The arrival in office of American President Donald Trump in January 2025 has led to massive cuts in the United Nations’ operations and staff, culminating in an existential financial crisis for the world body. Trump’s assault on global multilateralism, symbolized by slashing American contributions to the UN and abruptly closing the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is negatively impacting the world body’s security and development efforts.
Financial Impact and UN Reforms
The Trump administration cut 25 percent of its contributions to international peacekeeping and slashed humanitarian assistance to UN agencies, of which Washington had typically provided 10-30 percent of the global total. By April 2025, America owed $3 billion of the UN’s total regular budget and peacekeeping debt of $5 billion. Due to this financial crisis, Portuguese UN Secretary-General António Guterres was forced to accelerate UN80 reforms. He announced cuts of $500 million in the 2026 UN budget (15 percent of its programming), a 15 percent reduction in the peacekeeping budget, and the withdrawal of 25 percent of UN peacekeepers from the field.
Implications for Global Peacekeeping
These cuts are likely to have massive implications for global peacekeeping, forcing ill-equipped and poorly-resourced regional peacekeepers to take on more of the burden. At the root of these challenges lies a peacekeeping paradox. A total of 44,896 UN peacekeepers were deployed globally in March 2026, down from 94,793 two years earlier, with 77 percent deployed across Africa. UN troops tend to be relatively well-resourced compared to African regional bodies but often refuse to undertake dangerous enforcement missions to protect populations at risk. By contrast, African peacekeepers under the African Union (AU) and ECOWAS have historically been more willing to enforce peace but rarely receive the logistical and financial resources required.
Regional Instability and Mission Closures
Governments in Burundi and Mali have expelled UN peacekeepers, while leaders of the DRC and Somalia are calling for closing down UN missions on their territories. These untimely departures are likely to exacerbate instability in Africa’s most volatile regions: the Sahel, the Great Lakes, and the Horn of Africa. Within the UN Security Council, the US, which contributes 27 percent of UN peacekeeping expenses but is $1.8 billion in arrears, announced a “back to basics” strategy in 2025 led by its pugnacious permanent representative Mike Waltz. This approach seeks to curtail global peace operations, calling for withdrawals, strategic reviews, and benchmarking of performance.
US Pressure on Missions
Washington pushed for closing down UN missions in Yemen (by March 2026), Lebanon (by December 2026), and the Central African Republic (renewed until November 2026, conditional on eventual withdrawal). In February 2026, the US threatened to close the UN mission in South Sudan if warring parties continued to obstruct its work, and four months earlier requested a strategic review of the UN mission in Western Sahara. However, the Trump administration exceptionally supported two new UN missions serving its own interests: a Gang Suppression Force in Haiti in September 2025 and an International Stabilisation Force in Gaza two months later.
Reform Efforts and Geopolitical Climate
Guterres initiated a comprehensive review of UN peacekeeping in 2025, led by the Departments of Peace Operations and Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, whose publication has been delayed. The “peacekeeping trio” of Denmark, Pakistan, and South Korea held three open debates in 2025 to build international consensus on the future of peacekeeping. However, due to the deeply uncertain international geopolitical climate, with a highly disruptive US abdicating its global leadership role, member states have been cautious about ambitious reform. The talk is about a “networked approach” sharing the burden with regional actors like the AU and ECOWAS, but these goals are minimalist amidst savage cuts.
UN Security Council Representation
Africa and Latin America remain the only regions without veto-wielding permanent membership on the UN Security Council. Many elected ten (E10) members seek to reform the anachronistic Council. The African Three (A3) have worked with Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (2020–2021) and Guyana (2024–2025) to create the “A3 Plus” group, strengthening Pan-African influence. This collaboration is expected to continue with Trinidad and Tobago (2027/2028).
Peacebuilding Neglect
Studies note that in half of conflict cases, countries relapse into war within five years due to inadequate peacebuilding. The poorly funded UN Peacebuilding Commission has failed to close this gap. The current American-led retrenchment insists on achieving narrow security and political objectives while neglecting concomitant peacebuilding tasks essential to tackling root causes of conflicts. This backward step seeks to eliminate the multidimensional aspects of peacekeeping established under Egyptian UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s landmark 1992 An Agenda for Peace, ignoring lessons learned over three and a half decades of post-Cold War peacebuilding.
