Trump vs. the UN

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2:53There's 89 heads of state, five vice presidents, one crown prince, and 43 heads of government. Magdalena Del Valle covers the UN for Bloomberg, and she says the 80-year-old institution is at a critical juncture. The United States, which is responsible for about 20 percent of the U.N.'s annual budget, hasn't paid its dues in months. President Trump says the organization is bloated and isn't living up to its potential. That was the backdrop to Trump's arrival to the General Assembly on Tuesday. I mean, I think things kind of started to go wrong from almost the second he walked through the door. Magdalena says the president and first lady got out of their limo, walked inside, and then stepped onto an escalator.

3:38And then all of a sudden it stopped. They both were confused. And then they all had to walk up, kind of awkwardly, up this escalator. In a statement, a U.N. spokesperson said the escalator's built-in safety mechanism had been activated. The Secret Service says it's also investigating. Well, after that, there was another problem. When Trump reached the podium in the General Assembly Hall, The teleprompter wasn't working. I can only say that whoever's operating this teleprompter is in big trouble. Trump went on to deliver a speech that lasted almost an hour, detailing a lot of what he views as the major accomplishments of his second term.

4:17The president also trained his sights on the U.N. itself. What's the purpose of the United Nations, he asked. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It's empty words and empty words don't solve war. Trump turned that awkward start to his speech into a punchline and a metaphor. These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much. Trump's criticism of the U.N. raises the question of what the organization will look like in the future without the kind of engagement and investment the U.S.

5:00has provided for decades. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General, told me the organization is facing some hard choices. We shrink. We reduce what we are doing. The problem is that those peacekeepers, that many of them are in places where there is no peace to keep, with terrorist groups, with armed groups, they are sometimes the last resort for the protection of civilians. And those are the ones that will suffer. So the UN can move on, but the people that we support will suffer.

5:36I'm David Gura, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, the United Nations at a tipping point. As the United States withholds money and support, it raises questions about the role the U.N. plays on the world stage.

5:54Since the United Nations was founded in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, it's depended on funding from the United States. But the country's unpaid obligations to the U.N. are now more than$3 billion. So when I sat down with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last week, I asked him, can the UN survive without U.S. support? We are having some massive cuts. The agencies have responded in humanitarian aid and the development cooperation, which means that they reduced stuff, they shrunk their operations. So the UN moves on. But of course the people impacted by the cuts suffer, which means less food distributed, less vaccines distributed, less HIV-AIDS treatment distributed.

6:48So obviously the impact is not in the UN. The impact is in those that benefit from the action of our humanitarian and development agencies. On the other hand, we have the assessed contributions, which means the mandatory contributions that were agreed by member states for the secretariat and for the peacekeeping operations. And there, there are cuts announced and cuts that probably will take place in the future. We have been doing enough measures in the implementation of this year's budget to be able to move ahead. and we are preparing, if necessary, a series of emergency measures to drastically reduce our peacekeeping operations.

7:32Bloomberg's Magdalena Del Valle says many people were hoping President Trump would provide more information about the future of U.S. funding in his speech on Tuesday. But he didn't get into specifics. And it's not just because the U.S. isn't paying. A lot of countries aren't paying or they're paying late. And so it's really hard for them to decide kind of what they're going to fund. And the secretary general has made some proposals, but with so many different countries, with so many different priorities, it's hard for them all to agree. So even if the SG says, OK, we should combine these two entities and fire this many people for a lot of these decisions, all the countries have to agree.

8:07And so the bureaucracy could possibly get in the way of making some hard cuts. So there are these countries who haven't paid what they've said they would pay or they're supposed to pay. How would you describe the current state of the U.N.? How is it operating without that financial stream? I mean, I don't know if it's related, but it could be that the escalator and the teleprompter didn't work because they can't afford it. We're just guessing here. No, we are very much just guessing here. But in the past, they have had to shut down escalators at certain hours to save money. They turned off the air conditioning, again, I think during the weekend.

8:42They've had to make some decisions like that about just the day-to-day. I think some of the elevators sometimes didn't run, things like that. But more broadly, I think it means that if these countries continue to not pay, a lot of programs might just disappear. Something that's really at risk is the UN's peacekeeping missions. The UN is going to cut about 13 percent of its workforce and about 11 percent of its funding. And these missions are kind of the last resort for a lot of countries. I mean, every institution that I've talked to at the UN has this new motto where they say they have to do less with less.

9:15So I think everyone's trying to do that. More broadly, the UN is moving a lot of its projects to places where it's less expensive to live. So maybe instead of New York and Geneva, they're going to Kenya or to Germany. But there's also this push to make things more efficient and to actually instead of doing less with less to maybe try to do more with less. But that's obviously very, very difficult. We're living in this moment when global power dynamics are shifting so rapidly. There are several major conflicts unfolding all around the world. I spoke with the UN Secretary General on Friday and Antonio Guterres told me we're now entering into a multipolar world.

9:53This is no longer a bipolar world. This is no longer a unipolar world. This is at the present moment a chaotic world, but moving into a multipolar world. And we need to build the multilateral institutions of the future. That's why we are reforming the UN. And let's not forget, there was multipolarity in Europe before the First World War. In the absence of multilateral institutions, the result was war. It does seem like this is just the kind of moment the UN was created 80 years ago to address. A couple of months ago, I spoke to someone and kind of brought up the same question. And his answer was, well, we haven't had a third world war yet, so the UN is still working.

10:34But yeah, I mean, we have the conflict between Israel and Gaza. We have Russia and Ukraine. There was actually a Security Council meeting called on by Estonia to defend their own airspace. And now NATO is saying that they're going to really defend their countries if Russia flies over them. So there's also tension with Iran. Right now, they're kind of in a very tight spot where they have a week left to maybe come up with a deal before the U.N. brings back sanctions on Iran. But as long as we don't start World War III, some experts say that the U.N. is working. I want to go back to President Trump's speech.

11:08And I wonder if you could draw a contrast between the speech that he delivered in 2025 and the first speech he delivered eight years ago. Help us understand just how different the world is today than it was eight years ago. I mean, President Trump had this ambition to kind of reorder the global order. There were those who didn't take him seriously before. He has been successful in kind of pushing for or making a lot of the changes that he said he would back then. I think that's exactly right. I think eight years ago, people didn't take him as seriously. I think world leaders kind of thought he was a bit of a joke.

11:39And now he's here and he is not a joke. They're taking him seriously. They're making sure to get in his good graces because they know he can and will make their lives difficult if he wants to. You hear the president's skepticism of the UN as it exists today. And I'm curious how that affects the way other member states look at the US's role in the UN. As you talk to people there, other diplomats, what do they say just about the level of power or influence that the US has today? Well, I think one of the hardest things for a lot of the member states is the reality that no other country can really step up to take the U.S.'s place.

12:19There is a lot of speculation that China might step up and have more influence in the U.N. or a different country, but the magnitude of the U.S.'s influence and just, I mean, the sheer scope of the money they contributed, no one can match that. So sure, some countries might try here and there, but I mean, I just think it's unmatchable. Without the full backing of the U.S., How much can the UN do to promote peace and security around the world? That's next.

12:54Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or, if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow, and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined.

13:32An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the Public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market.

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15:37One common criticism of the United Nations is that when it comes to resolving conflict, one of its main roles, it's ineffective. The U.N. Security Council has the big and important role of maintaining security and peace around the world. But it's often deadlocked, frozen, blocked from moving forward because the council's five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S., have all powerful vetoes. And often the countries can't agree. I asked Secretary General Guterres how the broader institution can continue to operate when this central body is unable to do its job effectively.

16:15T-Win is much more than the Supreme Council. We are by far the main distributors of humanitarian aid in the world. We are in the front line of climate action. So we are involved in lots of activities of all kinds to the benefit of the people around the world. We have a problem. Yes, in the core area of our activity, which is peace and security, we depend on a security council that today has a problem of legitimacy because it doesn't correspond anymore to the world of today when we were talking about multipolarity where is the multipolarity in the security council clearly not and it has a problem of efficiency and that is a serious restriction for our activity but usually say when we do not have a dog we hunt with a cat but we hunt On Tuesday, the Security Council had separate three-hour meetings on Gaza and Ukraine.

17:19There are a lot of conversations about these conflicts. And then I do think in the background, there's that sense of, do we need the UN for this or not? The question of Palestinian statehood is, of course, front and center at this gathering. Canada, the UK, and Australia announcing they now recognize Palestinian statehood. What is your sense of the significance of them doing that? And how is that reverberating around the UN this week? I mean, it's pretty clear and everyone has said that it's mostly symbolic. I mean, in the long run, I know that Macron said he's hoping to have embassies and to have more solid things that represent that France recognizes Palestine as a state.

17:59And I'm sure other countries are working on that as well. But for now, you know, in the short term, it is mostly just ideological, which some countries think is good because it's going to put pressure on Israel. Someone I spoke to yesterday actually said it might be counterproductive because the pressure on Israel might actually be a motivation for them to really bring down the hammer harder than before because they feel more threatened. So, I mean, I guess we'll see what happens. Another point of tension at this year's General Assembly is immigration. In his Tuesday remarks, Trump called on other U.N.

18:34member countries to clamp down on border security. It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. Let's see, I can tell you. I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell. Trump has pressured the U.N. to change its protocols for asylum seekers. Basically, the U.N. has had this longstanding rule for how asylum should work and the Trump administration. They want, I think, to have the countries that people arrive to make more of the decisions rather than the people. They shouldn't be able to decide which country to go to. They should just, like, you know, if you make it to one place, then that's where you're stuck.

19:11You can't suddenly decide to go somewhere else. I think Trump also wants to propose that the host country can get to decide when the asylum seeker can go back. Like, they can assess how the other country's doing. And if the host country decides that it's OK, then the person can be sent back. So they definitely want to make a lot of changes. In light of what we've discussed, I think the trajectory of the UN doesn't sound like it's on a great path. What do your sources say about where the organization is headed? This is not the first year, and I don't think it'll be the last year, where people say that the United Nations is in a crisis.

19:47I mean, I think ever since it was founded, people have criticized it. People have thought that it's going to fail. And it hasn't. And a lot of the sources I've spoken to, I mean, when, you know, there was the crisis in Iran and things like that, were saying, yeah, the UN can't really mitigate every single little fight between two countries. They just have to make sure the big picture stays OK. And so, yeah, I think, I mean, someone was saying we're going to be here next year again and we're going to be wondering if we're going to be here the year after that. But we probably will. Like, I don't think the UN is going anywhere, even though people every year think it might be its last year.

20:34This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gurra. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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