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As luck would have it, Denmark and Panama just became two of the 10 rotating members of the UN Security Council, the body charged with maintaining international peace. The Danes will hold the presidency in March, with a high-minded agenda of “standing up for international law” and other good stuff. The Panamanians will take the gavel in August.
What could possibly go wrong? Let me count the ways. The Danes, Panamanians and other diplomats will take their seats next to Elise Stefanik, a MAGA mouthpiece whom president Donald Trump is sending to the UN to represent the US, one of the council’s five permanent and veto-wielding members. Read more In her confirmation hearing, she promised to put “America first” and again made clear she views the UN largely as an antisemitic swamp that wastes US tax dollars.
Denmark and Panama will have lots of questions for Stefanik, not least about Trump’s stated ambitions to buy or seize Greenland from the Danes and to “take back” that US-built canal from Panama. If Trump becomes as coercive as he sounds, both moves would not only violate but mock international law, the UN Charter and everything the security council stands for. Trump’s disdain for those concepts and institutions runs deep.
As the 45th president, he jeered the “globalists” at the UN and other multilateral bodies that are meant to manage conflict and promote international co-operation. As the 47th, he now appears hell-bent on taking a wrecking ball to the system built and sustained by all his predecessors since Harry Truman. What Trump and Stefanik are selling as ‘strength’ amounts to unilateral sulking Within hours of being sworn in, Trump gave orders to withdraw the US from two important parts of the UN system, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Paris Agreement to limit climate change.
Each has flaws, but instead of fixing these institutions, Trump wants to sideline or even ruin them. Even in the nationalist mental universe of “America first”, such moves must count as spectacular own goals. As the US steps out of these institutions, China will merrily step in and up, cynically posing to countries in the Global South as a better steward of world order.
What Trump and Stefanik are selling as “strength” amounts to unilateral sulking. Ships enter and leave the Panama Canal, which Donald Trump wants to 'repossess'. Photo: Getty Trump’s looming boycott, which will probably extend to other agencies of the UN, is myopic in other ways too.
Neither viruses nor the warming atmosphere respect borders. They are global problems that require concerted, meaning multilateral, responses from all nations – exactly the kinds of scourges the UN was built to address. By hobbling WHO, for example, Trump will make it less able to monitor the spread across geographies and species of zoonotic diseases – bird flu is currently of interest again – and to give timely warning of the next pandemic.
And by undermining the climate accords, the US, as the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon, is in effect betraying humanity’s common struggle to keep the planet habitable. Republicans in Congress, nowadays a MAGA fan club, are marching in lockstep behind Trump. While quizzing Stefanik, James Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, could barely suppress his contempt for the UN, suggesting that she “ratchet down the number of people that are clogging the New York streets” around the UN headquarters.
When the ICC targets Americans or allies – such as Israel – the US impugns the court Brian Mast, who heads the equivalent committee in the House, boasts about sanctioning the International Criminal Court, which he calls a kangaroo court. The ICC, based in The Hague, sits outside of but adjacent to the UN system. It came out of efforts led by the US during the 1990s to create a tribunal to try individuals for atrocities and war crimes, but once the court went live in 2002, the US turned its back on it.
When its judges investigate adversaries of the US, such as Russian president Vladimir Putin, Washington tends to co-operate. When the ICC targets Americans or allies – such as Israel – the US impugns the court. This US ambivalence about international law dates back more than a century.
In the rubble of World War I, Woodrow Wilson dreamt up a League of Nations to outlaw and end all wars. But the Senate then failed to ratify Wilson’s brainchild; without US support, the League became irrelevant as Japan, Italy and Germany overran sovereign nations in the 1930s. In the rubble of another world war, the US tried again, hosting 51 nations in San Francisco and Washington to found a new and improved League: the United Nations.
By design, the UN and the other elements of what came to be known as the liberal or “rules-based” international order. It’s often said that the UN doesn’t exist to bring us to heaven, but to save us from hell. Read more.
