Can the United Nations Survive Without the US?

ZURICH — Walk into the Palace of Nations in Geneva these days and one of the first things you’ll notice is a sign informing visitors that the power will be shut off between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. The home of the United Nations office and the site of thousands of international conferences a year is now also closed on weekends in order to reduce electricity costs and security personnel. The escalators at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights were switched off some time ago, and the outside lighting and heating at the U.N. headquarters have also been reduced. 

It is chilly in more ways than one.

The United Nations is in the midst of what Secretary-General António Guterres in January called an “imminent financial collapse.” Layoffs have swept through the offices of many agencies of the U.N., like the World Health Organization, with U.N workers holding protests in Geneva in May last year to denounce the staff cuts and austerity. 

“Staff are being stretched to a breaking point,” a former U.N. official and current Swiss mission diplomat tells Truthdig on condition of anonymity. With job mandates unchanged but funding sharply reduced, many U.N. employees are doing the work of two or three people. Short-term contracts are the norm now, and long-term career prospects are practically nonexistent, she explains.

It is one of the “worst budget crises” in the organization’s 80-year history, Andreas Zumach, a veteran U.N. correspondent who has covered the organization for German and Swiss newspapers for decades, tells Truthdig. 

Sign-language interpretation at the Human Rights Council in Geneva has been cut, reducing deaf delegates’ and observers’ access to proceedings. And at the sharpest end of the austerity, life-saving medicines aren’t being distributed in nations that need them the most, like Chad and Ukraine. Food rations are being reduced, with refugees in countries like Kenya receiving just a quarter of the standard amount. The people most negatively affected are the same as always: women, children, the sick and the marginalized.

The source of the crisis is not a mystery. Since President Donald Trump took office, the United States, historically the U.N.’s largest single donor, has withheld billions in dues — owing $2.19 billion in mandatory payments — and has also defunded dozens of programs devoted to humanitarian assistance and human rights. These programs  depend on voluntary contributions, which account for nearly 80% of the U.N.’s total budget. Donald Trump has withdrawn from the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Paris Climate Agreement, dismissing each as contrary to U.S. interests. 

If this feels like a betrayal, it helps to remember that U.S. ambivalence toward the U.N. is almost as old as the institution itself. The systematic weakening began in earnest under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, when he used funding as a cudgel against what he perceived as a pro-Soviet tilt among newer member states. His ideological soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, followed his lead and withdrew the U.K. from UNESCO — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — in 1985. However, the U.N. survived. It learned to function under austerity.

Now, mandatory contributions — the assessed fees every member country pays to keep the basic machinery running — are still trickling in from other countries. These amounts are foreseeable and largely intact, with 95% of the owed amount corresponding to the U.S.’ debt. 

“It is important to recall that the U.N. does not exist as an independent entity,” Zumach says. The U.N. is its 193 member states — a body defined not by any single nation’s generosity or spite, but by the collective willingness of governments to cooperate, he adds. And for many of those countries, particularly the poorest among them, the U.N. is not an abstraction. It is the “institution that shows up after the earthquake, that keeps the food coming,” he argues.

The United States has never been as central to the U.N.’s actual functioning as its financial dominance might suggest, Zumach suggests. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, has been ratified by every U.N. member state — except one, the U.S. Likewise, the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases, the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty and many others. In each case, the world moved forward without the U.S.’ ratification, sometimes despite active U.S. opposition. The lack of U.S. signatures to treaties are so numerous they constitute a pattern. So U.N members have spent decades learning to build consensus around the U.S. rather than with it.

The paralysis at the top

At a time of war, genocide and global economic and political power struggles, it is alarming that many of the countries leading or supporting wars are among the five veto-wielding U.N. Security Council members — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Since October 2023, a climate of fear has taken hold at the U.N. and senior U.N. officials now live with death threats, our diplomatic source says. Israel’s effort to discredit the secretary-general and its bulldozing of U.N. refugee agency offices in East Jerusalem represent an unprecedented attack on the institution’s legitimacy. The level of hostility witnessed firsthand in Security Council sessions, she says, is difficult to comprehend.

Former allies are now active adversaries. The erosion isn’t just financial — it’s ideological. Values agreed upon after World War II, such as the safeguarding of peace and human rights outlined in the 1945 United Nations Charter, are being openly discarded. The U.N. floor, in this sense, mirrors the world’s political regression.

The geopolitical tensions between today’s superpowers has rendered the Security Council largely ineffective. None of the veto-holding powers is willing to relinquish it. Reforming the Security Council would require amending the U.N. Charter, which in turn requires the consent of the very powers whose privileges are at stake. 

“The global human rights system is in peril,” warned Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch, in his World Report 2026.

Changes within the U.N.

And yet the U.N. has found ways to act around its most powerful members before. The International Criminal Court — the institution now issuing arrest warrants for sitting heads of government — was conceived and built within the U.N. system despite the objections of the veto powers. A determined, transcontinental coalition, backed by civil society organizations, made it real. That history matters.

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has long argued that the Security Council must be revamped. The solutions are sitting ready in the drawer; he proposed a long list of possibilities for reforms as early as 1997. Currently, reform efforts are real, but incremental to the point of being symbolic. Small changes — like a recent initiative requiring the General Assembly to discuss every Security Council veto — represent enormous diplomatic undertakings, yet move the needle only marginally. 

What the U.N. needs now is both a more assertive secretary-general and a determined coalition of peace-loving countries, Zumach argues, adding that Guterres has spoken clearly and often about the crisis engulfing the organization but he was increasingly ignored. His role, as Zumach puts it, has always been “more secretary than general,” its power inseparable from the personality wielding it. 

The best holders of the office, Trygve Lie and Annan among them, were “willing to confront powerful governments directly,” Zumach says. The two candidates currently nominated to replace Guterres in 2027 — Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile, and Rafael Grossi, the Argentinian director of the International Atomic Energy Agency — will each face the same essential question: Can they compel powerful member states to take them seriously?

Europe, meanwhile, has spent decades positioning itself as a faithful steward of the multilateral order while declining to exercise real political leadership within it. Zumach is pointed on this score. European governments, he argues, have hidden behind U.S. power for so long that “they’ve forgotten how to act independently.” They could refuse to participate in conflicts they deem unjust. They could mediate between India and China. They could take a genuinely independent position on the Middle East. “Instead, they hedge,” he says.

“Europe — wrongly — views the U.N. as an instrument for keeping the faraway places of the world in order,” Zumach says, referring to the Global South. He advocates for something different: genuine political emancipation, with Europe acting as a global player on its own terms, not as a subordinate of Washington. And that does not require it to become a military power, he says.

What comes next

In September last year, Trump addressed the U.N. General Assembly. By most accounts, it was a sustained exercise in mockery and grievance. He called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and criticized the organization for blocking his plans to refurbish the U.N.’s New York headquarters years ago. Even as he criticized European nations for their immigration policies, he took time to complain that the building “did not even get the marble floors I promised them.” 

Dismantling or obstructing international institutions has been a project of the U.S right for decades; what’s new is the speed and the scale of the execution. The consequences, if the U.N. cannot stabilize its finances and its mission, extend well beyond the halls of Geneva and New York. Frameworks like Trump’s so-called Board of Peace are waiting in the wings. A world in which the U.N. gradually implodes — not with a dramatic rupture, but through slow institutional decay — is a world in which space is left to other potentially less inclusive frameworks to fill the vacuum. 

The United Nations turned 80 last year. Whether the institution can survive a full century depends, in no small part, on whether the rest of the world’s governments are willing to pay for the things they claim to believe in. According to our diplomatic source, despite everything, graduate students in international affairs in countries like the U.S. and Switzerland are still eager to work in the sector, a sign of ongoing broader support for what the U.N. stands for. 

The institution, however broken, remains the only global vessel for peace we have — echoing the famous observation by former U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld: The U.N. was not created to bring humanity to heaven, but to save it from hell.

The lights in Geneva are being switched off at 5 o’clock. Someone is going to have to turn them back on.