The Trump Administration’s Retreat from the UN

The second Trump administration has thrown the United Nations (UN) into chaos. President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of multiple UN agreements and frameworks, such as the Paris climate change pact, and cut or frozen most financial contributions to the UN system. This has opened up huge funding gaps in many multilateral agencies, and hit the main humanitarian aid providers, such as the World Food Programme, especially hard. U.S. diplomats in New York and Geneva have instructions to demand that other countries delete words like “diversity” and “gender” from resolutions as a matter of ideological principle. The President’s own musings on taking over the Panama Canal or Greenland, possibly by force, have cast doubt on Washington’s commitment to the principles of the UN Charter. In the meantime, the new leadership in Washington has offered little strategic direction on some issues–such as how to stabilize Haiti and end the civil war in South Sudan–that were priorities at the UN for the Biden administration. Although Trump has not heeded the calls of some Republicans in Congress who want to pull the U.S. out of the UN altogether, he has already done significant and lasting harm to the world organization.

In the first months of the administration, diplomats in New York initially hoped that there would be limits to the U.S. attacks on the organization. At a minimum, they expected Washington to lay out some sort of vision of how it wants the UN to change over the longer term. While most UN members lament the way that Washington is treating the organization, many feel that it has grown too big and bureaucratic–and difficult to sustain financially–in recent years. A lot of ambassadors would be willing to work with the U.S. on reforms to make the UN more efficient, but, to date, the administration has only offered hints at its longer-term intentions with regard to the UN. U.S. officials say that President Trump wants the organization to focus on its “founding mission” of preserving international peace and security, but rarely offer more details than that.

As time has gone by, the mood has shifted among UN members, with many concluding that it will be hard to find any real common ground with Washington. The administration may offer a little more clarity about its intentions in the third quarter of 2025, when it will release the findings of a review of U.S. multilateral commitments and treaty obligations ordered by Trump in the spring. But diplomats fear that the administration will use this opportunity to announce more withdrawals from parts of the UN system, without offering a pathway to stable U.S-UN relations. Some hope that Democratic successes in the 2026 midterm elections, or the election of a Democratic President in 2028, could create new dynamics in U.S. policy, but that is still far away.

For the time being, diplomats and UN officials accept that it is necessary to assume that the U.S. will be a semi-detached, and often disruptive, member of the organization for the foreseeable future. Some see a scenario in which States continue to advance multilateral cooperation in the absence of the U.S., noting that negotiators in Geneva were able to agree a new Pandemic Treaty in May–setting out protocols for better international cooperation during future plagues–, even though the Trump administration had pulled out of the process in January. Nonetheless, it seems inevitable that the UN system as a whole will have to shrink if it does not receive U.S. financial support. Secretary-General António Guterres has launched a process (dubbed “UN80” as it is eighty years since the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco) to force financial savings across the organization–with UN entities expected to cut 20% of their staff in 2026–and potentially merge parts of the UN system to make them more efficient. While this is deeply unpopular among UN staff, who face the loss of their livelihoods, member States agree that it is necessary. UN officials have started to talk about the need to do “less with less” in a new era of austerity.

Yet some diplomats and UN staff also see an opportunity opening up as a result of the Trump administration’s behavior. Many UN members, especially from the so-called “Global South”, have been arguing for many years that the power structure of the UN is unbalanced, with the U.S. and its Western allies enjoying outsized influence across the organization. Efforts to address this situation through formal diplomatic processes–such as the negotiations on the 2024 “Pact of the Future”, a sprawling summary of ways to update multilateralism–have only yielded limited results. But by stepping back from the UN system, and raising doubts about its role as the guarantor of the international system, Trump may unintentionally change the diplomatic game. 

The U.S. retreat could be an opportunity for another power, most obviously China, to present itself an alternative guarantor of the UN system. Or it could be a moment for a broader coalition of States–including countries from both the Global South and Global North–to work out how to manage the UN in a more balanced fashion. That will not be an easy process, but the alternative could be a further fragmentation and weakening of the UN system. In the remainder of this essay, we will look in more detail at why U.S. policy has had such a severe impact on the UN in 2025–and how those UN members that want the world organization to recover can help keep it afloat. 

THREE REASONS TO BE HUMBLE AT THE UN

The Trump administration’s attack on the UN has been humbling for the world organization for three main reasons. The first is that Trump’s actions demonstrated exactly how dependent many parts of the UN have been on U.S. funding and goodwill. While diplomats and UN officials have been talking about the rise of a new multipolarity in recent years–underlining the need for UN reform–the organization has continued to rely on the U.S. to a very large degree. This is especially true in financial terms. While the U.S. pays roughly a quarter of the UN’s regular budget (which covers the running costs of the secretariat and some of its political missions) and peacekeeping budget, it has been responsible for an even larger share of funding to the UN’s main humanitarian agencies, which have taken on an ever-increasing role in managing the fallout of conflicts and climate change-related shocks in recent years. In 2024, for example, the U.S. covered half of the World Food Programme’s US$ 9 billion budget (partially through in-kind contributions of food). Washington also provided two-fifths of funding to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the refugee agency. The Trump administration has reduced funds to a trickle–and specifically cut off support for life-saving efforts in cases including Afghanistan and Yemen–leaving major parts of the UN very exposed.

Humanitarian officials have spent the first half of 2025 scrabbling to work out how to operate with reduced U.S. funds. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates it will have to shrink by about 40%, and UNHCR is cutting back by 30%. This is already translating into thousands of job losses, but it will also mean that the UN system as a whole is simply able to offer less food, shelter and protection for people facing crises. There may be ways to limit the damage, as humanitarian agencies often duplicate each other’s activities and capabilities, and may be able to consolidate their work in some areas. But even if savings can be found, the UN’s overall ability to do life-saving work will shrink. This will have knock-on effects for other areas of international cooperation, as ballooning humanitarian crises could fuel conflicts and set back economic development in some cases. Overall, it is now clear that the UN was always dangerously over-reliant on the U.S. to cover the costs of its work.

In addition to causing financial disruption, the U.S. has also dampened political discussions of some items that were previously high on the UN agenda, while altering diplomatic dynamics around others. In late 2024 and early 2025, for example, the outgoing Biden administration pushed hard for the Security Council to prepare for the deployment of UN peacekeepers to end disorder in Haiti (replacing a small Kenyan-led security mission that the Council authorized in 2023, but has proved insufficient to manage a growing crisis). The Trump administration has, however, frustrated its regional partners by dropping this initiative and failing to replace it with a credible alternative policy. There have been rumors that Washington would prefer the Organization of American States (OAS) to lead a mission instead, thereby circumventing the Security Council, but this notion seems half-baked at best and the OAS lacks the relevant operational expertise to manage it. However, other Security Council members have been nervous to make solid alternative proposals without greater clarity over U.S. intentions, once again showing how dependent the organization is on U.S. direction. There has been a similar drop-off in Security Council engagement on the civil war in Sudan, a Biden administration priority at the UN through 2024 that the Trump administration has paid little attention to since taking office.

The Trump administration’s most startling political move at the UN to date has, however, been to change its approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine. In contrast to the Biden administration, which offered Kyiv unstinting support in the Security Council and General Assembly, the Trump team tabled a Security Council resolution in February 2025 calling for a peace deal without naming any preconditions, such as respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. This delighted Russia and dumbfounded U.S. allies in Europe, although France and the UK refrained from vetoing the American text. Since then, Council discussions of Ukraine have remained adrift, with the Europeans wary of adopting positions that could increase friction with Washington. Overall, the Trump administration has shown that the U.S. can disrupt UN dynamics–as well as UN budgets–enormously, but generally failed to lay out an agenda for shaping peace and security diplomacy. 

Does the UN Have Any Friends Left? 

The second reason that the Trump shock has been humbling for the UN system is that while the U.S. has retreated, other countries have not rushed forward to fill the gap. This is different to the experience of 2017 and 2018, when the first Trump administration also took steps to distance itself from parts of the UN system including the Paris Climate Agreement, Human Rights Council and (during COVID) the World Health Organization. Back then, other UN members were quick to underline their faith in multilateralism. France and Germany set up a loose “Alliance for Multilateralism” as an umbrella for countries to discuss the enduring need for international cooperation. European donors found pockets of cash to cover U.S. budget cuts to UN agencies (although the scale of these cuts was far smaller than what we have seen this year, and the U.S. kept up financing to big agencies including WFP and UNHCR). With the Paris Climate Summit still a recent memory, Secretary-General Guterres rallied leaders to pledge to continue to fight global warming, despite Trump rejecting it. As I wrote on the day of the 2020 U.S. presidential elections (Gowan 2020):  

Washington has failed to persuade many other countries to join its attacks on multilateral mechanisms. Instead, worried by both Trump’s bullying tactics and China’s rising assertiveness, many States have invested political capital in defending the international system. 

As I noted at the time, “it is not clear that States that have advocated for multilateralism over the past four years could maintain the effort for another four if Trump wins a second term.” This has proved prescient, as UN members have been much less willing to step up with money and political support for the organization this time. This is especially true among European States, which have radically shifted their priorities in recent years given their security concerns with Russia. European diplomats made it clear to UN officials in late 2024 and 2025 that they would not be able to fill Trump-induced financing gaps, as their governments are channeling cash to defense. In the course of the last six months, some European governments, including the UK and the Netherlands, have cut aid budgets further. UN officials grumble that some of these donors are effectively using U.S. aid cuts as cover for their own reductions in spending. Although some other Western donors, including the EU institutions in Brussels, have maintained funding levels–and complain that their generosity is not acknowledged at the UN–they cannot fully compensate for U.S. and other cuts.

UN officials have also been disappointed that one country that could cover the U.S. cuts in full has not opted to do so. This is China. Since the scale of U.S. disengagement from the UN became clear, many commentators have suggested that Beijing could take advantage of the moment to increase its spending at the UN and gain more political influence in New York and Geneva. China has taken some steps in this direction, pledging US$ 500 million to the World Health Organization in May over the next five years. But Chinese officials have made it clear that they do not intend to put funds into other parts of the UN, like WFP and UNHCR, at scale. This is in line with Chinese policy at the UN over the last decade–which has tended to involve investing relatively small sums in parts of the organization of direct interest to Beijing–and may also reflect the fact that Beijing currently faces financial headwinds. Either way, there has been no “Chinese takeover” at the UN.

More generally, member States have been quite muted in their criticisms of the U.S. around the UN in recent months. Diplomats explain that their political masters in their capitals are not keen to pick unnecessary fights with Washington in the UN arena. Almost every nation on earth is trying to work out how to preserve their economic relations with the U.S. after Trump’s barrage of tariff announcements. Many are also aiming to protect security relations with Washington that Trump has put in doubt. In this context, it is natural for States to prioritize their bilateral relations with the U.S. rather than focus on its behavior in the UN system. This has affected not only States’ willingness to call out U.S. aid cuts in early 2025, but also their approach to specific problems on the UN agenda, such as the Israeli-Hamas war. While UN Security Council members frequently tabled resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023 and 2024–knowing that the Biden administration was likely to veto them–, the Council did not advance any resolution on the war in the first five months of 2025. Diplomats were honest about the fact that this reflected worries about how the Trump administration would react. Although the elected members of the Council did finally table a Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in early June–which the U.S. predictably vetoed–, their previous caution was indicative of the wider nervousness at the UN.

Some UN members deserve honorable mentions for bucking this cautious trend. Germany, despite going through an extended government transition, has convened inter-governmental meetings on the future of UN peacekeeping and development. Spain has attempted to bridge divides between the Global North and South by hosting a conference on financing for development in Seville (like the German meetings, this was scheduled before Trump took power, but took on extra resonance in light of his policies). France and Saudi Arabia have pressed ahead with convening a summit at the UN on the two-State solution to Israeli-Palestinian question, aimed at breaking the organization’s perennial deadlocks over the Middle East, despite the inevitability of a rift with the Trump administration, which firmly opposes Palestinian statehood.

Brazil, fresh from presiding over the G20 and preparing to chair the annual UN climate summit this fall, has also been keen to push innovative ideas about the future of global governance. Brasilia has tabled the idea of creating a “Climate Change Council” to supplement existing UN formats for dealing with global warming and–behind the scenes–floated ideas for a major conference on reforming the UN Charter. Such ideas may appear quixotic in the current fraught international moment, but they provide a healthy contrast to a wider sense of fatalism at the UN. 

Does anyone have a plan?

The third and final reason for UN insiders to feel humble a few months into the second Trump administration is, however, that nobody really has a strategy to get out of this mess. As noted, the U.S. has not yet given a clear sense of its longer-term plans for the UN, if any exist. Diplomats are especially frustrated that the administration has not–as of early June–sent a fully-fledged Permanent Representative to New York or Geneva. The initial Trump pick as ambassador in New York, Representative Elise Sefanik, chose to drop the nomination to stay in Congress (her seat was vulnerable to a Democratic takeover). At the time of writing, her putative successor, former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, has yet to go through his confirmation hearings. Ambassadors from other UN members say that they are very keen to see Waltz arrive in New York as soon as possible, as he might have the authority to set a clearer path for U.S. policy at the UN.

But if the U.S. has not offered a clear vision of where it is headed with the UN, nor have many other UN members. In recent months, different groups of ambassadors have met around New York to ponder where the UN may be headed. Having participated in a number of these meetings, I can say that they tend to be both thoughtful and tentative, with participants giving frank assessments of the strengths and (more often) the weaknesses of the UN, but holding back from offering bold plans for the organization. Member States have tended to stand back and allow Secretary-General Guterres some space to come forward with proposals to downsize and streamline the organization, although Guterres has pointed out that really significant reforms–such as merging UN agencies–would ultimately require inter-governmental approval anyway.

As I have argued elsewhere (Gowan 2025) this cautious approach by UN members is understandable, but may also eventually prove counterproductive. The Secretary-General can look at UN budgets, staffing tables and organigrams and propose improvements, but he is to some extent working in a political vacuum, as UN members have not set out the priorities that should guide his thinking. Last year, the UN membership did agree on a “Pact for the Future” that listed scores of areas for better cooperation, ranging from development to the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But the Pact was a non-binding document and the negotiators broadly tried to keep all parties happy, piling up priorities for cooperation. While the Pact is still a useful reference document, it does not address how the UN system should evolve in a moment when it is no longer possible to keep on expanding priorities, but instead it is urgent to focus on what the organization has to do with limited resources–and what parts of its work can be dropped or done by others.

Member States may be wary of getting into that discussion because–despite a general sense that the UN must shrink–there is no consensus on how to rank its activities in terms of importance and resource allocation. In recent months, Western diplomats have often said that it is time for the UN to “back to basics” and focus on its core mandate of peace and security (in this they consciously or unconsciously echo Trump’s references to its “founding mission”). But representatives from the Global South are nervous that this implicitly means deprioritizing the UN’s work on issues like development and climate adaptation. Having clashed over these questions around the Pact for the Future, all sides seem to fear that an open debate about the UN’s future could deteriorate into a North-South shouting match over the multilateral system.

This is a reasonable concern, but some sort of grand debate over where the UN is headed will eventually become necessary. It could come into focus in the second half of 2025. The Trump administration’s review of its multilateral commitments–noted in the introduction–could give other States a better sense of their options vis-à-vis Washington. Secretary-General Guterres has promised to lay out his overarching ideas for UN reform, based on the UN80 process, at the annual high-level meeting of the General Assembly in September. At the same time, the UN’s financial situation is liable to grow even worse as the U.S. withholds funds. With these prompts, States will not be able to avoid discussing what future they want for the UN indefinitely. The big question facing them is whether they can turn this ugly moment into an opportunity for a constructive discussion, rather than allowing long-standing divisions to overshadow the process. 

A moment of opportunity?

For all the confusion generated by the second Trump administration at the UN, Washington’s retreat from multilateralism may still offer an opportunity to rebalance inter-State relations at the UN. For a long time, countries of the Global South have argued that Western States–and above all the U.S.–have wielded outsized formal and informal influence in the institution, but Washington and its allies have justified this by pointing to their financial contributions. Now the U.S. seems determined to slash those contributions, and many other Western States have signaled that–like it or not–they cannot sustain the UN financially at its pre-Trump scale. This may create an opening for representatives of the Global South and Global North to discuss a rebalancing of power in the UN system, by which wealthier nations would pay less for the UN, but also accept that non-Western nations must now have a greater voice in its decision-making.

The first step towards such a rebalancing–if States want it–would be for countries from the Global North and Global South to use discussions around the UN80 process as an opportunity to test out ideas for what a rebalanced UN would look like. Rather than see the inevitable shrinking of the UN as a zero-sum game (in which cuts in different areas will inevitably hurt some States more than others), it is time for honest discussions about what the UN does well and badly. It is notable, for example, that representatives of developing countries that strongly defend the organization’s economic work in public are dismissive of it in private. Facing a difficult period, in which clinging onto old positions will likely do more harm than good, UN members should–quietly–feel each other out on potential areas of agreement over streamlining the UN’s work. 

Moving from such backroom discussions to formal negotiations on UN reforms will be hard. The U.S., after all, retains huge influence across the organization despite its retreat. Like the other veto powers, it has the power to block any reforms to the UN Charter by refusing to ratify them. But it is possible that the Trump administration, which seems quite willing to cut ties with large parts of the UN system, will ultimately take a transactional approach to UN reform–allowing other States to reshape parts of the system that it wants to ignore, so long as they do not impinge on its direct interests. Regardless, the remaining friends of the UN in the Global North and the Global South need to start talking about how to rescue and preserve the multilateral system.

For too long, many UN members have talked about their desire to transform the UN system to meet twenty-first century challenges–and reflect twenty-first century dynamics–while surreptitiously relying on the U.S. to keep funding the institution. For good or ill, the Trump administration has rendered that strategy untenable. It is time for States that want multilateralism to work to shoulder a greater part of the burden, political and financial, of making it function. 

References

Gowan, Richard. 2020. “Trump Failed to Kill Multilateralism, and Might’ve Even Made It Stronger.” World Politics Review, November 3, 2020. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/29186/trump-failed-to-kill-multilateralism-and-might-ve-even-made-it-stronger. 

Gowan, Richard. 2025. “Doing ‘Less with Less’ at the UN”. International Crisis Group, May 16 2025. https://www.crisisgroup.org/global-united-states/doing-less-with-less-un. 

Submitted: June 8, 2025

Accepted for publication: June 25, 2025

Copyright © 2025  CEBRI-Journal.  This  is  an  Open  Access  article  distributed  under  the  terms  of  the  Creative  Commons  Attribution  License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited.