Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to be U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, faces her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Jan. 21. Foreign diplomats at the U.N. will likely watch the proceedings with a mixture of trepidation and tempered optimism. There is little doubt that Trump and Stefanik will roil the world organization with provocative actions on issues ranging from climate change to the war in Gaza in the early weeks of the new administration. But many nations also hope that, after the initial diplomatic firestorm, Stefanik will emerge as someone with whom they can do business.
Worry Amid Possible Room for Engagement
The mood in Turtle Bay partly parallels that on the eve of the first Trump administration in 2017, when diplomats were doing homework on Nikki Haley, but there are also some significant differences. Eight years ago, most U.N. member States thought the organization was in good shape, but had no idea how Trump and his team would address it. The Obama administration had helped engineer the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate change agreement in 2015. Foreign officials fretted that Trump would not only withdraw from the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal (he did leave both) but also cut off funding the U.N. as a whole (he did not). Haley was certainly in sync with the Trump White House on Israel and Iran, and implemented the administration’s decision for the United States to exit the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2024, the Biden administration decided not to run for a term in the Human Rights Council term starting this January, denying Trump the pleasure of exiting the forum again. But despite these disruptive maneuvers, Haley was frequently pragmatic on other topics, such as negotiating sanctions on North Korea with China, and had a decent working relationship with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Although most ambassadors serving at the U.N. today did not overlap with Haley, they hope that Stefanik will be equally pragmatic and influential.
Based on my post-election conversations in Manhattan, many ambassadors in New York feel a little more confident that they know what Trump’s return will mean this time around. It is a given that his new administration will quit, or at least freeze relations with, most or all of those U.N. arrangements he quit the last time round. This list includes not only the Paris pact but frameworks like the Global Compact on Migration, a set of non-legally binding guidelines for managing international mobility, which the first Trump administration quit and considered a form of interference in national immigration management by the U.N. There have been reports that the Trump administration would also like to leave the World Health Organization (WHO), which he faulted over its handling of COVID-19, on “day one” although the original U.S. legislation on WHO membership means that this could take at least a year.
Assuming she is confirmed, the most probable lightning rod for arguments between Stefanik and her counterparts is the U.N. Relief and Works Agencies (UNRWA), which supports Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and elsewhere in the Middle East. In October 2024, the Israeli Knesset passed laws effectively banning the Agency – which it accuses of complicity with Hamas in the October 7 attacks – from operating in the West Bank and Gaza. Stefanik, who has staked out a role as one of the strongest supporters of Israel in Congress, is likely to back this move against opposition from the vast majority of U.N. members, even if it will spell misery for the Palestinians who rely on the Agency for basic necessities.
The Trump administration is also likely to move to withhold funding from multilateral offices and agencies which it feels have been too critical of Israel over its conduct in the Gaza war, or which it believes support abortion access. Guterres has quietly asked his staff to determine how long the U.N. could function without any U.S. financial support, and has told some member States that it can muddle on for at least a year. But, at a time when a bipartisan majority of U.S. congressional members are pursuing sanctions against International Criminal Court officials over the Court’s case against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, U.S.-U.N. relations appear set for turbulence.
Yet although diplomats say that they expect the next weeks to be hard, some also see opportunities to work with Stefanik. Rumors reaching New York from Washington suggest that Stefanik understands that a slash-and-burn approach to the U.N., while potentially scoring some domestic political wins in the short term, is not sufficient to build her reputation as a foreign policy player. And while U.N. member States may lament specific U.S. budget cuts, many – especially those that pay significant sums to the organization – would not be sorry if Washington tried to impose a new level of budgetary discipline overall. In contrast the relative degree of satisfaction with the U.N. in 2017, a lot of diplomats are currently unhappy with both the organization and how much it costs. There is a common feeling that the U.N. system, and its several billion-dollar budget, has become unwieldy (admittedly not a new accusation) and marginal to international affairs. Many representatives in New York lament that they struggle to excite their government leaders at home with reports of open-ended negotiations in Turtle Bay.
“Back to Basics”?
Some diplomats say that it is time to take the U.N. “back to basics,” focusing on a narrower range of priorities and better aligning its funds with its mandates. Since Trump won last November’s elections, I have spoken to several European diplomats about the consequences for the U.N., and not one has suggested that their countries have significant cash on hand to fill financing gaps created by Washington’s potential absence. Even China, which has paid a growing share of the U.N.’s regular budget and peacekeeping costs as its economy has grown, is now notably parsimonious in financial negotiations. If Elise Stefanik pushes for steps to trim multilateral budgets, many States will likely broadly back her out of their own interests.
Exactly how to cut costs at the U.N. without undercutting its more useful activities – including peacekeeping, promoting public health, and supporting refugees, to name just a few – is harder to define. In 2017 and 2018, Guterres devoted much of his time and political energy to finding cost savings that he could present to Haley. U.N. officials say that Guterres, having scoped out his budgetary options, and with just under two years in office to go, wants to concentrate on areas, such as climate change and regulating Artificial Intelligence, that may not play well with the United States, but which other U.N. member States are concerned by. But member States may push him to think more about additional savings, and will also quiz potential candidates to replace him as Secretary General – who will be on campaign through 2025 – about how they would manage the U.N. budget.
That could lead to some uncomfortable conversations about how parts of the U.N. system work together. For example, some U.N. officials have asked if the Secretariat in New York really needs separate departments managing peace operations and political affairs, as these could be fused into a single peace and security office. In Geneva, U.N. insiders mutter about the possibility of merging parts of the International Organization on Migration (IOM) and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Such schemes are likely to be unpopular with the entities involved, and cannot be delivered overnight, but the political pressure for streamlining will be heavy.
Not all U.N. member States will jump on board with such notions to please the incoming U.S. administration. In recent negotiations, States from the so-called “Global South” have persistently faulted the United States and other richer nations for failing to spend enough on development and climate adaptation. In talks on last year’s “Pact for the Future,” a wide-ranging framework on advancing cooperation promoted by Guterres, developing States insisted in putting economic matters to the fore and called for reforms to the governance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to give them more influence. The Biden administration resisted these calls, and Stefanik is unlikely to be more accommodating. If poorer countries see the Trump team, and potentially other wealthy States, backing away from further development and climate commitments, they are likely to be loudly critical. More broadly, it will be hard for officials in New York to firewall efforts at cooperation with Stefanik on U.N.-specific issues from wider sources of contention, such as Trump’s threats of hefty trade tariffs. (It may also not be super-helpful that the President-Elect has suggested that he could use military force to seize territory from two countries, Denmark and Panama, that just joined the U.N. Security Council for the next two years).
One U.N. member State with reason to be wary is China. Stefanik has positioned herself as a hawk vis-à-vis Beijing, and will almost certainly look for ways to contain its influence in New York. The first Trump administration took an increasingly aggressive approach to China in it later years, especially during the COVID pandemic. The Biden administration has also had tricky relations with China at the U.N., but the two sides have avoided public disputes. Stefanik could adopt a harder line, although this could backfire if Beijing starts to use its Security Council veto more regularly.
Nonetheless, while Stefanik’s appointment will draw much attention over the next few weeks, many U.N. member States will be willing to let the dust settle and then turn their efforts to looking for areas of common interest. When Trump first won office in 2016, many at the U.N. believed that he presented a fleeting threat to a basically reliable multilateral system. Second time around, he looks more like the harbinger of a necessary reckoning.
(Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect that Stefanik’s hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025.)