Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Foreign Affairs urges Guterres's successor to shrink the UN to three core functions
Antonio Guterres leaves at the end of the year after spending his final two years on cost cuts, and the three named candidates to replace him would take over a system whose revenue grew 85 percent between 2010 and 2022.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Guterres leaves at the end of the year after a decade in office, and diplomats and UN officials hope his successor can take a longer-term approach to refreshing the institution.
- The Trump administration halted most U.S. funding to UN activities last year, forcing the organization to cut back its peacekeeping and relief work.
- China, Russia and the United States have between them stopped the Security Council acting on the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the civil conflicts in Myanmar and Sudan.
- The declared field to replace him is small: UN trade official Rebeca Grynspan, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi, and Guyana's UN ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett.
- Foreign Affairs argues the next secretary-general should give up the institution's broader ambitions and concentrate on crisis prevention, humanitarian delivery and achievable development goals.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The winner does not get to decide whether the UN does less, because the money and the vetoes sit with member states; the live choice is which functions absorb the reduction.
- constraint Treaty-scale agreement, the currency previous secretaries-general built tenures on, is unavailable for as long as great-power competition holds, so the next chief has to be judged on delivery instead.
- cost Developing states carry the reduction twice over: they already say donors missed their development pledges, and a slimmed programme is what remains after the cuts.
- precedent A deliberate shrink would break a post-Cold War habit of answering each crisis with a bigger mandate, and would make a list of functions to drop the expected response to the next funding shock.
The scope question shows up in one line of the UN's accounts. Combined revenue across all UN entities rose from $40 billion in 2010 to a high of $74 billion in 2022, driven in considerable part by greater humanitarian spending [5]. That is $34 billion of growth, or 85 percent over twelve years [1]. All of it depended on donors choosing to keep paying, and poor countries already complain that donor states have not met their UN pledges on development spending [9].
Foreign Affairs names what it would keep: international crisis prevention and conflict resolution, the efficient provision of humanitarian aid, and achievable international development goals [6]. What it would drop is time-consuming diplomatic processes and inefficient bureaucracies, and the essay accepts that the result may disappoint ardent advocates of global governance [7].
A skeptic would say the Council's paralysis is cyclical and the money follows the politics back up. There is a precedent for that reading. The US war in Iraq in 2003 split the Security Council and temporarily derailed Kofi Annan's agenda, and he still organized a global summit in 2005 and led the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission and the Geneva-based Human Rights Council the following year [10]. The difference now is duration and money. The Syrian civil war divided the Council for over a decade [11], and Guterres has spent about a fifth of his ten years in office on staff reductions and other cost-cutting measures to keep the secretariat from going bankrupt [1][2].
The record also shows what retrenchment looked like the one time it happened. Boutros Boutros-Ghali envisioned the UN as a supercharged global peacemaking body, and after blue helmets failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 the organization briefly retrenched [12]. Annan reversed that from the late 1990s with fresh poverty-reduction goals, a campaign against AIDS and peace operations in Kosovo, Timor-Leste and several African countries [13]. Since the end of the Cold War, UN chiefs have answered crisis by arguing the institution should do more, not less [14]. Ban Ki-moon championed the Paris climate pact in 2015, and Guterres convened a "Summit of the Future" in 2024 [8].
The essay's own hope is about personnel: diplomats and UN officials want a new leader who can take a longer-term approach to refreshing the institution and keeping governments committed to multilateralism [15]. It also states the ceiling on that hope. As long as the world remains competitive and chaotic, Foreign Affairs writes, the UN's ability to forge wide-ranging international agreements will stay constrained [16]. The essay does not say what any of the three candidates would cut; it says a UN reduced to a few core functions may be the only version still viable in an era of great-power competition and austerity [7].
What to watch
- Whether Grynspan, Grossi or Rodrigues-Birkett names functions they would stop funding before the selection closes.
- Whether U.S. funding to UN activities resumes, since the peacekeeping and relief cuts followed the halt.
- Whether the Security Council passes anything on Ukraine, Iran, Myanmar or Sudan before the handover.