“Imminent financial collapse,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres hysterically predicted in a Jan. 29 letter to all UN member states, saying his reputationally challenged organization is so cash-strapped that it will run out of money by July, close its iconic Manhattan headquarters in August and cancel its annual General Assembly meeting in September.Most UN functions, including its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which claims to coordinate responses to global emergencies, may also sunset in the coming months due to lack of funds.
This gushing cavalcade of good news sounds more like a promise than a warning.
The institution in December foolishly approved a $3.45 billion budget it can’t afford, and less than a month later Guterres lamented “the urgency of the situation we now face.”
Cuts and layoffs are already underway. Morale is reportedly low.
“It’s now or never,” one UN spokesman told The New York Times. “We do not have the sort of cash reserves and the sort of liquidity to keep functioning.”
Paring down the diplospeak and cushy coverage in the former paper of record, Guterres and his broke lackeys sound more like spoiled teenage girls who maxed out their dads’ credit cards than competent leaders of the world’s largest diplomatic organization.
Yet the only solution that can keep the privileged globalist caste dipping fondue at average and, often, tax-free salaries of $95,600 with generous benefits (while not having to suffer the indignity of paying millions in city parking tickets) is an urgent influx of cold, hard cash — your cold, hard cash.
A towering 95% of its projected $2.2 billion shortfall is money the UN says the United States owes in unpaid dues from 2025 and as-yet-unpaid dues for 2026, per a senior UN official who briefed the press on the would-be world government’s rapidly impending insolvency.
On top of that, the official said without a trace of embarrassment, American taxpayers owe his fellow overpaid third-world bureaucrats another $1.9 billion to fund those oh-so-successful peacekeeping missions, $528 million for “closed missions” and, incredibly, a $43.6 million tab for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, global judicial bodies whose jurisdictions we do not accept and in the ICC’s case we don’t even belong to.
Seeing international organizations for the corrupt, inefficient piles of waste they usually are, the Trump administration has wisely scaled down American involvement.
On his first day back in office, President Trump pulled us out of the World Health Organization by executive order, in part because it demanded “unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.”
Days later, he withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council, a laughably ineffective body whose current members include top human-rights violators China, Cuba and South Africa.
Trump also cut funds to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is supposed to help needy Palestinians but employed dubious locals who were accused of fighting with Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Trump in July pulled out of UNESCO, the UN’s educational and cultural organization, which is openly antisemitic, blames world conflict on “patriarchal masculinities” whose “mindsets” its programs seek to “change” and advocates “systemic changes” to solve “structural racism.”
In early January, Trump withdrew from 66 other international organizations and agreements determined to be “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
“I’ve always felt that the UN has tremendous potential,” Trump said when withdrawing from the Human Rights Council last year. “It’s not living up to that potential right now.”
If that was true then, when the UN was at least solvent, it’s still true now that it’s broke.
If the UN can’t survive without billions more in handouts from the American taxpayer, the time has come to let this failed 80-year embarrassment in world governance succumb to its own mismanagement.
After the likes of Guterres have squandered whatever “potential” Trump saw in their disastrous organization, the president might well consider that the UN headquarters’ six celebrity-architect-designed buildings offer 2.6 million square feet of easily convertible space across 18 acres of prime Manhattan real estate in a city with a notorious housing shortage.
With a $2.15 billion renovation completed as recently as 2015, surely the complex could be put to better use under the brand of a certain well known New York developer.
And those late September traffic jams would be a thing of the past.
In any case, the do-nothing United Nations will not be missed.
Paul du Quenoy is Palm Beach Freedom Institute president.
