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The UN enters its 81st year expecting to be viewed as a beacon of global governance — but is more like a patient in intensive care. The prognosis, derived from internal assessments and financial autopsies, is dire.
A 30 percent reduction in system-wide funding, forced by the withdrawal of its largest donor, has triggered a cascade of institutional failure. The Secretariat is on the brink of insolvency, with simulations indicating an inability to meet payroll by the end of this year. What is dismissed as mere budget shortfalls is in fact systemic cardiac arrest.
In response, the UN80 reforms initiative, touted as a rejuvenation of the institution, is nothing more than capitulation — managed decline disguised as transformation. The highly anticipated mandate review revealed a body suffocating under the weight of its own history: more than 40,000 resolutions that remain technically active, 86 percent of which lack sunset clauses or termination mechanisms, creating a paralyzing inheritance of 4,000 active directives. It is no longer a system that evolves with global needs but a collapsing museum of outdated intentions.
The organization’s fundamental dysfunction is rooted in a pathological refusal to confront its own structural decay, which is epitomized by the Mandate Implementation Review, an 18-month exercise that conspicuously failed to establish any tangible connection between the flood of directives and the financial means required to implement them. This omission amounts to an institutional admission of surrender, confirming a system content to operate in a state of deliberate fiction.
The scale of this delusion can be easily quantified by the 15 percent of new mandates that are adopted without any dedicated funding and explicitly demand execution “within existing resources.” Such phrasing has become the mantra of UN operational culture, perfectly framing a world of magical thinking where ambition consistently outpaces capacity.
Naturally, the resulting bloat is both operational and existential: 27,000 formal meetings are convened annually, and more than 1,100 reports are produced, nearly two-thirds of which are downloaded fewer than 2,000 times. Such output does not constitute governance; it is self-referential performance art, a ritualized production of documents that substitutes for impact and obscures a total absence of accountability.
In the end, we have a system that only accumulates, layering new obligations atop a brittle and underfunded base, mistaking volume for value, and procedure for progress. Consequently, field operations that roughly speaking represent the organization’s most tangible value are being systematically dismantled. Core humanitarian agencies, eviscerated by the withdrawal of US funding, are confronting existential contractions.
The World Food Programme, which relied on Washington for half of its $9 billion budget, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which depended on it for two-fifths of its operating capacity, have been forced to terminate thousands of staff. The drastic cuts have necessitated the adoption of a doctrine of “hyper-prioritization,” in which life-saving assistance is allocated not based on need but by the cold calculus of budgetary convenience and donor preference. 

The UN is no longer an institution that evolves with global needs but a collapsing museum of outdated intentions.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

Unfortunately, the human consequences of this strategic retreat only increase exponentially. In Gaza, for instance, Israel’s genocidal blockade and targeting of UN infrastructure has crippled aid delivery amid famine in a campaign of mass extermination.
Elsewhere, the same operational collapse is mirrored by the Security Council’s state of advanced paralysis, with any potential for coherent action undercut by its most powerful members’ erratic engagements. The result is a descent into procedural squabbling and strategic incoherence, leaving hot spots, from Haiti to Myanmar, to fester without any meaningful intervention or even consistent diplomatic attention. Broadly speaking, it leaves a hollowed-out UN that is failing to fulfill its mandates and is instead forced to merely preside over its dwindling operational relevance.
Worse yet, the UN80 initiative, far from arresting the organization’s decline, has become the primary instrument of its managed demise, masquerading as renewal. The directive to slash the Secretariat’s staffing by a fifth, for instance, which is framed as a strategic recalibration, is more of a blunt financial amputation, a reaction to a 30 percent systemic funding decrease and a liquidity crisis so severe the organization risks insolvency.
Furthermore, much-touted relocations to Nairobi and Vienna, with price tags that reach about $76,000 per employee, are correctly diagnosed by insiders as merely a costly performance of efficiency that ignores the UN’s structural flaws. Besides, the entire process is crippled by a fundamental absence of strategic direction, reduced to a transactional exercise in cost-cutting that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres himself has reportedly conceded is a substitute for the profound institutional reforms he lacks the time and political capital to pursue.
Thus, the ensuing leadership vacuum is merely a symptom of a deeper, terminal political failure among member states. The reform process, for instance, is paralyzed by an irreconcilable ideological schism: Western members, led by a US administration that has accrued $1.5 billion in arrears, demand a return to a narrowly defined “peace and security” core, effectively seeking to essentially unilateralize the UN’s agenda through financial pressure.
Naturally, this is met with justified resistance from the Global South, which rightly perceives these forced “reforms” not as streamlining but as abandonment of foundational commitments to development, climate action and human rights, the very pillars that grant the organization its universal legitimacy. The result is a deadlock that precludes any consensus on the UN’s purpose in the 21st century, ensuring that no vision can emerge.
Nowhere are the UN’s institutional failures more evident than in Libya. The absence of a coherent and empowered peace-building mission has ceded ground to an illegitimate coalition led by a warlord whose personal ambitions are the single greatest obstacle to the stabilization and democratization of the country.
A dysfunctional Security Council signs off on mandates despite the UN mission’s inability to project authority or facilitate a unified political process. The ensuing chaos in Libya has only enabled spoilers and prolonged instability, as malign actors pursue unilateral initiatives while the UN looks on helplessly — a familiar pattern that repeats globally.
The UN’s unraveling is therefore a choice, not an inevitability. It is the product of a collective unwillingness to make hard decisions: to sunset obsolete mandates; to fund priorities adequately; and to demand accountability for results. The organization is trapped between member states that demand more with less, and a bureaucracy that delivers less with less.
The upcoming selection of a new secretary-general threatens to become a contest to choose who can best manage austerity, rather than a debate about the revitalization of global cooperation. Without a radical shift in political will, the UN will continue its descent from a world organization to a weakened institution, its relevance measured only by the crises it is no longer equipped to handle.

• Hafed Al-Ghwell is senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center in Washington and senior fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
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