By Manhattan’s East River sits a stretch of concrete, glass and idealism: the UN's headquarters. Conceived in the postwar optimism of 1945 and inaugurated in 1952, it was once called “the most important site in the world”.
Now, depending on your viewpoint, it’s either an architectural relic, the best rent-controlled deal on the island, or a fault line where history’s tectonic plates collide. And despite it being an international body, the slash-and-burn spending policy of the current US administration could shake the UN to its core.
The UN may not always solve the world’s problems, but it has the best front-row seats. It occupies nearly seven hectares of prime Manhattan real estate, overlooking Midtown’s towers. Yet while new skyscrapers climb higher each year and apartments in neighbouring Turtle Bay fetch seven figures, the Secretariat building’s Cold War gravitas feels frozen in time.
Its corridors are filled with soft power and stiff suits; its cafeteria serves sushi and curry and a lingering sense of bureaucratic fatigue. Its flags flap in the Hudson breeze. Tourists snap photos of its iconic curve. Inside, translators juggle idioms; delegates trade statements and censorious frowns. And developers eye it like chess players eye the centre of the board.
This patch of land, donated by the Rockefellers, has long stood as a neutral ground. It’s not quite America – UN employees don’t pay New York City taxes, and parking tickets accrue like diplomatic cables, often unpaid. Still, the Big Apple, in its usual transactional shrug, puts up with it. After all, what other place on Earth would be able to effortlessly host five simultaneous translations of global disagreement?
“It’s hard to think of New York without the UN,” one passer-by told The National. Another said: “It makes New York feel like the capital of the world.”
But what if, whispers a certain breed of real estate fantasist, the UN packed up and moved to Geneva or even Nairobi? Behind security barricades, the UN remains as much a symbol as it is a seat of power: multilateral in an age of unilateral demands.
US President Donald Trump's administration is weighing a proposal to slash the State Department’s budget by nearly half, a move that would gut international aid and strip the UN of critical funding.
Washington, the UN's largest contributor, is in arrears: it owes nearly $1.5 billion for the regular UN budget and nearly $1.2 billion for the peacekeeping budget for the current fiscal year. Reports indicate that the White House budget office has recommended cutting funding for UN peacekeeping missions, pointing to operational failures in Lebanon, Mali and elsewhere.
“The US role in financing and politically backstopping the UN is so huge, that if Washington walks away nobody can fully compensate for it,” said Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group.
A top UN diplomat put it bluntly: “The UN shouldn’t wait for Elon Musk to come here. They should start making changes now.” The diplomat was referring to the Tesla co-founder and billionaire adviser to Mr Trump, who has been slashing budgets, firing thousands and shuttering offices in an attempt to eliminate government waste.
Another diplomat told The National: “The UN has lost its way” – the kind of observation offered not in anger, but with the weary certainty of someone who’s seen too many resolutions passed and promptly forgotten.
“The Trump administration threatens to push it over a cliff edge,” said Mr Gowan. “Many Republicans deeply distrust the institution and are angry over UN criticism of Israel over Gaza and are coming for revenge.”
He added: “Multilateral bodies like the UN don't really matter in Trump's worldview.”
The UN is already teetering on the edge of a liquidity crisis. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last month said he is seeking ways to improve efficiency and cut costs as the world body turns 80 this year. The machinery of global diplomacy, it seems, was built under the assumption that America would always be there to foot the bill.
The rumoured US cuts come as Hugh Dugan, a former diplomat at the US mission to the UN and a former special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the State Department, leads an initiative aimed at reforming the world body.
As the founder of Doge-UN – the UN-focused offshoot of Mr Musk's Department of Government Efficiency – Mr Dugan aims to tackle “bureaucratic bloat, waste and inefficiencies” at the world body, and propose cost-cutting measures.
“We need much more accountability for the resources that are provided to the UN,” Mr Dugan declared, his tone suggesting that he views the current system as less an international body than a fiscal black hole.
“The United States is undertaking this type of exercise in Washington, through the Doge exercise, to get into the books, into the management records, and to find out if there is accountability and where there is none, to stop the organisation until it provides the type of effective and efficient service that our taxpayers are expecting.”
The Trump administration, he noted, is already conducting a sweeping review of the UN, due to conclude by the end of August. “When the President speaks at the General Assembly in September,” Mr Dugan said, “He’s going to identify the United States’ expectations of the United Nations.”
Mr Dugan insisted that the US will not withdraw from the organisation but did float another idea: moving certain UN offices to different locations around the world.
“It would cost much less,” he pointed out, “because the salaries in New York are given a 40 per cent additional allowance for the cost of living,” he said.
One Republican senator has even introduced long-shot legislation that would pull the US from the UN entirely. Senator Mike Lee’s Disengaging Entirely from the United Nations Debacle (Defund) Act “addresses grave issues of national sovereignty and fiscal accountability which have plagued US involvement in the UN.”
Mr Gowan noted that the UN is going to have to shed a lot of jobs and merge a lot of its departments and agencies to reduce costs to continue to function.
“I worry that the UN will face pressure to cut quickly and may not make cost reductions in a logical or strategic way,” he said. “At least Guterres, who initially seemed unready for the Trump challenge, is now pushing his staff to think boldly about reform. He has recognised he needs to get a grip on the process.”
But whether the UN’s entrenched bureaucracy would submit to such upheaval remains an open question. For now, the only certainty is that the reckoning is coming.
