By Jeremy Kinsman

October 1, 2025

Four score years, a human milestone, call for celebration. From Donald Trump, the United Nations instead received the following birthday message: “Your countries are going to hell.”

Of course, what Trump says is usually less conclusive than what the US actually does, or doesn’t do. Having lectured the United Nations for failing in a mission that he misrepresents and doesn’t understand, Trump hours later U-turned to assure UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that the US is behind the UN “100%.” We don’t always agree with “it…But we’ll try to work with it.” Trump has not only fully leaned into rhetorical Jell-O, he has made it his brand.

Over my years of engagement with UN institutions as a Canadian diplomat and beyond, I have often been asked to speak to US audiences. I’ve cautioned them not to misjudge the UN as being some kind of fixed, incorporated entity, like a bank, university, or company. The UN is not a strictly hierarchical “it,” as Trump seems to believe, but rather a reflection back to us of our complicated world, and the very different conditions and points of view of its member states. I’ve reminded audiences that the UN does not just debate and quarrel. Its functional, specialized agencies try to work beyond politics to deliver humanitarian, developmental, sectoral support to meet the needs and challenges of an interconnected world.

In the darkest hour of the Second World War Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined in his inaugural address for a third term the “Four Freedoms” — freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear — that people “everywhere in the world ought to enjoy.”

It was those principles, notably their presumed universality, that inspired the UN Charter, forged in 1945 as a response to the nationalist, racist, nativist, predatory atrocities of a war waged against humanity.

Eighty years later, to the day, that President Roosevelt delivered the “Four Freedoms speech” on January 6th, 1941, Trump’s followers mobbed the US Capitol and smeared its halls with their feces to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

As Doug Saunders wrote in The Globe and Mail of Trump’s UN speech, it endorsed the very things the UN was created to oppose. This was not new for Trump, whose contempt for multilateralism, for diplomacy, for democracy and for status-quo global power arrangements converge in a hostility towards the United Nations that, this year, rivalled the most toxic rogue-leader moments of the past 80 years.

In his UNGA speech, Trump criticized the UN for being of no help to Trump’s efforts since January to resolve seven world conflicts, from India-Pakistan to Rwanda-Democratic Republic of the Congo. In reality, these conflicts are hardly resolved despite Trump’s claims. On September 29 he and Benjamin Netanyahu launched from the White House a 21-point proposal to end the horrific war in Gaza, en route to Palestinian-Israeli “peaceful coexistence,”  thereby bringing to an end over a century of conflict.

During the UNGA, the proposal was circulated secretly to various delegations, so in that respect the global organization played the role of a passive host. But it was not engaged in the active diplomacy beforehand, a sign of the US/Israeli disregard for its worth, and of its fractious history with Israel, including over the role of UNWRA in providing socioeconomic infrastructure for Palestinians,

When I was posted to UN Headquarters in New York as a brand-new foreign service officer in the fall of 1967, I witnessed the Security Council adopt the famous Resolution 242 on the outcome of the Seven Days War launched by Israel’s Arab neighbours. Most notably, it called for Israel’s withdrawal from the territories it had captured in the war in exchange for a just and lasting peace.

Canadian Ambassador George Ignatieff was prominent in the debate, a consequence partially of the pivotal role played after the 1956 Suez War by then-Foreign Minister Lester Pearson, who proposed a UN peacekeeping force to act as an impartial buffer between the warring states, earning Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Israel’s withdrawal from the captured territories of the West Bank of the Jordan River, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, never ensued. Still, in the wake of the Cold War, the 1993 Oslo Accords did create a Palestinian Authority to administer the territory that encompasses the aspirational Palestinian state that most of the world now recognizes, though it remains bitterly opposed by Israel, which has persisted in building illegal settlements on the lands in question in an effort to make the “facts on the ground” conform to Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of permanent stalemate at best.

It is consistent with both its long-fraught relationship with Israel and its recent marginalization from conflict resolution more broadly that UN offices have been sidelined from these latest negotiations.

Nearly 60 years later, peace has seemed more elusive than ever in the wake of the grotesque Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, and the Israeli counter-attack on Gaza that has killed over 60,000 Palestinians.

The US-Israeli 21-point plan aims immediately to at least end the horror in Gaza. Light on details, the plan foresees that Gazans will remain in the Strip while Gaza is redeveloped, and Hamas members who wish can obtain safe passage to receiving countries.

The administration of Gaza will be provided by a temporary, transitional government of Palestinian technocrats. The redevelopment of Gaza will be supervised by a “Board of Peace” reserving any role of the Palestinian Authority for an unspecified later date once the West Bank Palestinians have reformed their governance.  The Plan infers the creation of a “credible” pathway to a future Palestinian state, (though Netanyahu remains dead-set against it).

If, per the plan, Hamas agrees to stand down, and exchanges of hostages and prisoners come off, the IDF will “gradually” withdraw from Gaza at some unspecified time.

If all concerned agree, the accord could set a foundation for a wider Mideast peace at last, though Netanyahu continues to resist the creation of a Palestinian state. The supervisory “Board of Peace” will be chaired by President Trump, and will include Netanyahu and former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Blair’s inclusion is in line with the work he did after he stepped down as PM in 2007. He served as special envoy for the “Quartet” Group of the UN, EU, Russia, and the US charged with finding Israeli-Palestinian and wider peace regional solutions. He stepped down after 8 years with little to show for the effort. Stil hanging over him is the damning legacy of his promotion along with President George W. Bush of the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003 that ultimately made a wide swath of the Middle East a failed region. A UK Commission of Inquiry found that Blair had acted on “flawed intelligence…before the peaceful options for (Iraqi) disarmament had been exhausted.”

But a signal achievement of Blair’s term as prime minister was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that brought peace to Northern Ireland after intensive dialogue and negotiation between loyalist and republican parties and the UK and Irish governments that ended the civil war. By contrast, there has been no consultation with Palestinians on the US-Israeli proposal. Perhaps Blair can apply to the future of this project some lessons learned from 1998 in Northern Ireland.

It is consistent with both its long-fraught relationship with Israel and its recent marginalization from conflict resolution more broadly that UN offices have been sidelined from these latest negotiations. Although, in the prelude to the deal, the great majority of UN members, including most Arab neighbours, voted in favour of a French-Saudi General Assembly Resolution that foresaw most of the US-Israeli proposition.

The gradual erosion in this century of the UN’s earlier authority on issues of peace and security is a consequence of its broader status as a casualty of the shift away from democracy-led multilateralism, and the resulting decline — most alarmingly and most recently on the part of the US — of commitment to cooperative global solutions in a UN framework. The profile and influence at the UN of Canada, which had long kept the UN as a central focus of foreign policy, have drifted downward as well.

So, while Gazans remain under heavy bombardment at this writing and there is still no ceasefire in sight, the United Nations remains at least out of the crossfire of criticism, but ready to bring its aid delivery and historic experience to bear. Given this century’s record of thwarted and collapsed Middle East peace efforts, that may not be the worst place to be for now. The world body may yet resuscitate some of its somewhat lost allure as the last best hope the world has.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.