UN-nerved: How Trump's Victory is Seen at the United Nations

Diplomats and international officials at the United Nations in New York have responded to the election of Donald J. Trump as the next U.S. President with weary resignation rather than outright panic. In contrast to 2016, when Trump’s first victory caught the world organisation off balance, many UN insiders had assumed he would make a comeback this time. They have been quietly discussing the implications of the form that the next U.S. administration will take in New York throughout 2024. 

This does not mean that the UN is well set up to manage Trump’s return. The next President and his team are likely to sow a good deal of drama and dissension in Turtle Bay at a time when the institution is already reeling from extended arguments over Gaza and Ukraine. On 11th November, Trump nominated Elise Stefanik – a stalwart defender of his agenda in Congress – as the next U.S. ambassador to the UN, praising her as an “America First fighter.” While we cannot predict all the fights that lie ahead at the UN, it is possible to predict what some of the flash points will be, and think through how to manage them.

One overarching question is whether there is a coalition of UN members that is willing and able to lead efforts to counter U.S. pressures on the UN over the next four years. During Trump’s first term, European governments led by France and Germany took a prominent role in defending multilateralism. This time around, however, European leaders are juggling multiple Trump-related challenges – including the risks of a transatlantic trade war and Washington stepping back from NATO – and U.S. policy towards the UN is unlikely to be at the top of their agenda. Nonetheless, Western officials fret that if they do not invest some effort in defending international cooperation the main beneficiary will be China, which will see and take the opportunity to expand its influence at the UN.

It is fairly easy to foresee some of Trump’s moves at the UN by reviewing his behaviour towards the organisation from 2017 to 2021. The once and future President was occasionally quite positive towards the UN, and obviously enjoyed his visits to New York for the annual meeting of the General Assembly, where other leaders laughed at his jokes. But he had no compunction about condemning and boycotting multilateral mechanisms that he did not like, including the Paris climate change accord and the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, which Republicans argue is biased against Israel. The White House also fiercely opposed the Global Compact on Migration, a largely toothless framework for international cooperation on migration management that Trump’s advisers claimed would weaken their nation’s borders. While the Biden team re-engaged with all these mechanisms, it is safe to assume that the next Trump administration will pull out both those mechanisms and the other UN frameworks it previously boycotted, and will do so very quickly once in office.

One litmus test of how negative the administration will be towards the UN as a whole will be its treatment of the World Health Organization (WHO). Trump accused the WHO of covering up China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and announced that the U.S. would quit the body. This process was not complete by the end of his term, and President Biden brought it to a halt. It is possible that Trump – having targeted the WHO to distract from his own handling of the coronavirus – will let bygones be bygones and not return to the withdrawal option. If he does decide to withdraw from the WHO, it will imply that he nurses lasting grudges against the UN.

While UN officials accept that the U.S. will exit parts of the system, their broader concern is that Washington will also severely reduce its funding for UN activities as a whole. The first Trump administration pushed for cuts in many UN budgets – for example around the costs of UN peacekeeping – although Congress reversed some proposed cuts. Next year, however, the Republicans are set to control Congress, and many members of the party are lobbying for stringent financial penalties on the UN in response to its displays of support for the Palestinians during the Israel-Hamas war.  In a worst-case scenario, the U.S. could simply refuse to pay its contributions to the UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets, which add up to nearly ten billion US dollars a year. As the U.S. covers roughly a quarter of these contributions, the resulting financial gap would be huge, although UN officials hope to cobble together enough cash to keep operations going through 2025.

Turning to the Security Council, it is pretty certain that Trump is likely to ratchet up the Biden administration’s stance of strong support for Israel (Elise Stefanik has accused the outgoing administration of being too soft on the Palestinian Authority). That will potentially set up further confrontations with the majority of UN members, who have been volubly critical of the U.S. position on Gaza. Washington is also likely to look for ways to restore UN sanctions on Iran that were suspended as part of the Obama-era nuclear deal, which was one of the last Trump administration’s obsessions in New York in its later years.

When it comes to other crises, including Ukraine, all bets are off.  If the U.S. pushes the Ukrainians into a ceasefire with Russia next year, as many of Kyiv’s supporters fear, it is possible that Moscow could ask the Security Council to pass a resolution supporting it (Russia persuaded the Council to endorse the controversial “Minsk 2” deal on Donbas in 2015). This could create friction between the U.S. and European NATO countries worried about formalising a bad bargain with Russia.

The Trump administration could also wind down Biden-era initiatives at the Security Council, including some U.S. efforts to improve ties with the African group at the UN. While Biden’s team has generally aimed to minimise the UN’s role in the Middle East crisis, it has seen the UN as a useful platform for addressing African concerns. In December 2023, for example, the U.S. and Ghana negotiated a Security Council resolution creating a framework for the UN to fund peace operations led by the African Union. Republicans in Congress were highly critical of this proposal and its potential financial implications for the U.S. – which would again carry a hefty chunk of the proposed costs – and it is probable that the next administration will oppose taking it further.

Perhaps the biggest question about the next administration’s posture at the UN is how confrontational it will be towards China. The first Trump team adopted an increasingly hawkish approach towards limiting Chinese power at the UN during its term in office, culminating in the two powers’ arguments over COVID-19. By 2020, the U.S. was lambasting Beijing over its purported role in the pandemic in the Security Council, and the State Department created an envoy tasked with keeping Chinese candidates out of senior UN jobs. The Biden administration has also been wary of China’s influence at the UN, but has also tried to avoid excessive public showdowns – in 2022, for example, U.S. and Chinese diplomats had back-channel contacts on how to avoid Russia’s war on Ukraine freezing cooperation on all other issues in the Security Council. If the next administration reverts to a more explicitly confrontational posture towards China, it could chill UN diplomacy as a whole.

While UN officials and UN member states brace for the return of President Trump, it is not clear who – if anyone – can lead efforts to manage the fallout. Some of the burden will fall on Secretary-General António Guterres, who also had to navigate relations with Trump during his first term. He handled the challenge rather well the first time around, building a surprisingly solid personal rapport with the President. Some members of his team say in private that Guterres found it easier to work with the tough but transactional Trump than the aloof Biden. But the Secretary-General now faces some additional handicaps in dealing with Washington, including the fact that he has been loudly critical of Israel over Gaza, annoying many Republicans. He also only has two years of his final term left, and the race to replace him will hot up in 2025. Aspirants to replace him will need to tread painfully carefully as they lay out their stalls to lead the UN in tandem with a Trump administration, especially if the U.S. undermines the organisation’s budget.

Looking beyond the Secretary-General, many UN members will watch to see how the EU’s members – and friends like Britain and Norway – meet the moment. During Trump’s first term, the Europeans did a yeomanly job defending multilateral principles and institutions. Germany and France launched an “Alliance for Multilateralism” to act as a laboratory for new thinking on international cooperation (this loose coalition of like-minded states faded away in the Biden era). EU members coordinated unusually closely in the Security Council from 2017 to 2021 to stymie U.S. proposals on issues like undercutting the Iranian nuclear deal. European treasuries scraped around to locate additional Euros to help out UN agencies that lost American dollars. While there were some outliers – Hungary, for example, coordinated with the Trump team to challenge UN proposals on migration – Anthony Dworkin and I concluded in 2019 that “the EU remains the most consistent and best-resourced supporter of a strong multilateral system in the world today.”

European officials insist that they will still step up to defend the UN, but it is clear that the circumstances this time are different. Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine have stretched European budgets, with many European governments already reducing spending on the UN. Some EU members, especially those on the bloc’s eastern flank, have also been frustrated by the Security Council’s inability to penalise Moscow and the fact that countries from the so-called Global South have been tepid in their condemnations of Russia’s actions. In institutional terms, the top priority for most European leaders in the coming months will be looking for ways to reduce the incoming President’s suspicions of NATO and the EU. The UN will be an afterthought.

Yet despite this inevitable hierarchy of priorities, European governments – and like-minded partners from other regions – should still look for ways to preserve multilateral diplomacy. Despite differences over questions like Ukraine, the EU and its allies have been able to use the UN as a platform to engage non-Western countries on issues including international development and cooperation on Artificial Intelligence in recent years. In an increasingly fragmented international environment, they will need to work with these countries – and relevant international agencies – on problems such as migration, global health and crisis response in the years ahead. The UN is only one among many channels for this sort of cooperation, and the U.S. can do a lot to weaken it, but it is still a unique platform where states can interact quite easily.

And while many non-Western UN members will now expect the U.S. to distance itself from the organisation, a more general Western retreat from multilateralism would create even greater disruption. It would create space for China in particular to gain more authority across international institutions. Beijing was able to use Trump’s first term to frame itself as an alternative guarantor of the international system to the United States. It will likely see the return of Trump – and all the drama that is liable to ensue at the UN - as an opportunity to assert this role once again. In the Biden era, U.S. and European officials have quietly coordinated to limit Chinese influence in international institutions by investing more in those institutions themselves. But European diplomats in New York acknowledge that the balance of power in the multilateral system is changing, and if the U.S. pulls away from many parts of the UN that process will accelerate (Secretary-General Guterres has made a point of cultivating good relations with Beijing for just this reason).  While European powers look to stabilise their relations with the Trump administration, they should also aim to invest sufficient political and financial resources in the UN system to ensure that they retain some leverage in the organisation during a period of disorder.