04 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
OCTOBER 2025
Back to the Future
The UN's budget crisis deepens challenges amid climate disasters, conflicts, and reform demands. The devastation of lives fuels and worsens skyrocketing inequalities within and among countries.
By Barbara Adams
Disproportionate influence over the UN’s budget represents a long-standing, deep-seated exercise of power that handicaps its ability to halt this devastation. This was recognized decades ago by Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who in 1985 proposed a ceiling of 10 percent on the assessed contribution of any Member State, addressing the influence of the United States’ share, which today stands at 22% of the total.
Image by Matthew TenBruggencate, via Unsplash.
In addressing the UN General Assembly in 2014, then-Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, stated unequivocally: “Our ability to exercise leadership in the UN—to protect our core national security interests—is directly tied to meeting our financial obligations.”
The current US administration’s refusal to meet its UN treaty obligation of paying its required share of the UN regular budget has forced UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to launch the so-called “UN80 Initiative” with three main workstreams: Efficiencies and Improvements, Mandate Implementation Review, and Structure and Program Realignment.
Certainly, a quality re-structuring is long overdue. Its current governance Charter is eighty years old, put in place when only fifty-one countries were politically independent. Similarly, the terms of global economic governance were determined in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, attended by a scant forty-four governments, and have continued to be shaped and dominated in the economic interests of the US and its currency.
The blatant abandonment of the use of soft power by the US administration as it embraces tariff warfare and “who pays” or transactional politics, has pulled back the remaining layer of its facade as a team player. This blunt unilateralism elevated the “impossible to ignore” deceptive state of international cooperation to another level and re-cast the outcome of the 2024 Summit of the Future as a premier item in the push-back toolkit of high-level consensus agreements adopted by all Member States.
The decades-long behavior of big powers – now taken to a new level - has generated some pushback from the majority for which collective decision-making and agreement are essential for their seat at a governance table, their collective security and progress towards sustainable development. This is clearly evident with the continuing emphasis, mainly by the Global South, on the Sustainable Development Goals despite the US’s denunciation of them. It has also spurred different analyses of the future global governance configuration.
Some are comparing this to an epoch after a “world” war, channeling energy and commitment into redoing the governance stage, the players, and the issues, with a view to creating a remade global agreement relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s global challenges.
Others articulate the situation as critical but not existential, such that they must put lower on the policy-priority ladder their 3 or 4 key issues to “save multilateralism” and the UN Charter and its values. Iraq on behalf of the G77 and China emphasized the importance of not " undermin[ing] the multilateral spirit of processes" in the Financing for Development negotiations. In the same process, “the EU has repeated time and again that this process is about more than financing for development, more than the 2030 Agenda or about achieving the SDGs. It is about all of those, yes. But it is also fundamentally about showcasing that multilateralism delivers.”
There are also those who see an opportunity for new power centers, moving from the UN and multilateralism to multipolarity. This has triggered a debate on multilateralism and multipolarity, or multilateralism versus multipolarity, with various positions elaborated at the UN High-level Week in September 2025.
Brazilian President Lula, for example, stated: “In the future that Brazil envisions, there is no room for the re-establishment of ideological rivalries or spheres of influence. Confrontation is not inevitable. We need leaders with clarity of vision, who understand that the international order is not a "zero-sum game.” The twenty-first century will be increasingly multipolar. To remain peaceful, it cannot fail to be multilateral.” President Stubb of Finland voiced: “In its simplest form, foreign policy is based on three pillars: values, interests, and power… Power – hard and soft – is a luxury of bigger players. The power of a smaller country arises from its capacity to cooperate with others…. [T]here is a growing tension between those who promote multilateralism - an order based on the rule of law - and those who speak the language of multipolarity or transactionalism.”
Multipolarity may still be a might-is-right governance regime, but with a few more “mighties” and more policy - and possibly fiscal - space for the rest.
It is unclear what the multiple poles might be. Something bi-polar or broader, such as regional and sub-regional networks or (Global) South-South trading partners?
So far, as power centers shift, all iterations have paid minimal if any attention to the disproportionate power and influence of transnational corporations and high-net-worth individuals, even as many Member States and the UN have fallen prey to corporate partnerships and the need for so-called innovative financing.
Does the era of double standards continue, within and between countries, or has cynical acceptance or wilful blindness become too painful, and can we become agents in a move to something more peaceful and just?
Decades of big-power politics have extended their bilateral agendas and global and regional rivalries into multilateral spaces, influencing and steadily undermining deliberations and outcomes toward a people-centered multilateralism. Economic globalization and the accompanying economic pragmatism have limited the policy space of small and medium-sized countries to pursue domestic alternatives or diverse policy paths, and have made them accomplices—willing or otherwise—to a failing global governance setup.
For the UN, this has resulted in a shift away from its core functions, notably the setting of global norms and standards and the negotiation of legally binding treaties. Member State negotiations have reflected the status quo with minimal areas of quality agreement and even risk going backward in areas such as human rights, gender equality, sustainable development and the environment. Replacing global agreements with weaker ones or removing them entirely makes a mockery of the essence of accountability to a “better world for all.”
Barbara Adams is Board Chair of Global Policy Forum and teaches at the New School. An economist, she's a researcher, CSO advocate, and former UN staffer.