The UN’s founding audacious promise was to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. For seven decades, the institution functioned as the global platform for dialogue, conflict resolution, and joint problem-solving. As the international community faces an avalanche of challenges from the war in Ukraine and Gaza, to climate change, pandemics, and migration, the UN faces one of the most precarious moments in its history. The high-level week at the General Assembly revealed how easily this fragility can shatter. No show of solidarity. No shared vision. Instead, the Assembly saw clashing world views over the purpose and function of the UN. From his return to power earlier this year, Trump seemed to have adopted the international stage as his new soapbox, taking with him a preposterous sense of grievance against multilateral institutions. While Macron, Lula, Ramaphosa, Musar, and other leaders offered a different vision, one marked by calls for reforms, a representative Security Council, and a larger, better-funded UN. Their divergence was more than tonal. It was generational. It marked a moment when the UN’s relevance is contested not only by authoritarians but also by some of its founding members.
Trump at the UNGA 2025 Image credit-Youtube
Trump’s UNGA Address: Diatribe Over Diplomac
Trump’s performance in the UNGA mirrored a speech he has been delivering since his return to the White House earlier this year. The emphasis is on nationalism over multilateralism, exceptionalism over solidarity, and transactional politics over collaborative solutions. It is laced with insults against the UN’s bureaucracy, boasts of circumventing multilateral organizations at will, and contains accusations that the organization is “a club for the weak who lecture the strong.” It even features some favorite conspiracy theories about the UN family being taken over by China and Russia.
The overarching theme in Trump’s UNGA address, much like in his first tenure, was the assertion that the United States is free to ignore or circumvent global governance structures and alliances. The idea is to make American power more affordable and accessible by avoiding shared arrangements and requiring others to cover their own expenses. He returns time and again to this theme, from vaccine distribution and the WHO to U.N. peacekeeping forces, aid, and climate change.
The problem with this narrative is that, as the single country that created the UN and has the power to make or break it, the U.S. has become one of the UN’s loudest critics. This has existential consequences for the organization, since Washington is its single largest donor, and the President decides to pay up or not. This has led to funding cuts and program shutdowns, making humanitarian missions, refugee programs, and peacekeeping patrols unworkable.
The withdrawal of great powers from the UN system is not just a problem of funding, but also one of international legitimacy. The great powers help to make multilateral rules, treaties, and organizations legitimate. The entire UN project is premised on the idea that global cooperation is only possible if major countries are involved. Yet Trump has shown that when one of them leaves the room, the rest of the world doesn’t really matter.
This is especially significant because, unlike the European project or the League of Nations, the UN has almost no will or capacity to operate without significant leadership and financial support from great powers. The irony, then, is that Trump has not made the UN irrelevant; he has made it ineffective. The result is a dangerous erosion of the UN’s authority: where the Security Council has proven paralyzed on Ukraine, divisions among the permanent members on Gaza are arresting even basic humanitarian calls for a ceasefire, and in Sudan, a full-blown civil war is raging without the slightest glimmer of UN peace action or leadership.
The Alternative Voices
French President Emmanuel Macron, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Bangladesh Chief Advisor Mohammed Yunus, and Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar were among several leaders offering an alternative narrative at the UNGA this year. They drew attention to the urgent need to reform the UN to fit the global multipolar realities of 2025 better.
Macron rightly noted that the world is not at war but facing cascading crises in climate, health, cyber governance, and nuclear arms that require coordinated global responses. Yet the U.S. is no longer part of these structures because they limit its freedom of action. If global governance can be made cheaper and easier for the U.S. by simply leaving, Trump’s return to power signals a hardening of this line. Macron also called on the UN to act as the “parliament of humanity”, representing “shared values and universal rights,” and not remain the club of the victors of 1945. Reforms to the Security Council and the UN as a whole were therefore necessary to make it more representative, resilient, and legitimate.
Brazilian President Lula put it more directly: the question was not about the UN’s survival but “whether we want a multipolar or unipolar world order”. For Lula and other leaders representing the Global South, inequalities and injustices in the international order were as glaring as in the domestic order of their own countries. The Earth, he reminded the Assembly, is heated mainly by developed countries and frozen mostly by the poor. Developing countries contributed the least to global warming but suffered the most. This was just as true of global wealth, voice, and influence in the current system, he continued. Lula, like Ramaphosa and Macron, called for reform of not just the UN but the Bretton Woods financial architecture to give a fairer say to less-developed countries.
President Ramaphosa made a similar case on behalf of Africa, the world’s second most populous continent with over 1.4 billion people. It has zero permanent seats on the Security Council, where 54 member states are represented by zero people. This, he said, “is an injustice that undermines the very legitimacy of the Council.”
Dr. Yunus at the UNGA2025 Image credit Youtube
Bangladesh’s Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus called for a just, inclusive world based on his vision of a “Three-Zero World”—zero carbon emissions, zero wealth concentration, and zero unemployment through youth entrepreneurship. He praised Bangladesh’s youth for restoring democracy and urged global financial reform to curb inequality and illicit wealth transfer. Yunus condemned the Gaza genocide, demanded a two-state solution for Palestine, and called for action on Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis. Emphasizing the importance of renewed multilateralism and regional cooperation, he warned that progress toward the SDGs is moving at a dangerously slow pace and urged a revival of SAARC.
Summarizing the mood, Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar said the world is at a “tipping point” on whether to rescue multilateralism or abandon it.
Conflicts and Resolutions: A Broken Promise
It is this betrayal of multilateralism, which the UN was built upon, that is now most evident in the arena where it matters most: in conflict resolution. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the situation on the ground in the clearest terms: peace is in “full retreat, with an alarming loss of lives”. In Ukraine, repeated attempts to issue a resolution to condemn the Russian invasion and demand a withdrawal were shot down by Moscow. In Gaza, the divisions between the permanent members of the Security Council freeze even basic calls for ceasefires and humanitarian access to let some civilians escape. In Sudan, we are witnessing a major civil war with thousands of dead and millions on the move. There is not a glimmer of peacekeeping or UN leadership as member states weigh the potential costs of boots on the ground against the loss of life.
The Secretary-General then went on to reflect that if the UN was set up to “prevent and end wars and conflicts”, why is it failing so spectacularly in that task? The problem is the Security Council. The Council, he said, was designed as a rapid response system to act when an existential threat to international peace and security was identified. The veto power given to the five permanent members—U.S., Russia, China, France, and the U.K.—was not intended to shut the Council down at will, but rather to keep the great powers within the multilateral system. The weapon was designed against external wars of aggression, not to be used as an internal instrument of political paralysis.
This much was already clear: the UN has not become irrelevant because of Trump or Russia, but because the Security Council has become broken. In this way, Trump’s return has not made the UN more divided; it has simply made it more honest. But if that is the case, why do leaders such as Macron, Lula, Ramaphosa, Yunus, and Musar still believe the UN matters? Because it does. The problem is not about irrelevance but effectiveness. While peacekeeping operations in Lebanon, the DRC, and Mali have had their share of failures, such missions on the ground have at least on occasion been able to prevent worse carnage. UN agencies continue to feed and vaccinate millions of refugees and provide early warning and monitoring on everything from nuclear arms to human rights. The problem is that the UN works, but it is too slow, too compromised, or too paralyzed when the great powers fail to take collective action.
The Security Council: Stuck in 1945
One of the most urgent reforms then is reform of the Security Council, especially its permanent members. The five permanent members (P5) were chosen to represent the world’s power distribution as it appeared at the end of World War II. In 1945, the U.S., U.K., France, and Russia were the only powers with an atomic bomb, and their overwhelming share of global GDP and military might was reflected in their permanent seats on the Security Council. China took the fifth P5 spot after the Communists took over in 1949.
As much as P5 members insist that the current system is working fine, the elephant in the room is a Security Council stuck in the 1940s. The UN is stuck because the world has changed, and the Council has not. Emerging powers such as India, Brazil, and South Africa argue that the Council’s composition is outdated and unrepresentative. Why are there no permanent seats for Africa, a continent with over 50 countries and 1.4 billion people? Or Latin America, the only geopolitical region with zero Security Council representation? The entire European Union, it is often said, has less representation than China alone, while Europe is massively overrepresented compared to Asia, which has the world’s largest population.
Proposal to reform the Council abounds: the G4 (India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan) want permanent seats. The African Union demands at least two permanent seats for Africa. Others want long-term renewable seats but no veto for an expanded Council.
Yet, there is no appetite to change the rules, as any reform would require amending the UN Charter. This process takes two-thirds of the General Assembly and the agreement of all the permanent members, a near impossibility. This is the system’s structural trap: the very actors who need to sign off on the change are also the most invested in the status quo.
Making the UN More Democratic and Representative
The Security Council is not the only institution in need of reform. The entire UN system needs democratization, from the General Assembly and Economic and Social Council to UNAIDS, WHO, UNEP, UNHCR, UN Women, and other relevant organizations. In the General Assembly, member states have one vote each, and all votes count equally. However, its resolutions are non-binding and are often routinely ignored by the more powerful. This often creates a distorted balance of power in favor of the Council. The Assembly and regional groups must be given more oversight to restore that balance.
Regional bodies such as the African Union, ASEAN, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Mercosur, and the European Union should be given a more formalized place in the UN system. The UN has increasingly utilized regional organizations for mediation, conflict prevention, and peacekeeping. The Gulf countries have led efforts to end the civil war in Yemen. The African Union and ECOWAS are leading most peace missions on the continent. The European Union now has observer status in the UNGA. If regional organizations play such an essential role in mediation and peacekeeping, it only makes sense to give their voices a more structured place in the UN’s internal discussions.
UN bodies also need to be opened up for more participation from non-state actors and stakeholders. Civil society groups, youth networks, and the private sector all play a more active role in the areas the UN addresses today, including climate change, public health, cyberspace governance, and emerging technologies. Opening up the organization for non-state actors is just as much about credibility as reform.
Financial Sustainability: The Achilles Heel
Finally, no list of reform proposals would be complete without the perennial question of money. The U.N. runs on a mixture of assessed contributions from member states and voluntary donations to specialized agencies. However, this heavy dependence on just a few wealthy states, particularly the U.S., renders the organization politically vulnerable. The President withholds or refuses to pay up, and entire programs start falling like dominoes.
Hosting the UNGA and the Secretariat’s headquarters in New York has become an enormous fixed financial cost that the UN can ill afford. Real estate prices, security, and logistics requirements continue to grow each year, sapping resources from field missions and emergency relief. Solutions to this need to be considered: relocating or decentralizing some UN agencies to lower-cost locations would not only save money but also serve as a symbolic shift to bring the organization closer to the Global South. A modest global carbon tax, financial transaction levy, or international airline ticket fee could create a stable revenue stream. Internal efficiency reforms to consolidate overlapping agencies and reduce waste would be beneficial.
Financial independence is not just about solvency; it is about credibility. As long as the UN remains at the mercy of its largest donors, it will struggle to argue that it is truly global or representative.
The Way Forward: Reform or Decline
The UN is at a crossroads. Either it reforms itself to be fit for the multipolar world, or it is on a path of accelerating decline and irrelevance. The ideals enshrined in its Charter are as urgent as ever: sovereign equality, collective security, dignity for all. But just like people, organizations get old. The question then is not about irrelevance but renewal.
Reform will not be easy and will not come quickly. It requires the political will of member states, especially the P5, and an acknowledgment by the rest that power brings responsibility, which goes both ways: contributing more to peacekeeping and aid is just as important as changing rules. It also requires citizens worldwide to fight for multilateralism. Climate change, pandemics, cyberattacks, and economic inequality cannot be addressed through unilateralism or great-power deals. These are problems only a world organization like the UN can bring countries to address through collective action. The UN has the biggest membership of any organization in human history, but it still needs to earn legitimacy.
Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar at the UNGA 2025
Conclusion
The Slovenian President summed up the moment: the world was at a tipping point, with the question of whether to rescue multilateralism or abandon it. The return of Trump has accelerated the UN’s existential crisis. Still, the organization’s fate will depend less on him than on other leaders and the global public’s willingness to fight for its renewal. Reforming the Security Council, democratizing the whole system, and ensuring its financial sustainability are not just interesting academic debates. These are survival imperatives. The UN can reform itself, or it will be replaced by something worse: a fragmented order of rival blocs, ad-hoc coalitions, and unchecked conflicts.
The choice is clear: a world in decline and disarray, or an international order organized around its greatest asset: a renewed UN.