Undermining the UN is not a new US policy

The annual general debate of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) starts on Tuesday morning in New York amid dire circumstances. Besides traffic gridlock and overpriced hotel rates, cavalcades of motorcades and successive dignitaries delivering calibrated speeches, this session will hear Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s last speech on the state of the UN.Guterres headed the UN for 10 years, and during that time, he repeatedly failed to defend it when it came under attack. He passes on his post at the top of a world organisation on the verge of financial collapse and more marginalised than ever before.Paradoxically, Guterres has the United States, the host government of the UN, and its mercurial president, Donald Trump, to thank for this dismal state of affairs.Earlier this year, the Trump administration withdrew from dozens of UN agencies and organs and, in an extraordinary move, ceased all payments of its dues to the regular and peacekeeping budgets of the UN. But these drastic policy decisions did not spring out of nowhere. Trump’s unhappiness with the UN is multifaceted, and his decision to stop fulfilling Washington’s legally binding financial obligation may well be t...