Trump is setting up the U.N. and its next leader for failure

How risible and despicable: In addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump once again bragged that “while others have spoken of peace, I have made peace.” Then he rattled off the “eight” wars he has supposedly settled, before boasting about the war he waged and won against Venezuela and defending the war he is waging, but seems unable to win, against Iran, even musing about whether to “annihilate” it.

When he refers to “others” who only speak about peace, Trump means the United Nations, which he and his MAGA followers never miss an occasion to belittle. Therein lies a non sequitur that strikes at the foundation of the U.N. and the international system it represents: The American president in fact resembles his Russian counterpart in accelerating the decline of the U.N. system, which both hold in contempt.

Trump and Vladimir Putin each lead one of the so-called P5, or permanent and veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council. (The others are China, Britain and France.) In theory, the council is the body meant to safeguard the U.N. Charter and prevent another major war.

In practice, Trump and Putin have themselves violated that charter, by attacking sovereign states such as Iran and Ukraine. And there is nothing the U.N. or its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, can do about it, no matter how much they “speak” about peace.

The U.N. system is “rotting from the head down,” Richard Gowan, an expert at the International Crisis Group, told me, where the head is not the secretary-general but those P5, and in particular America and Russia.

That’s a crucial insight as this year’s U.N. General Assembly in New York is consumed not only by the world’s multiplying conflicts but also by the search for a successor to Guterres, whose term expires at the end of the year.

The race to succeed him is wide open, with seven candidates. The current front-runners are Rebeca Grynspan, a former vice president of Costa Rica who has been running the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, the permanent representative to the U.N. of Guyana. That suggests the next secretary-general may well be a woman from Latin America. But anything could happen.

The bigger question is what role the next U.N. secretary-general will play and what the P5 allow. If current trends continue, the Great Powers will keep demolishing the postwar order while blaming its demise on increasingly irrelevant secretaries-general until the entire U.N. system collapses.

This is a dramatic change from the stature of secretaries-general and their relationship with Washington and the other P5 capitals during much of the Cold War. Thant Myint-U, a former U.N. official, describes those secretaries-general of yore as “mediators-in-chief of the world.” They didn’t wait to be invited to do their part. But the Great Powers also did theirs by encouraging and supporting the U.N.’s efforts.

In the 1950s Dag Hammarskjold helped to end the Suez Crisis of 1956, when he defended the U.N. Charter against two members of the P5, Britain and France, negotiated with the leader of Egypt and kept the trust of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s, U Thant, Hammarskjold’s successor (and Thant Myint-U’s grandfather), intermediated between John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro to save the world from nuclear Armageddon. It turned out that it was easier for Khrushchev to back down in a conversation with the neutral U.N. secretary-general than to bow to an ultimatum from an American president. In the 1980s, Javier Perez de Cuellar used skillful diplomacy to help end the war between Iran and Iraq and other conflicts in Central America and Africa.

In the 1990s, however, the office of the secretary-general and the functioning of the entire U.N. started changing. America was suddenly the only superpower left, and interstate conflict (as distinct from civil wars) became less frequent.

The world, including American presidents, expected the U.N. to branch out: into development, human rights, education and more. That trend peaked in 2015, when the U.N.’s member states sealed the Paris Agreement to slow climate change and also adopted 17 so-called Sustainable Development Goals, from ending poverty and hunger to educating women and girls.

That was also the year in which Trump rode down his golden elevator to announce his first presidential run. In retrospect, it marks the high point of global optimism that multilateral cooperation can solve the world’s problems, even beyond the U.N.’s original mission of preventing war between the major powers.

The decade since then mostly reads like a record of failure. This month the U.N. said that the world has failed to slow global warming to the limits agreed in Paris, and switched to Plan B, which it calls a pathway to “overshoot, peak and decline.” I call it a white flag.

It’s a similar story with those Sustainable Development Goals. Of 139 targets the U.N. set itself for 2030, it’s making progress on only 36%, while stalling on half and actually regressing on 15%, including biggies such as poverty, hunger, gender equality, climate change and conflict.

But whose fault is that? Trump and his MAGA acolytes point to the U.N. and its secretary-general. But how can the world fight climate change when Trump has withdrawn (for the second time) the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, from that Paris Agreement and denies that the climate even needs saving?

How can hunger and poverty decrease when Russia fights an illegal war that has cut off grain shipments to poor countries or when America launches a war that makes fuel and fertilizer unaffordable for swathes of less developed nations?

The SDGs still exist in the U.N.’s public-relations efforts; this week’s gathering in New York includes a swanky SDG “lounge.” Outside the perimeter, though, they have been dead at least since the Trump administration rejected the goals, calling them outgrowths of a woke ideology that “lost at the ballot box” (presumably the American presidential election of 2024).

The decline of the U.N. is even more evident in its more traditional function of peacekeeping. The U.N. hasn’t mandated a new peacekeeping mission since 2014. A decade ago, its “blue helmets” numbered more than 100,000; that number has shrunk to about 50,000; it will keep decreasing if, as expected, the U.N., under U.S. pressure, ends its peacekeeping operation in Lebanon. The largest drop in the number of peacekeepers occurred in 2025, owing to a funding crisis created by member states, notably the U.S.

For skeptics of the U.N., defunding the bloated U.N. agencies is the point, the better to remind the U.N. of its original focus on preventing war. But wars are multiplying — 2025 saw the most state-based conflicts, 65 in total, since 1946. Once again, it’s easy and tempting to blame the U.N.

But if the U.N. seems absent in these conflicts, it’s because the P5 have made the security council all but irrelevant. France and the U.K. haven’t exercised their vetoes since 1989. But the U.S., Russia and China wield theirs in a way that shields their interests and allies and prevents any collective attempt to solve today’s major wars in Ukraine or the Middle East. Above all, Russia and the U.S. are the aggressors.

This is the context in which the search for Guterres’s successor is taking place. But which leader of stature would want to step into such a thankless role? The secretary-general “is always going to be the person who, even though he or she has no power, might be scapegoated,” says Thant Myint-U.

Gowan at the International Crisis Group agrees. “There’s a very high risk you’re setting up the next secretary-general for failure,” he told me; “and then the conclusion will be, oh well, the U.N. is rubbish.”

That may just be what Trump and many of his supporters want. They should be careful what they wish for. In the 1930s, world leaders made the League of Nations irrelevant; the result was World War II. My advice: Stop sabotaging and ridiculing the U.N. and start backing it, so the United Nations can finally start doing its job.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics.