In early December, as the vote tally flashed across the United Nations General Assembly, rumor hardened into fact: The United States had aligned with a handful of authoritarian regimes to oppose a Ukrainian resolution on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The move seemed to symbolize a shift for Washington within the international body.
The resolution expressed “grave alarm” over a Russian strike last February that compromised primary safety functions at the power plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The text also formalized the Ukrainian spelling of the site, “Chornobyl.”) It passed 97-8, with the United States joining Belarus, China, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Niger, and Russia in opposition; 39 countries abstained.
The United States explained its unusual opposition by citing a reference in the resolution to the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The language—noting how Chernobyl cooperation “can contribute” to the 2030 agenda—is boilerplate in many General Assembly texts, helping sponsors to whip votes from developing nations. A week earlier, the United States had supported Ukraine on another resolution calling for the return of children abducted by Russia.
Less than a month after the United States broke with precedent on the Chernobyl resolution vote, it carried out strikes in Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro—resulting in an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Monday. Many capitals have seen Maduro’s rule as illegitimate since the country’s disputed 2024 presidential election.
However, U.S. President Donald Trump followed up this raid with threats against two Security Council members: Colombia and Denmark. Then, on Wednesday, Trump announced that Washington would withdraw from dozens of international bodies, including the U.N. Population Fund and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Under Trump, the United States is justifying outsider positions and withholding funding for popular U.N. programs based on arguments about language. It is wielding billions of dollars in withheld contributions to force deep spending cuts and a reevaluation of priorities. And now, it is making unilateral threats against the sovereign territory of member states, including Security Council members.
The Trump administration seems to be pursuing a metamorphosis of the international order—and its approach at the U.N. as 2026 begins is emblematic of this game plan.
The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, released in December, reserved some of its most scathing criticism for European allies and heralded the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine aimed at asserting U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. After the Jan. 3 attack on Venezuela, Trump said that the United States would “run” the country and try Maduro in a U.S. court. He implied that Colombian President Gustavo Petro could face similar measures and reiterated his threats to annex Greenland, a Danish territory.
Colombia, long a U.S. counternarcotics partner and a recipient of U.S. aid, joined the Security Council this month as a non-permanent member and called the emergency session on Monday. Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., left the meeting shortly after reading out the U.S. statement. China and Russia both supported Colombia’s request; Russia’s envoy accused the United States of “generating fresh momentum for neocolonialism and imperialism”—surely the most cynical political statement of the new year.
If the U.S. attack on Venezuela leads to a resolution in the General Assembly, where the United States doesn’t have veto power, it could face similar isolation as Russia did after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. During the emergency session, Washington’s European allies mostly walked a diplomatic tightrope. Denmark, another non-permanent member of the Security Council, was among the most forceful voices emphasizing that decisions about the country’s political future belonged in the hands of Venezuelans.
The Trump administration’s intimidation campaign at the U.N. goes well beyond a war of words. Since Trump returned to the White House, the United States has not paid a penny to what is known as the regular budget for administration, and it is leveraging its withheld contributions—as well as those to separate budgets for peacekeeping and other U.N. programs—to push its agenda. The administration has branded its approach as “Make the U.N. Great Again.”
Waltz framed the muscular U.N. budget negotiations at the end of last year as safeguarding the interests of U.S. taxpayers. Yet the math remains lopsided. The United States is billed annually for 22 percent of the U.N. regular budget, or roughly $800 million; for the average U.S. household, that amounts to $6 a year. Withholding funding could reshape aspects of the U.N. agenda that Trump dislikes, namely the promotion of abortion rights, references to “gender” in U.N. texts, or programs aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change.
The negotiations over the 2026 regular budget went down to the wire, with U.N. diplomats huddling in closed-door meetings overnight, even on Christmas Eve. The U.S. envoys were burning the midnight oil with them, including Waltz and Jeff Bartos, Trump’s U.N. ambassador for management and reform.
Ahead of the talks, Waltz had shared a post on X calling the U.N. a “bloated bureaucracy” and pressing for a 25 percent reduction in global peacekeepers, a 15 percent overall spending cut, and the reduction of 2,600 “HQ bureaucrats.” A French diplomat said that U.S. officials were not only pressing to reduce the size of the workforce but also to reevaluate salary levels. The diplomat pointed out that it was already difficult to recruit translators, who are required to speak at least three languages, at their current salary.
Ultimately, the U.N. approved a $3.45 billion budget for 2026, representing a 15 percent decrease in financial resources and a 19 percent reduction in staff positions. The negotiations were so drawn out that there wasn’t time to translate the committee’s report before the General Assembly met to approve the regular budget—another departure from U.N. norms. Bartos commended the budgetary committee for “embracing common sense reform.”
The U.N. system is already reeling from a fiscal crisis largely engineered by Washington. At U.N. headquarters in New York, basic repairs are often delayed for weeks. After reversing a decision to cut back security guard hours at the staff entrance, the latest cost-cutting proposal is a plan to remove paper towels from restrooms at the iconic U.N. headquarters to save some $100,000 a year.
But the Trump administration is bumping up against the procedural limitations of its budget tactics as 2026 begins. Per the U.N. Charter, a member state in arrears in the payment of its dues in an amount that equals or exceeds the contributions due for two preceding years can lose its vote in the General Assembly. (Only Afghanistan and Venezuela currently have that status.) If Trump pushed it that far, the United States would remain a permanent member of the Security Council.
After the White House withdrew from dozens of international organizations and treaties that it deemed “wasteful, ineffective, or harmful” this week, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, underscored Washington’s failure to meet even its obligatory financial dues. “Assessed contributions to the United Nations regular budget and peacekeeping budget, as approved by the General Assembly, are a legal obligation under the U.N. Charter for all member states, including the United States,” he said.
Much of the spending within the U.N. system is deployed for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian aid. Last August, the United States pushed through a Security Council resolution phasing out peacekeeping operations in Lebanon over the publicly expressed reservations of some Security Council members—including France, which leads the council’s work on Lebanon.
At the end of December, the U.S. State Department and the primary U.N. humanitarian relief coordinator held a joint press conference in Geneva announcing a $2 billion U.S. contribution for humanitarian assistance—below Washington’s previous commitments to U.N. relief programs, but a turnaround after its previous withdrawal from a laundry list of U.N. agencies and programs. The United States announced that 17 countries would be eligible for funds from the $2 billion contribution.
Jeremy Lewin, the State Department’s undersecretary for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs, and religious freedom, told the reporters assembled for the Geneva press conference that some countries explicitly wouldn’t be eligible for the U.S. funds, such as Afghanistan and Yemen, and that Gaza would be “handled on a separate track.”
Lewin described $2 billion as an “initial tranche” of U.S. support and predicted the money would be more impactful than before because of “hyper-prioritization.”
Tom Fletcher, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, clarified that work will go on without earmarked U.S. funding. “My teams are out there responding to climate disasters, crises, hurricanes, and so on, and that work won’t stop happening,” he said.
To be sure, Waltz has notched some noteworthy successes since arriving at the U.N. last September, including securing the approval of Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza in a 13-0 vote at the Security Council. (Russia and China abstained.) Another diplomatic source said that the Gaza plan was presented to council members behind closed doors as the only alternative to a return to war, leaving them little choice but to support it.
Waltz, a former Green Beret, sometimes employs military metaphors to describe the administration’s goals at the U.N., particularly in striking down proposals seen as encroachments on U.S. sovereignty. In a Fox News appearance last year, Waltz celebrated the blocking of a proposed global carbon emissions levy on international shipping by the International Maritime Organization and credited Trump’s decisive style. “We just defeated that vote today. Thanks to the president and the truth Tomahawks,” he said.
In a wry joke making the rounds at U.N. headquarters, diplomats are referring to the new reality as ultimately about “doing less with less.” The Trump administration seemingly doesn’t intend to walk away from the U.N. entirely, and indeed, Waltz argues against throwing out the “baby with the bathwater.” But the clear goal of the budget negotiations for 2026 was to reframe U.N. priorities.
Ultimately, the “Make the U.N. Great Again” doctrine represents a calculated gamble. The United States is trading its role as the principal architect of the rules-based international order for the role of a disruptor. Though the specific geostrategic realignment on issues from climate change to Russia’s war in Ukraine might not survive the Trump administration, the scaling back of the U.N. could permanently transform the institution that Washington once championed as the cornerstone of global peace and stability.