Do we need the UN?
"We’re watching your votes.”
Donald Trump in May 2018 to the UN after relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem.
The once formidable United Nations looks suddenly vulnerable in the Age of Donald Trump. The world body’s flagrant anti-Israel stance on the war in Gaza and Lebanon is unlikely to be missed by the new American president.
On May 14 2018, the Trump administration moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, to the fury of Palestinians who believe it is the capital of a free Palestine state.
A UN resolution against relocating the embassy was promptly vetoed by America. In his last term, Trump had threatened to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to the UN.
“We’ll save a lot. We don’t care. But this isn’t like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars,” he had announced.
“We’re not going to be taken advantage of any longer.”
In his second term, this old warning does not bode well for the organisation, which ostensibly is the conscience captain of the world. But it seems to be a biased conscience.
The latest outrage is an exhibition of paintings on the walls of the UN building in New York, which call for the destruction of the Jewish state.
“I demand the immediate removal of this shameful exhibition,” Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN insisted. The preferential stand taken by UN chief Antonio Gutierrez isn’t doing the organisation any favours with the new US President in place. Trump’s position on the positions he takes is historical: “I don’t care. It is my call.”
Will that call sound the death knell for the UN? Though India and other member states have paid up this year, deadly foes America and China have held on to their membership cheques in a game of one-upmanship over who dominates the organisation. Which begs the question, ‘does the world need the United Nations?’ It is a new world order.
The right-wing anti-immigrant, nationalist and protectionist wave sweeping Europe and America will have politics and economies looking inward: America First and Europe First. Italy has swung right. So has the Netherlands. Germany is next. By the time this decade is over, there could well be a Trumpian Europe. This realignment will divide the world into two halves: the Radical Left and the Aggressive Right.
Trump, in spite of all his extreme positions and behaviour often regarded as uncouth by US allies, won on a simple message: “You are either with us, or against us.” That philosophy will rule America and the world for the next five years.
The ‘us’ and ‘you’ may change periodically, but he has created a global order that will mirror this simplistic format: Us versus Them.
The United Nations, in Trump’s world, will struggle to find a place. Or will have no place. It has only itself to blame. The war in Gaza and Gutierrez’s pro-Palestine stance could cost the UN dearly. Donald Trump has made no bones about his Islamophobia: on May 14, he told donors about his plan for dealing with pro-Palestine campus protests: deport the protestors.
“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” When police rounded up pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who had laid siege to Columbia University, Trump called it “a beautiful thing to watch”. He had said earlier, “These are radical-left lunatics, and they’ve got to be stopped now.”
When crowds roaring ‘From the River to the Sea’ slogans clogged America’s bridges, squares and roads waving Palestinian flags and assaulting Jews, one of 20 promises Trump made at the Republican National Convention this year was to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”.
The UN will be boxed into a corner; Trump has deviated from the organisation’s founding values; a position he is likely to stick to, and delight ally Israel, which desperately needs the validation. Trump’s attitude towards the UN policy is well known.
1. His attack on crucial UN institutions during his first presidency was unambiguous. He pulled America out of the Human Rights Council, and swore not to return until real reform is enacted.
2. He accused the International Criminal Court (ICC) of arrogance by claiming “near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy”. ICC has issued warrants for two Trump buddies: Israel’s Netanyahu and Russia’s Putin.
3. The US withdrew from UNESCO, which Trump accuses is prejudiced against Israel.
4. Iran is in Trump’s crosshairs. “The dictatorship used the funds to build nuclear-capable missiles, increase internal repression, finance terrorism, and fund havoc and slaughter in Syria and Yemen,” is his view.
5. The Trump administration shut off the tap to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the nodal organisation dedicated to protecting and campaigning for displaced Palestinian refugees. The US was UNRWA’s biggest benefactor till then, with an annual allocation of over USD 350 million. In April 2024, Biden resumed the funding. It seemed to be a terrible mistake.
In Gaza, three humanitarian agencies are active, of which two are UN related: UNRWA, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL) and third, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Last week, Israel banned UNRWA from operating in Israel and Gaza.
Tel Aviv has warned it will arrest and prosecute any of its employees with terrorist connections. Photos and videos showed dozens of UNRWA officials and staffers directly participating in last year’s October 7 pogrom in southern Israel.
Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who led the carnage and kidnapping of Israelis hiding in a roadside bomb shelter, was an UNRWA employee since July 2022 while also serving as a Nukbha commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion: he was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last week in Gaza.
Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, leader of the Hamas in Lebanon headed the Lebanon’s UNRWA teachers’ union; he was a school principal with 65 schools and roughly 40,000 students under his control - last week, he too was eliminated by IDF in Gaza.
UNRWA’s Abu el-Amin was the coordinator of terror activities between Hamas and Hezbollah. He acquired weapons, recruited terrorists and used social media to provoke attacks on Jews. The IDF has unearthed terrorist infrastructure inside and around UNRWA schools, hospitals and offices. The IDF also discovered a Hamas underground data centre under UNRWA’s HQ in Gaza City which was powered by electricity from the UN agency’s building.
The UN has been crying hoarse that the IDF is stopping the distribution of humanitarian aid to starving Gaza civilians. This, in spite of Hamas seizing hundreds of supply trucks entering Gaza every week; the food and medicines are sold by the terrorists on the black market to desperate civilians at extravagant prices.
According to Western intelligence, Hamas has seized an estimated USD 500 million in foreign aid so far. Communications between two Hamas terrorists reported overflowing humanitarian aid warehouses in Gaza.
“We’ve got trucks filled with goods alongside the diesel trucks,” one operative is heard saying.
“At this point, we have everything... The warehouse is at full capacity. We’re just waiting for the green light to start transferring.”
To circumvent the hijacks, IDF roped in Gaza-based merchants to distribute food and medicines; it stopped after Hamas commandeered 20 per cent of the merchants’ profits. An example: UNRWA distributed supplies from only 225 trucks Israel sent for Gazans out of the 400 sent on May 2.
“What really should be shocking is how anyone can pretend Hamas, with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency collaboration, hasn’t been impeding or diverting aid delivery for months,” Saif Richard Goldberg, Senior Advisor of think tank FDD said.
The other agency which is being accused for its pro-Hamas bias is the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC supposedly stays neutral in any conflict. But it has not in Gaza. The Geneva-based monitoring group, UN Watch, has flagged the partiality; of 187 tweets on ICRC accounts, including those by its president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger and director-general Robert Mardini, 77 per cent blasted Israel and just seven per cent of the tweets censured Hamas.
On October 17, the ICRC backed Hamas’s fake news that Israel attacked and “destroyed” Al-Ahli hospital. It was “shocked and horrified” to know “hundreds were killed”, including “patients killed in a hospital bed”, and doctors “losing their lives trying to save others”.
It turned out later that the explosion was a result of a misfired rocket attack by Hamas-ally Islamic Front on the parking lot of the hospital. The ICRC did not even issue a correction.
“By refusing to condemn Hamas’s repeated and unprovoked aggression, and by systematically glossing over the suffering of Israelis subjected to 11,000 rockets in the past two months alone, including the suffering of 3,00,000 displaced Israelis, the ICRC and its leaders have effectively validated and encouraged Hamas’s cynical tactics to exploit and trample the laws of war,” alleged Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch and an international human rights lawyer.
The Red Cross neither did visit the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, nor monitor their state of health, it did not try to get them released either. Even as medical aid streams into Gaza and is hijacked by Hamas, the Shurat Hadin NGO of Israel which champions Jewish victims of violence said the ICRC did not even “try to supply the medicines required to the hostages”.
During Jewish New Year in 2018, Trump informed community leaders that he told the Palestinians,
“We’re not paying until you make a deal,” regarding cutting off US dollars to UNRWA. With such a fund squeeze, Hamas loses a critical support system operating under UN protection.
However, Trump’s attacks on Hezbollah has been confusing: in 2023 he called the terror group “very smart” and blamed Netanyahu for Israel’s October 7 intelligence failure. The very next year, Netanyahu’s office, after a call between the two leaders said Trump “congratulated (Netanyahu) on the determined and powerful actions that Israel carried out against Hezbollah.”
Another one of the UN’s failures is the ineffectiveness of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL) over time.
A reason the League of Nations failed was because it did not have soldiers to enforce its mandate unlike its successor. The UN can use force only in self-defence or if the mandate is violated. The UNIFL has 10,000 peacekeepers drawn from 46 countries, whose job is to help the Lebanese Army keep the south of Lebanon free from “unauthorised armed personnel, such as Hezbollah”.
However, Hezbollah terrorists have been based right on the opposite side of the wired fence between Israel from Lebanon since 2006. The UNIFIL has been unable to stop the terrorists from building about 1,50,000 rockets and missiles under its nose. It has lamely stood by as terrorists launched thousands of rockets at Israel.
Hezbollah’s intimidation of the peacekeeping forces has left the UN impotent. In 2019 Hezbollah launched “at least 114 cases of violent conduct” against UNIFIL forces, in which six soldiers died and 41 were injured, as reported to the Security Council between 2006 and 2019. Last month, Hezbollah struck UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura with rockets.
The UN’s Achilles hell is its Security Council. India’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ruchira Kamboj asked, “Has the UN system, and particularly its principal organ, the UN Security Council, based on a 1945-world construct, not been rendered ineffective to address contemporary challenges to global peace and security?”
It was a call for reform within the UN Security Council, because of the constant impasses on contentious world issues.
“What has made it worse is the composition of the Security Council. What role can Britain play in today’s world when it itself is unable to sort out its own domestic problems. Its writ does not extend beyond its shores. It has an army of about 90,000 and that can hardly play a role in today’s world. More or less, the same can be said about France.
Maybe it has a slightly larger army, but it got kicked out of Niger recently. There are huge questions about the actions of the UN Security Council members as to whether they are guided by self-interest rather than global interest, which is how the Security Council membership was supposed to function,” says Rajiv Dogra, Former Ambassador and India’s ex-Permanent Representative to the United Nations Agencies in Rome. The UNSC is bipolar: Russia and China on one side and the US, UK, and France on the other.
The UNSC couldn’t take any action on Ukraine, Israel and Sudan because of the veto power of these countries which put their geostrategic interests on top.
“As far as the Security Council goes, the US, of course, is a dominant force. But there are five members and all of them have a veto right. And with some nations not exercising their veto right, it is the Russian veto, which is prominent and hinders the UN’s working. If US, under Trump, patches up with Russia, it may make the Security Council more active again,” says Dilip Sinha, Former Ambassador and India’s ex-permanent Representative to the United Nations Agencies in Geneva.
Gutierrez has been more or less missing from the mediation process in Ukraine; colleagues allege he has jeopardised the ‘continued existence’ of the UN as reported by The Hill Times of Canada.
“The fact that Security Council members themselves constitute an active threat to peace and security only makes that failure all the more egregious,” according to Ben Tonra, Professor of international relations at University College Dublin.
The UN sometimes is a comedy of errors: Iran, the most repressive misogynist theocratic regime after the Taliban was elected to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women before it was expelled. According to Mary C Murphy, Senior lecturer in politics at University College Cork, “It is past time for the UNSC to expand its permanent membership to include Japan, Germany, and India, as well as influential countries from Africa and Latin America.”
China’s control over the UN is rapidly expanding as a counter to the West and a threat to India’s interests. China’s President Xi Jinping’s aggressive foreign policy is making itself felt in UN affairs since China is second largest contributor of funds after the United States: if Trump gets his way, it could become the first. China directly controls four of the 15 top UN agencies - FAO, UNIDO, ITU, ICAO while it has representation in nine of the 15 UN agencies, including the World Bank.
Beijing traditionally heads the UN deputy security-general for economic and social affairs post. Using massive aid power, its influence over 60 countries through its Global Development Initiative (GDI) has become formidable.
Just as the UN helplessly watched the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union unfold to reach perilous territory, history repeats itself as the organisation gets stuck in the US vs China matrix of hostility. All this is not to say that Gutierrez has not tried to fill his own shoes. Unfortunately he failed.
He ineffectually tried to use the UN’s influence to address the wars in Sudan and Ukraine in which millions are dying. Peace operations in Africa and sanctions against gang violence-ravaged Haiti haven’t yielded results. He tried to stop human right violations in Myanmar, but the Generals aren’t in an obliging mood.
The UN couldn’t dissuade Russia from using its veto on sanctions against North Korea thanks to Kim Jong Un sending North Korean troops to fight the Ukrainians.
Gutierrez’s term ends in 2026, but the jockeying for his successor has begun. According to an unsaid convention, the Secretary-General’s job is rotational; the next UN boss could be from Latin America or the Caribbean. But the jinx is that the Security Council’s permanent members can veto the candidate.
Hence, the successor must be acceptable to the US, Russia, China and the West. India’s demand from the UN for its legitimate position in the UNSC has consistently been thwarted by China; India has given more to the UN than it has received.
The return of Trump is a booster to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Global South strategy against China: Modi had campaigned for Trump in 2019, announcing “Agli Baar Trump Sarkar”. With BJP’s strong Hindu base, Modi is not unduly worried about backing his friend Netanyahu at the cost of alienating India’s 172 million Muslims. His first tweet after the October 7 invasion was to express complete solidarity with Israel in its fight against “terrorism in all its forms”.
The Modi government has been strongly pro-Israel in this war; in April 2024, it abstained on a UN Human Rights Council resolution that called for Israel to implement an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on the Jewish nation. But, New Delhi’s YoYo game is an assertion of its independence; India supported a UNGA draft resolution to admit Palestine as a full-fledged member of the UN “favourably” but abstained on a UN resolution that called on Israel to end the occupation of Palestine within a year. The West sees India as an effective counterforce to China.
Changes in the global status quo are affected by what diplomats call ‘system-determining states.’ India wants to use the UN to become one.
These states cannot influence events on their own but can help bring policy outcomes in their favour through careful calibration of their positions as India has done in the West Asia theatre. Hence its Global South strategy, BRICS, the G20 presidency and getting the African Union on board its diplomatic chess board are clever tactics to further its cause.
The United Nations was formed in June 1945 on the ashes of World War II in which 70-85 million people died: soldiers and civilians. Included in this horrifying number were six million Jews, who were gassed, tortured or shot by Hitler’s Nazis in concentration camps, ghettoes and Death Marches.
After Iran launched missiles against Israel, and Israel responded with a calibrated counterattack, the ayatollahs have promised deadly retaliation. In the unlikely event of that happening, the US is unlikely to hold Israel back like Biden did.
Gutierrez’s response to the Israeli retaliation was characteristically ambiguous: “All acts of escalation are condemnable and must stop.”
Will the West Asia conflict spill over to another world war, one humanity will not be able to survive? The ability of the UN to survive in this toxic diplomatic and military arena holds the answer.
The UN, has for too long been in the grip of China that sees America as its nemesis. It has nurtured, funded and sponsored the anti-American bloc which the Democrats have not been able to circumvent. China mothering a Left Liberal mob is as ironical as Europe supporting it; such are the vagaries of geopolitics that beats comprehension.