out of sixteen developing countries surveyed, including Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico, ranked the United States as a greater threat to their nation than either China or Russia.
Repeatedly under Trump, the United States has found itself either alone or in a tiny minority on certain U.N. resolutions—including General Assembly votes against a call for a ceasefire in Gaza and a resolution recognizing the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. It was the lone voice of dissent among dozens of countries in a U.N. commission focussed on expanding efforts to support women’s rights. Earlier this summer, it was one of just ten countries, including North Korea and Russia, that voted against giving Volker Türk, a respected Austrian lawyer, a second term as the high commissioner of the U.N.’s human-rights agency, purportedly because he had been critical of the United States and Israel. “The US used to be a beacon of human rights,” France’s U.N. mission in Geneva posted on social media, in a conspicuous broadside. “Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it.” (The Trump Administration punished France for that post, suspending the approval of a new French ambassador to Washington for weeks, until authorities in Paris offered a timid apology.)
