September 23, 2025

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UN Facing Questions Over Its Impact as World Leaders Gather In New York City

AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis

As world leaders gather this week for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the mood remains somber, despite the organization celebrating its 80^th anniversary. Budget shortfalls and questions over the relevance of the institution will dominate the headlines this week, in addition to calls for reform and questions over what role, if any, the UN can play in ending the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, solutions to which have remained elusive for the past several years. More than 140 world leaders and senior officials are expected to attend this week’s meetings. Optimism around multilateral solutions has faded as the international system has become more Hobbesian, reflecting a ‘might makes right’ mentality perpetuated by Israel, Russia, Iran, and other state actors. Even middle powers, including Türkiye and several Gulf states, are far more active in meddling in the affairs of countries throughout the Global South, including many in sub-Saharan Africa.

Donor apathy and staff reductions have also hobbled the UN, and laudable goals related to international development and combating climate change remain unfulfilled. Speaking to the New York Times, Richard Gowan, who serves as the UN director for the International Crisis Group, described the United Nations as “an organization that is sort of in free fall.” Many of the resolutions and decrees passed by the UN are non-binding, even as they may impact international norms, diplomatic alignment, and domestic politics in member countries. Yet, these symbolic gestures often fail to translate into practical and actionable outcomes. In a world of spreading conflict and instability, strongly worded statements now mostly fall on deaf ears, and the UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, is often a marginal player in debates over conflict resolution, especially since U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to meet with him.

France is also leading a push for broad recognition of a Palestinian state, something which the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Portugal already announced over the weekend. France and Saudi Arabia are co-hosting a conference to discuss Palestinian statehood, which the United States and Israel remain opposed to. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to frame a Palestinian state as a “huge reward to terrorism,” suggesting that it will only embolden groups like Hamas to continue engaging in violent acts to achieve their goals.

U.S. President Trump is scheduled to speak today, where he is expected to "touch upon how globalist institutions have significantly decayed the world order, and he will articulate his straightforward and constructive vision for the world," said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. The speech is merely a reflection of the Trump administration’s worldview, which sees the exercise of unilateral U.S. power as far more preferable to consensus-building and multilateralism. Trump is also expected to meet bilaterally with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who yesterday sat down for a one-on-one interview with former four-star U.S. Army general David Petraeus.

To address the prevailing issues facing the UN, Guterres has announced the UN80 initiative, which aims to make the UN more agile, cost-effective, and reduce its bureaucracy to serve its members’ needs better. The initiative plans to combine agencies that have overlapping missions, such as combining the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change with the UN Environment Program and consolidating the UN’s HIV/AIDs program into the World Health Organization (WHO). The administrative arm of the UN is also looking to trim its budget down by 20 percent, which may ultimately lead to almost 7,000 jobs being cut, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

UN80 will also review about 4,000 mandate documents that underpin the structure of the UN to eliminate redundancies and duplications. This effort, attempted almost 20 years ago, failed due to the sheer number of documents that needed review. UN administrators hope that integrating AI into the workstream will make this task more efficient; however, with severe budget constraints and a prospective workforce cut, reviewing these mandates seems like a lofty goal, even though it is one that is necessary.

Across the many initiatives UN80 outlines, one theme is constant: improving efficiency and simplifying the UN’s sprawling bureaucracy. That bureaucracy lies at the heart of global distrust and fatigue with the institution and underpins many of its problems. A transformation of this aging organization is undoubtedly needed, though its feasibility remains to be seen as bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to self-reform. Nevertheless, these UN80 initiatives themselves cannot resolve the other glaring structural constraint of the UN: the Security Council. As long as the permanent members (the P5 –China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) remain at odds in this era of great power competition, the UN’s effectiveness will remain limited, something most reforms are unable to address. However, that is why UN80’s emphasis on streamlining what the UN does best — its humanitarian organizations — can be incredibly constructive. These operations sit one step removed from the veto politics of the P5 and can deliver tangible gains to places in need, even when high diplomacy stalls.