By Kyle Matthews

September 18, 2025

As presidents and prime ministers file into New York this month for the annual United Nations General Assembly, the speeches will sound familiar: calls for peace, climate action, and global cooperation. But behind the lofty words, the UN itself is gasping for breath. America, once the institution’s lifeline, is now pulling the plug.

The Trump administration’s decision to slash billions in funding to the UN system has left humanitarian agencies, global health programs, and peacekeeping missions in crisis. This is not a routine budget squabble; it is an existential threat. If the UN is the emergency room for global crises, Washington is shutting off the oxygen.

Consider the scope of the cuts. The administration has withheld nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, including funds for UN peacekeeping and democracy promotion. More than $500 million in USAID awards have been cancelled, choking off projects that once delivered food, vaccines, and education to millions. America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) gutted global measles labs. Support for Gavi, the vaccines alliance, was slashed by over a billion dollars, threatening to leave a generation of children unprotected from preventable diseases.

The human consequences are staggering. The World Food Programme (WFP) warns it will cut up to 30 percent of its staff. UNICEF, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) are freezing programs and slashing operations. The High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that more than 11 million displaced people will no longer receive lifesaving humanitarian assistance.

This is not only a humanitarian disaster but a geopolitical one. For decades, U.S. funding bought Washington unmatched influence in multilateral institutions. By stepping back, America leaves a vacuum. China is particularly eager to rewrite international norms to suit authoritarian interests and is more than happy to see the U.S. pull back its political and economic support of the UN. Every dollar the U.S. cuts weakens its leverage and strengthens China’s.

The metaphor of life support is no exaggeration. The UN is the last line of defense for the world’s most vulnerable. It feeds children in Yemen, vaccinates infants in the Democratic Republic of Congo, shelters displaced families in Syria. It monitors cease-fires, tracks disease outbreaks, and helps rebuild shattered economies. Starve it of resources, and these lifelines vanish.

The General Assembly is often dismissed as an annual parade of speeches. This year, it is something more: a test of survival.

The costs of losing them are counted not in abstract numbers but in human lives: a child in a refugee camp who no longer eats, a family exposed to cholera because clean water programs are suspended, a community falling prey to armed groups because peacekeepers have been pulled back.

These are mystifying developments given that the Trump administration has made it a national policy priority to reduce illegal migration to the U.S. Cutting off all assistance to those living in extreme poverty or in conflict zones will result in more people trying to enter America, not fewer.

That is why this year’s General Assembly cannot be business as usual. Leaders will give speeches about protecting civilians, fighting poverty and stabilizing countries affected by conflict. But unless they address the collapse of the UN’s financial health, those words will ring hollow. The credibility of multilateralism is at stake. If the UN cannot respond to wars, pandemics, or natural disasters because its largest donor has walked away, the very idea of international cooperation will collapse.

Other nations cannot afford to stand by. Canada, Europe, Japan, and rising powers in the Global South must step up to stabilize the UN system. This means filling budget gaps, but also defending the principle that cooperation matters. Civil society, journalists, and citizens must press their governments to act. And Americans themselves should ask: does retreating from the UN really make the United States stronger? Or does it isolate the country, empower its adversaries, and abandon the values it once championed?

The late Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize laurate, once said “We are not only all responsible for each other’s security. We are also, in some measure, responsible for each other’s welfare. Global solidarity is both necessary and possible. It is necessary because without a measure of solidarity no society can be truly stable, and no one’s prosperity truly secure.”

The General Assembly is often dismissed as an annual parade of speeches. This year, it is something more: a test of survival. The UN is on life support, and whether it recovers or flatlines depends on the choices made in the coming weeks.

If the plug is pulled, it won’t just be the institution that dies. It will be the idea that nations can face global crises together. In a century defined by pandemics, climate disasters, and wars, that is more than tragic, it is suicidal.

Kyle Matthews is executive director of the Montreal Institute for Global Security.