By Rajan Philips –
Rajan Philips
Down but not out may be too uncharitable a way to describe a global agency that was launched with lofty expectations 81 years ago, and has just entered its ninth decade of existence with more forebodings than promises. The precarity of the UN’s circumstance is also a reflection of the crassness of its chief benefactor, the United States of America under its current president. Stellar American Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, both Democrats, led their country to virtually bankroll the formation of the UN after World War II. President Truman handpicked his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt’s widow and turn-of-the-century President Theodor Roosevelt’s niece, the highly accomplished Elanor Roosevelt, to spearhead the drafting of the UN Charter of Rights. That was the beginning of the era of human rights in human history. That was also the early stirrings of the civil rights era in American history.
From the plenitude it projected in 1945, America has fallen to the pits under its current President Donald J. Trump. The sight of his arriving at the UN with Melania Trump as First Lady, who may know little or nothing about Elanor Roosevelt, the greatest First Lady that America has had, says all about everything that is wrong with the US and its fallout for the UN. After Americans elected Trump to a second term as President, the fear of Trump pulling the US out of UN always loomed large. More so, in the wake of Trump-ordered withdrawals from UN agencies and the ungenerous defunding of US Aid programs. Last year at its 80th anniversary, UN insiders were wondering whether the agency had the wherewithal to keep going. In January this year, there were fears of an “imminent financial collapse.”
But nothing untoward happened. Trump did not pull US of the UN. Instead, the Trump Administration gave a financial breather by making a part payment of $725M out of a total $2.0 billion outstanding US dues to the UN. A further $102M was added to support UN peacekeeping. The payments were made a week before the Annual Sessions, perhaps as the US President’s voluntary entrance fee to address the General Assembly. The truth of the matter is that Trump needs the UN forum to validate himself, at least to his base in his own country.
His own actions overseas throughout 2026 – in Venezuela, in Iran and the Middle East, and on Greenland, not to mention his global tariff war or his bully-thy-neighbor bearing towards Canada – have forced him to show up and make his case at the UN, to his own satisfaction. The assembly hall was virtually full for his speech but it persuaded no one except his own entourage and the delegates from Israel. The same could be said of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who braved the ICC (International Criminal Court) arrest warrant against him to show up at the UN. Unlike during Trump’s speech, UN delegates left the hall in droves as Netanyahu arrived at the podium.
Besides the two notorious attendees, there were powerful absences this year, including China, India and South Africa, the heavyweights of the Global South and three of the five founding members of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). But none of them would wish the withering away of the UN, the way Trump and Netanyahu may entertain thoughts about a world without the UN. Even so, Trump has not precipitously pulled the US out of the UN in the first two years of his second term, and he does not have much time left to do any serious damage to the agency in the future.
Not only time, but also power is running out of Trump’s executive grasps. All indications are that Trump and the Republican Party will likely lose control of both the House and the Senate in the November midterm elections that are barely twenty days away. Even if Democrats do not win control of the bicameral Congress, the Trump Administration is already in disarray, and his Maga base is cracking up with infighting among wannabe Trumps.
What seems to be hitting home for almost all Americans is the extent of first family and cabinet corruption that has been growing exponentially during Trump’s second term as president. Trump’s personal fortunes have increased to $2.2 billion in 2025, up from $622 million in 2024. There are other myriads of corruption avenues involving the Trump presidency: pay for pardons; gifts and grafts; insider trading; crypto courses; Truth Social trust scam; and tariff reductions for gold gifts and golf businesses – from Switzerland to Indonesia to Vietnam; etc. etc. It is this barefaced moneymaking from the White House that is angering American citizens and raising expectations of a landslide electoral rebuke in November.
UN’s Predicaments
Even though Trump’s powers are waning and his threats are receding, the UN’s own circumstances are not getting any better. Its challenges involve both global turmoils that the agency has to deal with, as well as organizational weaknesses that impair its effectiveness and its influence over member countries. “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformations: A United Nations That Delivers for All,” is the agency’s official theme for its 81st year. The theme is more organizational than achievement oriented. On the eve of the 81st Anniversary, the US Statement Department declared on its website a goal of its own for the UN: “at this year’s session, the United States is pursuing one clear goal: delivering prosperity through peace, by bringing the UN “back to basics.”
Back to basics, whatever that might mean, has long been an American refrain for the UN. Under Trump and Secretary (of State) Marco Rubio, it has taken the form of an ideological fight against the so called global left elitists. The General Assembly sessions this year grappled with a range of issues, including climate change, AI threats, the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Iran war, the tragedy of Gaza, and the elusive two-state solution for Israel and Palestinians.
The climate change and AI crises are manifestly 21st century addons, all the others are new manifestations of old problems – as old as the UN itself. What is remarkable is that Trump has placed his villainous stamp on everyone of these issues, and has contributed nothing to positively resolving any of them. When the principal superpower goes rogue there is little that a global agency like the UN can do to contain the fallouts.
Yet the world cannot be without an organization like the UN. Almost all countries and their leaders would like the UN to continue even if only a few of them would be inclined to abide by its decisions. In fact, the world needs a stronger UN and not a weak UN. That was the message of the departing Secretary General António Guterres in what was his last speech to the General Assembly. “The world does not need a weaker United Nations,” said Secretary Guterres, “it needs a U.N. strong enough to face the world as it is — and determined enough to build the world as it should be.”
Mr. Guterres will be leaving the UN on 31 December 2026 after completing two five-year full terms in office. The search for a new Secretary General to succeed Mr. Guterres has begun but early signs are that there is no immediate consensus candidate to succeed him. The UN Secretary General (UNSG) is the de facto head of the organization, and is appointed for a term of five years by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council. The five permanent members of the Security Council can exercise their veto on a candidate, while no citizen of their can be a candidate for the position.
The eventual appointee has always been a compromise candidate from on of the ‘middle powers’ or smaller countries. In general, candidates who are first appointed with grudging unanimity often get their second term approved with generous unanimity. While there is no term limit on a Secretary’s tenure, incumbents have avoided going beyond two terms since the 1981 vetoing by China, of the third term bid by Austria’s Kurt Waldheim. And the only Secretary General to be denied a second term was Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali thanks to American vetoing in 1996.
Finding a Secretary General
Since 1997, the SG appointments have been following a rotational system to give representation to the UN’s five regional groups: African Group, Asia-Pacific Group, Eastern European Group, Latin American and Caribbean Group, and Western European and Others Group. Although the principle of gender equality is acknowledged, so far no woman has been appointed as Secretary General. It has been a long wait, considering the role played by a woman, Elanor Roosevelt, in the setting up of the UN charter enshrining gender rights, among others.
Secretary General António Guterres is the ninth Secretary General that UN has had since its inception 1945. He is the fifth UNSG from a European country – after Britain’s Gladwyn Jebb who started the list; Trygve Lie of Norway; the illustrious Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden whom President Kennedy called “the greatest statesman of our century,” after his plane crash death in Rhodesia (now Zambia), in 1961, which was also attributed to the CIA by global rumour; and Austria’s Kurt Waldheim.
Hammarskjold was succeeded by Burma’s U Thant who became the first non-European and first Asian Secretary General. Waldheim succeeded U Thant, and after Waldheim it was Latin America’s turn with the appointment of Javier Perez de Cuellar in 1982. Cuellar was followed by Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose successor was Ghana’s Koffi Annan, the first UN insider to become the Secretary General. After Koffi Annan it was South Korea’s Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon. António Guterres, who succeeded Ban Ki-moon, had been Prime Minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and is the first head of government to become UN Secretary General.
António Guterres’s main legacy may well be that he was the world’s most persistent voice on climate change. In an interview he gave Fiona Harvey, Environment Editor of the Guardian (22 September), he said as much while admitting that ‘voice’ is all that a UN Secretary General can muster as the office “has not much power, and there is no money.” He went on, “it is my duty to use that voice without any compromise, to tell the truth and to alert the international community to the dangers it faces. I have not the power to all of a sudden make everybody invest in renewables, but I have the duty to tell people that unless we accelerate from fossil fuels to renewables, unless we drastically reduce emissions in the next decade, we will be facing dramatic problems that will impact on the whole of humankind.”
An Electrical Engineer by profession and a former leader of both the Socialist Party of Portugal and the Socialist International, Guterres has no qualms about calling regressive spades for what they are: “There are vested interests that are interested in maintaining the present development model based on fossil fuels. You have a systematic campaign that is strongly financed by the huge profits of the sector that tries to divert attention [from] the impacts of fossil fuels.”
Although he has not been able to achieve much, Mr. Guterres’s legacy on climate actions will be a hard act to follow for his successor. Going by UN’s rotational system, this time it is the turn for someone from Latin America or the Caribbean to be appointed as Secretary General. The prospect of a fellow head of government, former Chilean president and UNHRC High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet, succeeding Guterres has been blown out of the water by US veto threat.
That leaves seven candidates contending with varying levels of support and veto threats in the Security Counsil. Four of them are women: Rebeca Grynspan, 70 year old Economist, former Vice President of Costa Rica, and current head of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development; Ms. Rodrigues-Birkett, 53, Guyana’s former Foreign Minister and UN Ambassador since 2020; María Fernanda Espinosa, 62, former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister of Ecuador, as well as UN Ambassador; and Ivonne Baki, 75, another Ecuadorean politician and diplomat, as well as the country’s first female ambassador to the United States, to France and Qatar.
The three male candidates are: Olara Otunnu, 75, an Ugandan politician and diplomat, and a former UN under secretary general for Kofi Annan; Rafael Grossi, 65, Argentinian career diplomat and head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has played a prominent role in the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear spill threats in in Ukraine after Russian invasion; and Macky Sall, 64, a Senegal President and Prime Minister.
There is no clear front runner, but Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Guyana’s Rodrigues-Birkett would seem to be garnering the most support in the Security Council. At long last, UN may have a female Secretary General. But the political world is more likely transfixed with the November midterm elections in the US and their fallout for the Trump presidency, than looking for the next UN Secretary General. At the same time, any fallout for the Trump presidency will have implications for the world and the United Nations. The implications will not amount to a swift reversal of all the Trump follies and return to pre-Trumpian normalcy. Rather they would slow down and avoid further dismantling of the world order and its agencies which did not seem possible even as recent as an year ago.