National Interest

by Eric Alter and Nickolay Mladenov

    If the UN is going to lose funding anyway, it should think long and hard about what it wants to preserve.

    An accidental contraction costs an organization much more than a planned one. Only a planned streamlining can deliver an institution worth funding. And the United Nations is on track for the wrong kind.

    Last fall, UN Secretary-General António Guterres proposed cutting the 2026 regular budget to $3.24 billion and eliminating 2,681 posts. On December 30, the General Assembly approved $3.45 billion, a top-line cut of about 7 percent. At the start of the year, unpaid assessments to the regular budget totaled $1.57 billion, more than 95 percent owed by the United States. Until the General Assembly changed the rule in June, unspent prior-year credits had to be returned even when the cash behind them was never collected.

    When cuts come, they go where accounting is easy and where there is little resistance inside the institution. The question confronting the member states and the next secretary-general should not be how much the UN can survive shrinking resources. It should be which functions the world cannot afford to lose.

    Two familiar answers are usually offered. Both seem to be wrong.

    The first answer and a natural one given the conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine, is that the UN should serve as the mediator-in-chief. Mediation matters, but the UN’s distinctive value is not simply that it can lead negotiations. It can remain in the room, lend legitimacy and technical capacity and sustain practical arrangements that others cannot.

    Take the Israel–Palestine file as an example. While UN Resolution 2334 has continually failed to stop the growth of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, from September 2018 to the spring of 2019, the UN raised nearly $110 million for Gaza’s fuel, water, health and temporary jobs. The electricity supply roughly doubled for the Strip’s 2 million people. Working alongside Egypt, the UN helped keep Gaza from another war until, in 2023, it fell apart on October 7. None of this progress stemmed from a UN resolution. It was based on the fact that the UN remained in the room.

    The Red Sea says the same. For eight years, a rusting supertanker, the FSO Safer, sat abandoned off Yemen’s Houthi-held coast with 1.14 million barrels of crude aboard, more oil than the Exxon Valdez spilled. No resolution ordered it emptied. The UN raised about $120 million from governments, oil companies and an online crowdfunding appeal, bought a replacement tanker, hired a salvage firm and in 18 days in the summer of 2023 pumped the oil across a stretch of water seeded with naval mines.

    The second answer is that the organization should keep doing everything, only with less. That is what is happening now. The UN has legitimacy and legitimacy depends on institutional machinery. A secretary-general commands no divisions and raises no revenue. The office is effective only as long as governments accept its findings because of the machinery behind them: sanctions committees, expert panels, inspectors, mediators and monitors. In 2024, Russia vetoed the renewal of the panel monitoring DPRK’s sanctions. Nothing inside the UN replaced it.

    The question is not which activities matter, since most do. The question is which are the activities that only the UN is suited to carry out. States, NGOs and regional organizations can deliver humanitarian aid. Governments or ad hoc coalitions can attempt mediation. But sanctions monitoring, nuclear inspections, ceasefire verification, technical certification, treaty custodianship and international investigations are different. They are global public goods. When they disappear, there is usually no substitute. The UN’s future should be organized around protecting those functions first. Everything else must justify its existence.

    Legitimacy is questioned not through discussion but by actions and vetoes. While Washington, Moscow and Beijing often clash at the UN, all three worry about preventing cheating in nuclear programs, ensuring aid access to conflict areas and maintaining standards for food, vaccines and technology. Washington acts selectively—parting ways with the WHO in January and planning to leave UNESCO in December—yet it relies heavily on IAEA inspectors for its Iran policy.

    The same logic put inspectors in a war zone. On September 1, 2022, an IAEA team went across the front line to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest and left experts behind to monitor the reactor. They have been there ever since. No Security Council resolution created that presence. It exists because both Moscow and Kyiv find it useful to have someone credible in the control room. That is what legitimacy looks like when it is backed by machinery.

    The UN has spent decades adding mandates but very little time deciding which ones have reached the end of their usefulness. More than 40,000 resolutions adopted since 1946 still shape the organization’s work, creating mandates administered across over 240 intergovernmental bodies, according to the secretary-general’s own review. Yet most of those resolutions and mandates include no provision for assessment or termination. In 2024, servicing this legacy required 27,000 meetings and 1,100 reports, three in five on recurring topics. One-fifth of those documents are downloaded fewer than a thousand times.

    Washington’s objections to UN spending are not frivolous: an institution carrying 40,000 resolutions across various UN bodies should prove it can end something before asking for more money. In the realm of economic development, duplication is everywhere. UN agencies like DESA, UNCTAD, UNIDO, the regional commissions and UNDP all study the same economies for the same governments and each has its own structure, mandate and reporting lines.

    Yet institutional debates still gravitate toward preserving departments rather than asking what problem they solve. A leaner UN should not be measured by how many offices survive or don’t survive. It should be measured by whether its departments can prevent conflicts, verify facts and sustain agreements.

    The next phase of UN reform must also recognize a reality many member states privately accept. The UN no longer has a monopoly on diplomacy. Regional organizations, middle powers and issue-based coalitions increasingly broker deals, organize humanitarian responses and convene negotiations. This is not a failure of multilateralism but rather its contemporary form. The UN’s comparative advantage in this new reality is that it can provide continuity, legitimacy, technical capacity and global reach to such initiatives.

    A leaner UN is likely to create space for more flexible, ad hoc bodies that focus on specific problems, attract targeted funding and can be dissolved once their work is complete, unlike many UN mandates. This model is not new. The Security Council has long delegated enforcement to coalitions of states and regional organizations, from authorizing member states to use “all necessary means” in ejecting Iraq from Kuwait in 1990 to authorizing a multinational force supporting security efforts in Haiti in 2025.

    A more ambitious example is the Board of Peace, which the Security Council endorsed in Resolution 2803. By design, the Security Council authorizes and the Board implements. More broadly, the Board’s charter establishes a standing mechanism for peace-making and stabilization, bringing together a small group of states.

    Critics argue that the Board risks creating a parallel structure to the UN. Yet if properly anchored in Security Council authority, such initiatives could help address persistent weaknesses in conflict prevention and mediation while preserving the Council’s primacy and building on the UN’s machinery.

    The greatest potential of such ad hoc initiatives lies in preventing crises from escalating. Unlike the Council, which often acts only after conflicts erupt, smaller, more agile bodies could deploy envoys, maintain back channels and present findings and recommendations before tensions become emergencies. This would advance the preventive diplomacy agenda long championed by the UN and most recently articulated in the secretary-general’s New Agenda for Peace. For such arrangements to succeed, however, they must remain accountable to the Security Council, operate under fixed mandates and report regularly on their activities.

    Prioritization also means accepting that the UN cannot solve every war or fund every mandate equally. It must protect what only it can do, while keeping political failure from shutting down practical humanitarian access. The same pressures are affecting both peacekeeping and special political missions. In both cases, the key question should be not how many missions survive, but which political and monitoring functions disappeared from the global peacemaking toolkit.

    For years, reviews of peace operations have pointed to a simple lesson: politics should drive missions, not the other way around. The instinct has often been to preserve structures and search for a purpose later. The institution works best when it starts with a political objective and builds the minimum machinery necessary to achieve it. Every conflict is different. Missions should be designed around realities on the ground, not around bureaucratic templates inherited from earlier crises.

    Solvency should be public. Which countries pay and which do not should be spelled out in quarterly reports. Mandates without funds should be turned down. Lists of free riders requesting programs they have not paid for should be published each January. The G-77 has supported unfunded programs for 20 years. China always pays up, but late. Russia challenges decisions using the consensus rule in the Fifth Committee. Washington owes about $5 billion in the regular budget, peacekeeping and tribunals. Having promised $850 million, it has now put together its largest pledge since the freeze. Its arrears go back decades; peacekeeping arrears go back decades and regular budget arrears go back to 1980. The last effective deal to end this was the Helms-Biden Act in 1999.

    Most of the discussions ahead will be about the mechanics of electing a new secretary-general: informal straw polls, colored ballots and Assembly hearings. Those are details. What counts is whether the Council chooses a clerk of declining stature or a leader who can read the Charter as a toolkit, not just a constitution. The UN can be smaller. It may have no choice. But it should become leaner by design, not by neglect. The UN was created to provide public goods that no state can secure alone. Its future should not be measured by how much of the institution survives, but by whether the world retains the public goods it cannot afford to lose and that only the UN can provide.