LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The U.N. General Assembly opens today. President Trump will deliver an address when heads of state gather later in the month. The U.N. was created 80 years ago in the aftermath of World War II to save future generations from the horrors of war. But these days, the organization has been deadlocked over Russia's war in Ukraine and Israel's war in Gaza. And some U.N. watchers are wondering how it can survive a different threat - the Trump administration. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Just a couple of weeks into his term, President Trump said the United Nations is not living up to its potential, and he signed an executive order to review all funding to U.N. organizations.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It's got great potential, and based on the potential, we'll continue to go along with it. But they got to get their act together.
KELEMEN: Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and the U.N.'s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO. The State Department said UNESCO had an outsized focus on the U.N.'s sustainable development goals, which it described as a, quote, "globalist, ideological agenda." Fordham University political science professor Anjali Dayal says the U.S. has gone from a key underwriter of the United Nations to a real source of instability.
ANJALI DAYAL: From top to bottom, huge arenas of the U.N.'s work - things like poverty alleviation, things like public health, things like gender equality, things that fundamentally anchor the U.N.'s work - the U.S. is actively working to disrupt them.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: In favor - 169. Against - one.
KELEMEN: In June, the U.S. even voted against a resolution put forward by Mongolia to declare a World Horse Day. A career U.S. diplomat read out a statement explaining that the U.S. would no longer vote for resolutions that reaffirm the sustainable development goals. Richard Gowan, the U.N. director for a think tank called the International Crisis Group, says diplomats in New York are having a hard time figuring out just what the Trump administration wants.
RICHARD GOWAN: The U.S. is behaving in an incredibly petty way, you know, insisting on cutting words like diversity out of U.N. texts. Most other countries don't see this as, you know, a serious policy. They see this as ideological, slightly chaotic and hugely disruptive.
KELEMEN: The U.N.'s 80th anniversary this year was supposed to be a chance for countries to come together to think about ways to make the U.N. fit for purpose today. But Gowan says at the moment, everyone is in a defense mode.
GOWAN: The No. 1 priority for the secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is simply keeping the U.N. afloat financially.
KELEMEN: And that has Thant Myint-U worried. He's just written a book about his grandfather, a U.N. secretary-general during the Cold War, Thant U (ph).
THANT MYINT-U: There's no time, I think, in history since the founding of the U.N. where the U.S. has been less invested and where the public is less interested in the U.N. So I agree that, you know, the U.N. is both facing this - it's facing a funding crisis right now, but it's also facing this crisis of irrelevance.
KELEMEN: And it's not just because of President Trump, he says.
MYINT-U: It's not as if other countries have sort of jumped to the U.N.'s defense or fill the kind of breach left by the administration in terms of funding or anything else. So even countries that kind of pay lip service to the U.N. aren't really doing very much in terms of investing in the U.N. politically.
KELEMEN: But there is something that might pique Trump's interest. A search for a new secretary-general begins in earnest this fall. And as a veto holder on the Security Council, the U.S. plays an outsized role in that, along with Russia, China, France and the U.K.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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