Yes, the UN is terrible – but right now, we need it desperately

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Quiz question: What country surpasses Haiti, Somalia and Congo as a deadbeat and rogue nation?

Answer: In the halls of the United Nations, it’s the good old USA.

The Trump administration is delinquent on UN dues, while 141 countries – including those mentioned above – are fully paid up. And while other countries at least pretend to advance peace in the spirit of the UN, President Donald Trump used his UN speech to threaten to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into hell”. It was a rare instance of a world leader taking to the UN podium to muse about whether to commit what sounds like genocide.

All of this underscores a tragedy of our era: some 130 armed conflicts are under way around the globe, more than double the number in 2009, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a growing share of the challenges afflicting us are international and require multilateral solutions, yet the major powers are marginalising the UN and rendering it even less effective than usual.

Fuel prices are surging. Trump’s Iran war has spread to Yemen and the Red Sea. Russia is engaging in so-called grey-zone attacks in Europe. There is a risk of war with China over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Drugs, epidemics, artificial intelligence, computer hacking, terrorism, human trafficking, climate change, looming famine in Somalia, the toll of war in Ukraine, Sudan and the Gaza Strip – all of these challenges demand co-operative responses, and the UN is an obvious forum to develop them.

For many of these problems, the UN is becoming almost irrelevant.

Trump last year derided the UN as full of “empty words”, and he had a point. The organisation is a timid Tower of Babel that is more effective at issuing paper than at solving conflicts; hell is a UN meeting.

“The cost is measured in lives,” said Nadia Murad, a Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Yazidi region in Iraq was surrounded by Islamic State fighters in 2014 for nearly two weeks. “No one came to help us,” she told me, and she ended up kidnapped by IS and was raped for months. Her mother and six brothers were killed.

Yet if the United Nations is periodically paralysed, it’s also vital and sometimes a godsend.

“I have also seen UN staff members remain in places after everyone else has left, doing work no one else is willing to do,” Murad said. “That work is indispensable. That is precisely why the UN must do it better.”

Critics can denounce UN workers as “fatally arrogant parasites”, as President Javier Milei of Argentina put it a few days ago, but I’ve been held at gunpoint alongside courageous UN humanitarians in the Central African Republic who were trying to bring assistance to a desperate area after other aid workers had fled. I’ve seen front-line UN workers living out of cargo containers in Somalia, sleeping in tents in South Sudan, driving down perilous roads in Congo and standing up to gunmen in Yemen – risking their lives to save children from war, rape and disease.

One of the heroes of the 20th century was James Grant, who led UNICEF and in 1982 engineered the child survival revolution. He and his team employed vaccines and better treatment of diarrhoea to save 25 million lives in his lifetime, and countless millions since.

When have critics of the UN done anything half so noble?

When have critics of the UN put their lives on the line for others, like the 136 UN employees who died in the line of duty last year? Or like the 73 UN staff members currently held prisoner by the Houthis in Yemen?

Today in Congo, UN workers are combating the Ebola outbreak. In Somalia, they are feeding starving children. In Gaza, they are distributing aid. If the United States was distinguished during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza by providing 2000-pound bombs that Israel used to destroy neighbourhoods, the UN stood out for trying to achieve peace and get aid through Israeli checkpoints.

What’s the opposite of UN multilateralism? It’s Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s Trump’s attack on Iran. It’s Elon Musk “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”, as he put it, by one count costing more than 750,000 lives. So for all my impatience with plodding UN bureaucracy, I’ll take the United Nations any day over great-power jingoism and caprice.

At stake is not just the UN itself but the broader global architecture. Trump’s swipes at NATO are a gift to Russia. His assault on the International Criminal Court is a gift to warlords. His withdrawal from the World Health Organisation is a gift to viruses.

Sure, bash the United Nations; it often deserves it. But my guess is that millions more children would die every year if it weren’t for UNICEF, the World Food Program, the UN Refugee Agency and the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Understand also that the UN is a crumbling pillar of what is left of this geopolitical global order that the United States helped create after World War II and that has so benefited us and the world. And note that one reason for the infuriating UN paralysis and timorousness is that great powers throw their weight around, often vetoing constructive action and, in the case of the United States, slashing budgets as well.

I fear that the paralysis may get worse.

The United Nations is supposed to choose a new secretary-general this year, and this is a moment when the world needs a charismatic, outspoken leader who could use the bully pulpit and tackle the globe’s security and humanitarian crises. Sadly, that seems exactly what the United States, China and Russia are determined to avoid.

There is growing concern that Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin may be unable to agree on any of the current candidates for secretary-general and that they will settle on some innocuous dark horse so mild and inoffensive that the UN will be further marginalised and weakened.

The result would very likely be more Ebola outbreaks, more war, more paralysis in confronting the common threats to humanity – and more darkness descending on our planet.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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