Can the UN survive with an isolationist US president, a more aggressive China and growing calls for reform?

Kim Sengupta explores some of the key challenges facing the international body, 75 years on from its founding

Donald Trump speaks at a meeting on religious freedom at the United Nations (Getty)

The term “United Nations” was first used by an American president, Franklin Roosevelt, on 1 January 1942 when representatives of 26 nations pledged to continue the war against Axis powers, when final victory was still far from certain.

Roosevelt believed that the refusal of the US to play a part in the League of Nations set up after the First World War was a major factor in the failure to prevent the Second World War. The Declaration of the United Nations would, he held, help ensure that a lasting and just peace would be achieved when the conflict ended through close international co-operation. The organisation’s headquarters were set up in New York, and the vast bulk of its budget came from America.

Now, at the 75^th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, the US president is a vocal opponent of multilateralism and a frequent critic of the organisation. In his last address to the General Assembly, Donald Trump told world leaders that “the future does not belong to globalists, it belongs to patriots”. His administration, he stressed before and after the meeting, would not veer from its guiding principle of “America First”.

Since his arrival at the White House four years ago, Trump has pulled out of several international agreements that had taken years of negotiation to achieve, including the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. He has threatened to drastically cut America’s contribution to Nato, and wants sweeping changes to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

He used the UN speech to boast about how he had read the riot act to Nato partners about their supposed lack of defence spending, accused China of manipulating the WTO, and warned that he will be taking further action against Iran. This year, in the middle of the devastating coronavirus pandemic, he announced that the US would withhold its contribution to the WHO budget because of its alleged collusion with Beijing in suppressing information about the spread of the disease.

The UN’s anniversary commemorations will take place with the prospect looming of a cold war between China and the US and American allies. Trump has announced that a G7 meeting due to be held in the US, postponed from June to September because of the pandemic, will be expanded into a G11, with invitations to Russia, Australia, India and South Korea. This has been widely interpreted as an attempt to build an anti-China coalition and will undoubtedly lead to protests from Beijing.

The timing of the summit, just two months before the US presidential election, is opportune for Trump, with his campaign seemingly having decided to present China as an outside enemy to the electorate, with the added stinger of claiming that the Democrats are soft on Beijing. This is not a straightforward task – Trump has publicly praised President Xi Jinping and his government no fewer than 15 times over their handling of the coronavirus crisis – even as reports were emerging of the disease spreading from China around the world, including the US. Australia, South Korea and India, along with Japan, a G7 member, have long been mooted as democratic counterweights to China in Asia and, as such, were part of Barack Obama’s projected “pivot to Asia” before the then-president got sucked back into the Middle East crisis with the rise of Isis.

Some of China’s neighbours are increasingly concerned by Beijing’s actions. The clashes between Chinese and Indian troops in the Himalayan border between the two countries that left dozens dead this month have been the most dramatic and violent result of rising tensions. There have been other confrontations. A Chinese ship rammed a Vietnamese ship, sinking it, in disputed waters of the South China Sea. A standoff between Chinese and Malaysian vessels drew in warships from China, but also the US and Australia.

Fierce big power rivalry is not the only problem facing the UN. There have long been calls for major reform of its structure. US, Russia, the UK, France and China remain the five permanent members of the Security Council, with their deciding power of veto. There is criticism that this does not reflect the realities of current international politics. There is no place for India, the world’s second most populous nation, which has a nuclear arsenal and the fifth largest economy, or Japan, the world’s third largest economy, or, for that matter, any participants from Africa or South America or the Middle East.

Reform of the Security Council is not an easy process. It would need the agreement of at least two-thirds of UN member states in the General Assembly, and the five permanent members must also agree.

One often-mooted proposed change has been for more permanent members, with Japan, India, Germany and Brazil, the “G4 states”, as the candidates. This group supports each other and is backed by the UK, France and Russia. But the plan is opposed by the “Uniting for Consensus” group, in which Pakistan is against India becoming a permanent member, Italy and Spain are against Germany, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina are against Brazil, and South Korea is against Japan. In addition, there is another band of countries including Turkey and Indonesia, which propose expansion in the number of semi-permanent seats.

UN Undersecretary-General Fabrizio Hochschild, special adviser on the preparations for the commemoration of the anniversary, points to significant achievements in the fields of social, economic and human rights in the past seven and half decades. But he acknowledges that the organisation has fallen short on many other aspects, including conflict resolution by the Security Council. As preventing conflicts was a fundamental aim when the UN was set up, this remains a very serious shortcoming.