The U.N. Is Terrible. We Need the U.N.

Nicholas Kristof Sept. 26, 2026, 7:00 a.m. ET Trump’s attack on global institutions leaves us helpless before a growing array of challenges. The Trump administration is delinquent in U.N. dues, while 141 countries — including Haiti, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — are fully paid up. And while other countries at least pretend to advance peace in the spirit of the United Nations, President Trump used his U.N. speech to threaten to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into hell.” It was a rare instance of a world leader taking to the U.N. podium to muse about whether to commit what sounds like genocide.

All this underscores a tragedy of our era: Some 130 armed conflicts are underway around the globe, more than double the number in 2009, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a growing share of the challenges afflicting us are international and require multilateral solutions, yet the major powers are marginalizing the United Nations and rendering it even less effective than usual. Fuel prices are surging. Trump’s Iran war has spread to Yemen and the Red Sea.

Russia is engaging in so-called gray-zone attacks in Europe. There is a risk of war with China over Taiwan or the South China Sea. Drugs, epidemics, artificial intelligence, computer hacking, terrorism, human trafficking, climate change, the toll of war in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza, looming famine in Somalia — all these challenges demand cooperative responses, and the United Nations is an obvious forum to develop them.

Yet for many of these problems, the United Nations is becoming almost irrelevant. Trump last year derided the United Nations as full of “empty words,” and he had a point. The United Nations is a timid Tower of Babel that is more effective at issuing paper than at solving conflicts; hell is a U.N. meeting.

Many times over the years I’ve wanted to beat my head against the wall in frustration with U.N. bureaucracy. In 2009, when I was covering the Darfur genocide with George Clooney, the U.N. pulled our security escort, for fear of being associated with any criticism that Clooney might make of Sudan for committing genocide. When Bosnians, Rwandans and Yazidis were slaughtered, the United Nations dithered. “The cost is measured in lives,” said Nadia Murad, a Nobel Peace Prize winner whose Yazidi region in Iraq was surrounded by ISIS fighters in 2014 for nearly two weeks. “No one came to help us,” she told me, and she ended up kidnapped by ISIS and was raped for months.

Her mother and six brothers were murdered. Yet if the United Nations is periodically paralyzed, it’s also vital and sometimes a godsend. “I have also seen U.N. staff remain in places after everyone else has left, doing work no one else is willing to do,” Murad said. “That work is indispensable. That is precisely why the U.N. must do it better.” Critics can denounce United Nations workers as “fatally arrogant parasites,” as President Javier Milei of Argentina put it a few days ago, but I’ve been held at gunpoint alongside courageous U.N. humanitarians in the Central African Republic who were trying to bring assistance to a desperate area after other aid workers had fled.

I’ve seen frontline U.N. workers living out of cargo containers in Somalia, sleeping in tents in South Sudan, driving down perilous roads in Congo and standing up to gunmen in Yemen — risking their lives to save children from war, rape and disease. One of the heroes of the 20th century was James P. Grant, who led UNICEF and in 1982 engineered the child survival revolution.

He and his team employed vaccines and better treatment of diarrhea to save 25 million lives in his lifetime, and countless millions since.

尼古拉斯·克里斯多夫 2026年9月26日，东部时间上午7:00 特朗普对全球机构的攻击使我们在日益增多的挑战面前毫无还手之力。特朗普政府拖欠联合国会费，而141个国家——包括海地、索马里和刚果民主共和国——已全额缴纳会费。与此同时，其他国家至少还在假装以联合国的精神推动和平，而特朗普总统却在联合国演讲中威胁要“消灭”伊朗并“将他们打入地狱”。这是一位世界领导人罕见地登上联合国讲坛，思考是否实施听起来像种族灭绝的行为。这一切凸显了我们这个时代的悲剧：据红十字国际委员会称，全球约有130场武装冲突正在进行，是2009年的两倍多，而影响我们的挑战中越来越多的部分具有国际性，需要多边解决方案，然而大国正在边缘化联合国，使其比平时更加无效。油价飙升。特朗普的伊朗战争已蔓延至也门和红海。俄罗斯正在欧洲进行所谓的灰色地带攻击。因台湾或南海问题与中国发生战争的风险依然存在。毒品、流行病、人工智能、计算机黑客攻击、恐怖主义、人口贩卖、气候变化、乌克兰、苏丹和加沙战争的代价，索马里迫在眉睫的饥荒——所有这些挑战都需要合作应对，而联合国是显而易见的论坛。然而，对于其中许多问题，联合国正变得几乎无关紧要。特朗普去年嘲笑联合国充满“空话”，他有一定道理。联合国是一座胆怯的巴别塔，更擅长发布文件而非解决冲突；地狱就是联合国会议。多年来，我多次因联合国的官僚主义而感到沮丧，想撞墙。2009年，当我和乔治·克鲁尼一起报道达尔富尔种族灭绝时，联合国撤走了我们的安保人员，因为担心克鲁尼可能对苏丹实施种族灭绝提出批评。当波斯尼亚人、卢旺达人和雅兹迪人被屠杀时，联合国犹豫不决。“代价是以生命来衡量的，”2014年其家乡被ISIS武装分子包围近两周的诺贝尔和平奖得主纳迪亚·穆拉德说。“没有人来帮助我们，”她告诉我，她后来被ISIS绑架并强奸了数月。她的母亲和六个兄弟被杀害。然而，如果联合国偶尔陷入瘫痪，它也是至关重要的，有时甚至是救星。“我也看到联合国工作人员在其他人离开后仍留在原地，做着其他人不愿做的