At the United Nations General Assembly last week, U.S. President Donald Trump warned Iran he could “annihilate” the country or “drive them into hell” without a deal to resolve the war the U.S. and Israel launched in February.
Less than 24 hours later, Iran’s president got his rebuttal — the first for a country actively at war with the United States, according to the New York Times.
Standing at the same podium in New York, Masoud Pezeshkian said he rewrote his prepared remarks after hearing Trump’s threats. He held up photographs of the assassinated former Supreme Leader and of schoolchildren allegedly killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. He told the room that Iran would not “bend the knee” to Trump and his “bullying,” offering dialogue without the “language of force.”
Despite the public posturing, delegations from both sides were simultaneously holding talks through other channels. That effectively reduced the world’s premier deliberative body — an organization established to prevent the “scourge of war” — to a theater for the two leaders to perform for their respective audiences.
The choreography included walkouts. The U.S. representative demonstrably left the plenum during Pezeshkian’s speech, while droves of delegates departed when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke, his cue to proclaim them “moral cowards.”
With the UN unable to navigate competing interests, the organization is no longer able to fulfill its mission of preserving global peace and stability, “or more precisely, it has been rendered unable to do so,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told the assembly, pointing to crises in Gaza, Lebanon and Sudan.
Trump’s deal to expand the U.S. military presence in Greenland was signed in New York but outside the UN framework, underscoring the organization’s role as a stage instead of a workbench for global diplomacy.
Such futility is a flaw in its design. At its founding in 1945, the winners of World War II locked in postwar power dynamics. The founders routed enforcement through the Security Council and gave the five permanent members — the U.S., China, Russia, the U.K. and France — veto powers.
That defect was clearly evident during the Cold War, when Security Council vetoes were regular as Soviet and U.S. blocs faced off. While there was a brief period when the setup seemed to work as envisioned, that period is now over, buried by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.’s war in Iran and allegations of genocide in Gaza, which Israel denies.
So when the Security Council freezes, the General Assembly has little outlet to act on political pressure and the podium becomes a mere stage for airing grievances rather than a forum for “good neighbors” to resolve differences.
Secretary-General António Guterres, whose term expires at the end of this year, took the opportunity to make a renewed appeal for change, telling the assembly that global institutions still reflect “the power realities and interests of a largely bygone age.”
“We are clearly moving towards a multipolar world. And this movement is irreversible,” he said. “Building such a future begins with a recognition, especially by superpowers, that their power isn’t so super.”
The UN is trapped by Article 108 of its charter. The passage stipulates that amendments need to be approved by all five permanent members of the Security Council, so each has a veto over its own dilution of power. That’s a recipe for paralysis.
Its funding mechanism is also a weakness. The U.S. is the largest contributor, and in 2024 accounted for just over 30% of the financing for the UN and its agencies. That gives Washington outsized influence and Trump has used this leverage — and formed the Board of Peace with himself at the helm — to restrain the UN.
Trump at least didn’t renew threats to further reduce America’s role in the organization in his speech last week, but he still boasted about reducing staffing and budget contributions.
Despite the UN’s challenges and limitations, agencies like the World Food Programme, UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Health Organization still perform very real life-saving work that should continue without the threat of funding disruptions.
But if the UN can’t be reformed under current conditions and is ineffective at resolving conflicts, the question is: where does the global community go from here?
From a Ground Up perspective, one answer would be something new: a colloquium of global citizens.
Drawing inspiration from the 2021 Global Assembly, representatives would be selected from different locations in a weighted civic lottery to represent a cross-section of the world. It would serve as a tool of public pressure on issues such as security, climate and migration.
It would admittedly have limited impact in a hot crisis, but that’s a limitation the UN already faces. And if sufficiently visible, it would provide an alternative narrative to governments engaged in conflicts for their own ends.
By combining regular people with expert input, there’s potential to create pragmatic solutions that sidestep parochial political interests and apply pressure on local authorities to act. It would act as a complement to the UN’s mission rather than a replacement.
This is the devolution thesis applied globally. Like any such endeavor, it would be complicated to manage, organize and implement, but would offer fresh impetus to a global system that is stuck. It also means we don’t have to tear down what we have.
Shuttering the UN wouldn’t be my goal. I’ve had sympathy for the organization since I had an internship at its outpost in Vienna in the early 1990s. At the time, it seemed like the world was coming together after the end of the Cold War and the UN embodied that hope.
My boss was Polish and my colleagues were Indian, Finnish and Canadian. They were working together to try to make people’s lives a little bit better. Now, with our world so splintered and fragmented, it would be nice to reclaim that ethos.