Eight years ago, when a freshman President Donald Trump rose to the green marble dais of the United Nations General Assembly hall for the first time, he was received in the cathedral of postwar multilateralism with dismissal and suspicion – even mockery.
Few seemed to take seriously an American president who appeared unsure of himself and who offered outlandish claims that might have worked with his political base, but from the U.N. assembly invited derisive laughter.
Yet Tuesday morning, when Mr. Trump takes the same stage in the first year of his second term, things are likely to be very different. He will stand at the golden stage more as the conqueror of the gasping liberal democratic internationalism – the U.N. at its apex – that he seemingly has no use for and has worked to vanquish.
Why We Wrote This
Unlike in his first, widely disrespected address to the United Nations eight years ago, President Donald Trump will face the globe’s preeminent multilateral institution as the standard-bearer of a post-multilateral era of big-power competition.
Instead of the outlier in the temple of global governance, he will speak this time to the assembly of the U.N.’s 193 member states as the voice of an emerging world order of America First foreign policy and big-power competition.
To Mr. Trump’s apparent liking, it’s an order that has fading use for either international cooperation or well-intentioned but expensive global development.
“This time, Trump comes to the U.N. as it faces a post-multilateral world that he has had a very important role in delivering. So, I think his audience will perhaps reluctantly pay closer attention to what he says than some of them did in 2017,” says Michael Doyle, a professor of international relations at Columbia University in New York.
“This time,” he adds, “the things he said then that were sort of freelance and outlandish and that suggested a U.S. president with almost no appreciation for the value of multilateral cooperation, are things he can do and indeed has done.”
Gone from the U.S. approach to the U.N. and to multilateralism more broadly, Dr. Doyle says, is the longtime tenet of U.S. foreign policy that the United States derives a good deal of its power from cooperation with international partners.
“Trump has no appreciation for the idea that things can be done with the assistance of allies that can’t be done on your own,” he says.
Forced downsizing
Long the U.N.’s chief benefactor, the United States is now forcing a substantial downsizing of the global body that parallels the Trump administration’s reform and narrowing of scope – some critics say hollowing out – of the State Department.
The U.S. under President Trump has (again) pulled out of UNESCO, the U.N.’s education and cultural affairs agency, and has greatly reduced its contributions to humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Program.
On Thursday, the State Department announced a new “America First Global Health Strategy” that redirects international health spending to programs and initiatives that will make the U.S. “safer,” and reduces funding for programs the administration deems “woke” and wasteful – including family planning and women’s health.
“What’s happening here is a turning away from the traditional underwriting of the U.N. by the U.S. towards a more U.S.-centric approach that devalues the idea that the U.S. has also been an outsize beneficiary of the international system,” says Anjali Dayal, assistant professor of international politics at Fordham University in New York.
“The U.S. under Trump is less interested in the soft power and values that it played a key role in instilling in the international system,” she adds, “and the U.N. is bearing the brunt of that shift.”
Indeed, some say the U.S. pivot has left the United Nations at its darkest moment since its creation 80 years ago.
“Clearly, Trump 2.0 is going to be much more detrimental to multilateralism in general and to the U.N. in particular,” says Waheguru Pal Sidhu, associate professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “When you have an America First foreign policy, multilateralism comes last.”
Administration officials say cutting U.S. support for the U.N. and its agencies is about getting the world body “back to basics.” On Friday the Senate confirmed Mike Waltz as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. In his confirmation hearing, President Trump’s former national security adviser said he would work to “make the U.N. great again” by paring it back to what he described as its “core purpose” of advancing “peace and security.”
Given what Dr. Sidhu says is an “existential financial crisis” for the U.N., Secretary-General António Guterres is undertaking a reorganization and downsizing of the institution that is based on a 30% budget cut.
“Odd split screen”
Yet, even as the U.S. of Donald Trump reduces its U.N. footprint, it remains the world’s most powerful nation and largest economy. That explains why Mr. Trump will be sought out for potentially valuable bilateral meetings by leaders from a wide range of countries – even as some of those same leaders might be among the grumblers at the president’s Tuesday speech, some experts in U.N. affairs say.
“I think [the General Assembly] … is going to offer an odd split screen,” Dr. Sidhu says. “On one side, we’ll see some of the same skepticism and even opposition to Trump in the auditorium that we saw in 2017, while on the other side, we’ll see many countries lining up to get their one-on-one with the U.S. president.”
One key reason for that, he adds, is President Trump’s turn toward tariffs as a centerpiece of U.S. trade policy – and countries’ quest to get the most favorable tariff rate possible for trading with the world’s largest economy.
This week’s high-level meetings in New York will also showcase how the U.S. pullback from the U.N. is ceding space and influence to a rising China.
But China is not interested in replacing the U.S. as the U.N.’s bankroller, or in assuming the mantle of leader of the postwar international order, some experts say. Instead, they see China expanding its international role through a kind of “China First” approach to the U.N. that aims to enhance Beijing’s influence in the body’s international agencies that can benefit China most – for example, the World Trade Organization.
“The U.N. and its agencies have been very good for China, but that doesn’t mean it’s about to turn around and fill the vacuum of leadership left by Trump’s retreat from multilateralism,” says Dr. Doyle. “Beijing values its veto on the Security Council,” he says, “and it is most interested in increasing its influence in those agencies that have played a role in China’s development and enhancing its prestige.”
What remains unclear – and what Fordham’s Dr. Dayal says will have her closely watching President Trump’s speech for clues – is whether, under Trump 2.0, the United States will increasingly treat the U.N. with a benign neglect, or if it undertakes something more aggressive.
“The question now is whether the U.S. steps back and more or less leaves it at that,” she says, “or whether it actively makes [as its goal] breaking international institutions and the international consensus the U.N. represents.”
“Neither option is positive for the U.N.,” she adds, but the latter “would be the most challenging and even destructive for its future.”
