The UN needs an extreme makeover

Rarely has an institution founded on such noble ideals plunged to such lows. The United Nations, headquartered by Manhattan’s East River, was established in 1945, in the wake of World War II, to prevent humanity from more cataclysmic conflicts.After two world wars claimed 100 million lives, the UN’s founding members sought to replace the failed League of Nations with a functioning forum capable of resolving global disputes before they spiraled into catastrophe. Eight decades later, that vision is under unprecedented strain.

The UN today is beset by corruption scandals, dogged by questions about its relevance and saddled with a funding crisis so severe that the outgoing secretary-general, António Guterres, warned of “imminent financial collapse” and “a race to bankruptcy.” For the past two years, I have worked inside the United Nations system.I have seen its failures up close, from UNRWA’s shameful entanglement with Hamas in the Oct.

7 massacre to the secretary-general’s weeks-long delay in responding to the Islamic Republic’s slaughter of Iranian protesters in January. The UN’s failures are largely indicative of a sprawling bureaucracy that has grown bloated and inefficient. Yet despite what I have seen, I do not believe the United Nations is beyond saving.What it faces now is an existential make-or-break moment.

Either it dramatically reforms itself or continues its slide into irrelevance, and UN insiders agree. “We are putting the UN on a diet and we are pushing the institution to do less better instead of trying to be everything to everyone,” US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told me in a phone interview. As part of the Trump administration’s “Make the UN Great Again” campaign, Waltz said the US — which contributes roughly a quarter of the UN’s regular budget, more than what 180 member states pay in combined assessed dues — has pushed for sweeping cuts, including moving almost 3,000 bureaucrats out of the New York h...