In June 2025, the United Nations turn 80. However, in this important birthday year, it finds itself under major financial pressure and serious political attack. In recent months, most attention has gone to the impacts of the financial crisis: projects and programmes abruptly terminated, thousands of staff made redundant, possible relocations of staff and entire offices to cheaper places, and closures or mergers of different UN agencies.
While understandable, this is drawing attention away from intense political attacks on the UN because it defends certain international norms and rules, promotes certain values, as well as environmental protection and climate crisis action. The consequences of these political attacks, by some member states, are potentially much worse than from its forced downsizing. We need to remember that the League of Nations, created to prevent the horrors of war after the carnage of WWI, de facto collapsed in the 1930s, when militarization and preparations for war simply overran its mandate to maintain peace and security.
This brief examines both the financial situation and the political pressures in some detail. It then raises the key question: What possible futures for multilateral cooperation? Will the UN survive and continue as the primary platform for global multilateral negotiation and collaboration? Will it only be able to play that role on areas of undeniable common interest such as air- and maritime transport, but be made largely powerless on the critical issues, such as peace, security, human rights, environmental and climate action? And if the UN is severely weakened, as it was during the Cold War, would other bodies step up as major platforms for multilateral collaboration – at least among its members? Which ones, the regional bodies such as the AU, OAS, ASEAN, EU? The G7, G20 or G77? Would we see a re-emergence of a non-aligned movement, if we find ourselves in a new ‘Cold War’ era, now with 3 instead of 2 major powers?
What are your ideas about the possible futures for multilateral cooperation? Download the brief here.