Under the new US President, Donald Trump, the United Nations will not flourish any more easily – quite the opposite. During his first term in office, the egomaniac made it all too clear what he thinks of the UN: nothing.

The US turning its back on the UN is not new

This turning away from the UN is by no means new. The United States of America, once an extremely proud co-founder of the UN – after all, the then US President Harry S. Truman gave both the opening and founding speech in 1945 – distanced itself more and more from the United Nations over the years. This can be attributed to the forgetting of the 50 million dead of the Second World War. It can also be attributed to the rise of nationalist thinking since 2015, not only in the US, and the world's shift to the right. But one can also consider the United Nations' obvious weaknesses as a reason for the US's turning away from the UN. A good example of this is the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In 2006, long before the egocentric Donald Trump first took office, the administration of US President George W. Bush voted against the establishment of the Human Rights Council. At the time, John Bolton was the US ambassador to the United Nations, a particularly harsh critic of the UN. Bolton later became US President Trump's national security adviser, whose ‘America first’ strategy took precedence over any form of multilateralism anyway.

However, it would be too easy to simply attribute the US's rejection of the UN Human Rights Council to American nationalism. The Council, which was established in 2006, does indeed have serious structural weaknesses. The UN General Assembly elects the 47 members of the Human Rights Council for a term of three years. In 2019, these included Cuba, Congo and Venezuela, three countries where human rights organisations repeatedly report extremely serious human rights violations. When, to put it mildly, suspects sit on the bench to investigate suspicions all over the world, one must indeed seriously question the usefulness of such an institution. After all, human rights are one of the core issues of the United Nations; any weakness in this regard strikes at the very heart of the entire organisation.

As early as 2017, the then US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, called for three reforms at a meeting in Geneva. She demanded that the council reduce its focus on Israel. She also wanted to reduce the number of votes required to expel members for blatant human rights violations. In addition, there should be fewer speeches and resolutions. 1] No majority was found for the first two points. At least the last point resulted in a task: the Human Rights Council set about finding out how it could talk and write less in the future. The Council would certainly benefit from the envisaged reduction in bureaucracy, if it is successful. But the fundamental weakness, that states that continuously commit serious human rights violations continue to belong to the body, will not change. Worse still: a majority at the UN was not reached on the abolition of this almost absurd situation until 2024.

Human rights abusers in the Human Rights Council

Or to put it another way: the United Nations continues to insist that human rights abusers belong to the world body that is supposed to take action against human rights abusers around the world. This is difficult to comprehend even for friends and supporters of the UN and also hardly stands up to the general argument that ‘the UN is far from perfect, but there is nothing better’.

Under US President Barack Obama, the United States was still active in the Human Rights Council, but in the summer of 2018, the Trump administration announced the US withdrawal from the Human Rights Council. At a press conference in Washington, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the UN Human Rights Council a ‘cesspool of political bias’. She made it clear that the US no longer wanted to belong to this ‘hypocritical and self-serving organisation’ that ‘makes a mockery of human rights’. She now regarded the reforms of the body she had proposed a year earlier as a failure: ‘These reforms were necessary to make the Council a serious defender of human rights’. The Council had been ‘too long a protector’ of those countries that had violated human rights. It was obvious ‘that our calls for reform have been ignored.’

The call for fundamental reforms of the United Nations is not new. As early as 1997, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed a fundamental reform of the organisation. In March 2005, he presented a comprehensive programme of reforms and policies. In his report ‘In larger freedom’ he addressed topics such as terrorism, development financing, expansion of the Security Council and the replacement of the Commission on Human Rights. But the truth is that Annan's reform efforts have largely fizzled out without success: unfortunately, the United Nations has developed into a kind of monster bureaucracy that seemingly takes care of everything, but can only make a difference in a few areas. By trying to shed the name ‘United Nations Organisation’ (UNO) and preferring to refer to itself only as ‘United Nations’ (UN), the organisation may have linguistically suppressed the organisational-bureaucratic aspect, but anyone who regularly deals with the United Nations knows that it is, above all, one thing: bureaucratic. All attempts to reduce or minimise this bureaucracy through reforms have failed to date – and unfortunately the same is likely for the 2024 reform plan.

A future pact with little future

At the UN General Assembly in 2024, a new attempt was made to reform the United Nations under the leadership of Germany and Namibia. The so-called Future Pact has set itself an ambitious goal: to make the United Nations fit for the problems of the 21st century. The pact contains around 50 action points, ranging from the fight against hunger and poverty to the UN's peace missions and the rejection of the arms race in space and the call for global regulation of artificial intelligence. The initiative for renewed reform was taken by Secretary-General António Guterres three years earlier, in 2021. He praised the reform package implemented by Germany and Namibia as ‘an important step in reforming international cooperation’ and emphasised in New York: ‘We are here to save multilateralism from the abyss.’ But in fact, the 2024 Future Pact is primarily intended to save the UN itself from the abyss. After all, how realistic is it that the US or China will subject their activities in space or their AI research to the wishes of the international community – rather unlikely, especially with the new US president, Donald Trump?

50-year-old plan

The plan also envisages significant changes to the international financial architecture, i.e. the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), so that it should be easier for the countries of the Global South to obtain loans. But that is exactly what the economically less developed countries had already tried 50 years ago – in vain. In 1974, the ‘Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’ was adopted at a special session of the UN General Assembly, supplemented by a ‘Charter on the Economic Rights and Duties of States’. In this declaration, the participants agreed on fair prices for the Third World, the gradual removal of trade barriers to facilitate access for developing countries to the markets of industrialised countries, and a significant increase in development aid.

‘New order’ only on paper

All countries agreed to this “new order”, including the industrialised nations. Therefore, in the 1970s, the developing countries firmly believed that they would achieve prosperity comparable to that of the western industrialised world through the United Nations. It turned out to be a huge mistake and a huge disappointment for the developing nations when they realised in the following years that the adoption of the charter, although well-intentioned, was by no means serious. Because when it came down to it, the West let its negotiating skills run free and barely turned on the money taps. The industrialised nations made a few negligible concessions at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), but the expected structural change in the global trade system failed to materialise. A ‘new world economic order’ emerged only on paper at the United Nations, but not in reality.

Lowest common denominator

UN Secretary-General António Guterres probably had an ambitious reform agenda in mind when he launched the initiative to reform the United Nations. But in the end, the member states could only agree on the ‘lowest common denominator’ – and it remains to be seen whether the future package is worth the 30 pages of paper on which it was written. Especially since it may be assumed that US President Donald Trump will not even take note of this plan.