The U.N. Thought It Was Prepared for Trump's Return. It Wasn't

This article by Richard Gowan was published at worldpoliticsreview.com on March 19, 2025.
It is now almost exactly two months since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House and set about weakening the United Nations. On his first day in office, Trump announced that the U.S. would quit the Paris Agreement on climate change as well as the World Health Organization. At the time, I argued that these were predictable maneuvers, as he had taken similar steps in his first term.
Diplomats and international officials in New York were resigned to Trump taking early pot-shots at the U.N. but hoped that he would move on to other targets.
Two months later, U.N. insiders admit that the new administration has done far more harm to the institution than they had expected. And they worry that it will do even greater damage before long.
While the administration's cuts to foreign aid have hit U.N. agencies hard, U.N. officials had expected to face financial strains. But Washington has also blocked information-sharing by U.S. government entities with their U.N. counterparts on issues ranging from epidemics to indicators of famine. That has stopped the flow of data that U.N. agencies often relied on more than they would care to admit.
In parallel, U.S. diplomats in New York and Geneva have instructions to purge multilateral documents of references to words the Trump administration dislikes, like "gender" and "diversity." These strictures have upset routine U.N. committee processes on issues ranging from children's wellbeing to peacekeeping, as U.S. negotiators have focused on these semantic points to the exclusion of all other topics. Their foreign counterparts quip that U.S.
diplomats simply use the "Ctrl+F" keyboard shortcut to search draft texts for offending nouns and verbs to cut, in order to win credit with Washington.
Foreign officials in New York had always expected the Trump administration to be transactional rather than principled in its multilateral diplomacy. But its obsession with rooting out supposedly leftist notions has convinced many that it is ultimately following a right-wing ideological template, making it significantly harder to bargain with. The U.S. has reinforced this view by circulating a questionnaire to U.N.
agencies asking if they have had any association with communists or other anti-American forces.
While senior figures in New York have tracked the White House's attacks, they have had few real openings to understand U.S. thinking. The Senate confirmation of Trump's nominee as ambassador to the U.N., Rep. Elise Stefanik, has been put on hold to allow Stefanik to remain in Congress, as the slim and unruly Republican majority makes her vote indispensable for upcoming budgetary negotiations. Beleaguered diplomats at the U.S. mission to the U.N.
have tended to postpone big decisions until her eventual arrival, which is now expected in early April but could slip further into the future. Some major U.S. initiatives - such as the decision to side with Moscow rather than Kyiv in a series of General Assembly and Security Council votes in February marking the anniversary of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine - have seemed quite haphazardly put together.
The bleakest observers suspect that the Trump administration not only does not care about the U.N. but actively wants to subvert it.
Worried U.N. member states have been urging the organization's leaders to try to get ahead of this burgeoning crisis. In February and early March, major financial donors to the U.N. fretted that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres - who handled Trump quite successfully in his first term - was not taking the scale of the current U.S. threat seriously. Last week, Guterres announced a review of the U.N.'s mandates and structures to identify savings and efficiencies.
He has, rather unconvincingly, tried to present this as an independent initiative rather than a stop-gap response to Trump.
Looking ahead, denizens of the U.N. bubble broa...