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The United Nations Staff Recreation Council singers came from all over the world—Guatemala, Namibia, Malaysia, Slovakia, Spain—but about half the songs at their holiday concert last December were British or American. To create an impression of neutrality, the choir chose one tune from Russia and one from Ukraine; one song from Israel and one from Lebanon. But for much of the evening, vocalists wearing “national dress”—including a fez, a kimono, a dirndl, a gele head wrap, and the striped shirt and red scarf of a Venetian gondolier—harmonized on staid arrangements of songs like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Silent Night.”

Near the entrance to the concert, at the Church of St. Monica on East 79th Street in Manhattan, was a basket of lollipops, to which a surprisingly large number of the U.N. singers’ colleagues and friends had helped themselves: pew after pew of adults in sweaters and slacks, with white sticks jutting from between their lips. As the performance ran late, Germans murmured and Chinese girls giggled. The emcee’s jokes fell flat. I noticed the interior of the program had been printed upside down. Efforts at coordinating clapping and humming from the audience were unsuccessful.

I was attending the concert because I was curious about why the United Nations had come to seem so irrelevant. At a moment of global instability and rising nationalism, I wanted to know what had happened to the grand institution we had created the last time the world sank into a violent cataclysm, to make sure Hiroshima and Auschwitz and Stalingrad never happened again. Over the next several months, I would spend a lot of time in and around the vast campus of the U.N. Headquarters in New York City, talking to current and former diplomats and bureaucrats, undersecretaries and interns, ambassadors and support staff, and everyone in between. But for all that time I spent observing well-intentioned people having serious discussions about how to protect humankind from our worst impulses, it was my memory of this concert that I returned to most, because it seemed to so perfectly capture the essence of the enterprise: Western-dominated multicultural pageantry and desultory disorder in an Upper East Side church. Professionals sucking on lollipops while faraway crises festered and spread.

When the United Nations was created, in 1945, the founding fifty-one countries drafted a charter declaring their intention “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems.” With such broad, utopian goals it was perhaps inevitable that the administrative structure tasked with carrying out this work would become bloated and ineffective. Over the past eight decades, the United Nations has expanded to encompass an alphabet soup of humanitarian agencies and subsidiary organs with colossal, overlapping ambitions, supported by layers and layers of middle managers. There are endless commissions and centers and conferences and committees, departments and offices and institutes and forums tangled up in abstruse rules and regulations and tasked with eliminating world hunger, sheltering displaced people, adjudicating international disputes, solving climate change, facilitating trade, reducing poverty, and much, much more. UNICEF, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund: all are part of the United Nations. There is a Counter-Terrorism Committee and an Office of Counter-Terrorism; a Department of Peace Operations and a Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. The organization has become so unwieldy that even its most well-meaning workers describe being caught in a culture of toxic inefficiency, hamstrung by problems of accountability, organization, and funding. “The U.N. is a vortex of bureaucracy,” Anadil Hossain, a former senior adviser at the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me. “Something needs to change. It’s embarrassing.”

In the wake of the U.S. presidential election, the mood at the United Nations grew even more fatalistic. During his first term, Trump had cut U.N. funding, withdrawn the country from UNESCO and the U.N. Human Rights Council, and excoriated “the utter weakness and incompetence of the United Nations.” It was no surprise that a man who campaigned on America First and notoriously couldn’t care less about people in “shithole countries” had little interest in multilateral diplomacy and foreign aid. His MAGA acolytes tend to equate the United Nations with a dreaded “world government,” anyway.

But anger and frustration with the United Nations are common across the political spectrum. One current agency employee, a liberal European woman, worried it was “run by white saviors” before laying out the many examples of ineptitude she had witnessed.¹ Another left-leaning former employee at a humanitarian agency accused the United Nations of being “patriarchal,” “hierarchical,” “colonial,” and “ageist” (that is, biased against younger employees). Money was being wasted, she said. Time was being wasted. The dysfunction was too deep to fix.

“It’s a mouthpiece for posturing, and it certainly has not stopped nations from using violence against their neighbors,” said Charles Kupperman, who served as deputy national security adviser during the first Trump Administration, but has since become a prominent anti-Trump voice on the right. “Why continue the fiction that it is an effective international organization that does positive things?” (Kupperman has worked under John Bolton, George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, who once said that the U.N. building could lose ten stories “and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”)

For others, the United Nations is even worse than a boondoggle. Jeffrey Wells, a former Navy SEAL and current fellow at think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Truman National Security Project, told me the United Nations was “heavily corrupt by nature,” “untrustworthy,” and “not effective at stopping conflicts. They’ve never had a program that’s been successful,” he said. Wells even wondered whether the world might be safer without the United Nations, rattling off crises he felt the organization had aggravated: Sudan, North Korea, Somalia, Gaza, Afghanistan. “Without the U.N., I could see Ukraine not having happened,” he said, meaning Russia’s invasion. The United Nations was beyond wasteful and ineffective, he went on. It was actively causing harm.

When Wells first told me this, I was somewhat shocked. I had heard plenty of gripes about the United Nations’ mismanagement and redundancies, but I hadn’t expected anyone to tell me that it intensified conflict. Was the United Nations producing the exact opposite effect of what it had set out to achieve? I needed to know what the people who worked there thought, the people who staffed the field offices and ran the programs and managed the most sprawling bureaucracy in human history from a handful of buildings in New York City. What was the United Nations actually contributing to the world?

Before I would be allowed access to the U.N. complex, along the East River in Midtown Manhattan, I first had to submit, among other documentation, a copy of my passport, a supervisor’s phone number, and a two-inch by two-inch headshot for my press ID. According to the specifications, the distance between the top of my hair and the bottom of my chin needed to measure between one inch and one and three eighths of an inch, while the distance between my eyes and the bottom of the image needed to be between one and one eighth inches and one and three eighths of an inch. One set of instructions demanded a JPEG, while another indicated that PNG and GIF files would also be accepted. A consultant had told me that his first U.N. contract was rejected because the signature pages were a centimeter out of place, so I wanted to get it right.

I made a series of calls to the people whose job it was to handle journalists like myself: the Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit, or MALU. After a few weeks I received an email saying I could pick up my pass between 9 am and 2 pm. But the Media Access Guidelines—which included a preamble and stretched to more than 2,500 words—suggested that I could enter until 6 pm. I called MALU yet again, and asked why pass pickup ended at 2 pm. “Well, that’s the Security Department,” said the representative. “This is the Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit. It’s a different department.”

This kind of deflection, I would learn, was typical of U.N. employees. “If they’re hired to do three things, don’t ask them to do four,” one former UNICEF contractor told me, rolling his eyes. For white-collar workers at U.N. Headquarters, this attitude was merely an annoyance, but for people doing higher-stakes work in the field, it had bigger implications. Wells told me that when he and his unit were in Somalia, back in the mid-Nineties, the food sent in by the United Nations kept getting intercepted. “Everybody knew the food was ending up in the hands of the warlords, but nobody wanted to do anything about it,” he told me. “That’s not my job. My job was just to get the food there,” Wells recalled the development workers saying. “Anything beyond that is not my purview.”

Intending to retrieve my pass well before the 2 pm deadline, I set off for my first visit to U.N. Headquarters on a cold mid-December morning. Six blocks of wrought-iron fencing fortified the eighteen-acre complex, which included the shimmering, thirty-nine-story Secretariat Building and the squatter General Assembly Building, its concave roof punctuated by a giant dome like a mouse with a trackball. A row of national flags loomed over First Avenue, alongside the omniscient and omnipresent surveillance cameras. Silver medallions affixed to the fencing displayed the U.N. emblem, which is meant to represent peace but looked to me like a world map in a crosshairs.

At the Visitors Entrance, I was turned away and sent across the street to the Visitor Check-in Office. When I arrived there, I was once again directed to another building: the Pass and Identification Unit. Here, a security guard asked whether I had my paperwork, but didn’t bother to put my bag on the conveyor belt for the X-ray scanner, simply ushering me through the metal detector and ignoring it when it went off. After making my way through a series of lines and numbered windows, I was finally granted my ID card. It was 1:57 pm. Three minutes to spare.

I proceeded back to the Visitors Entrance and charged through the security checkpoint, across an outdoor plaza, and into the General Assembly Building. Passing a life-size statue of Nelson Mandela, I hopped in an elevator and rode to the fourth floor, where I soon found myself alone on the highest balcony of the General Assembly Hall.

The General Assembly is usually what comes to mind when one thinks of the United Nations: a world congress where each member state gets a vote. Once every autumn, 193 presidents, prime ministers, kings, and dictators fill the hall to make speeches, hash out deals, and pass resolutions. When the General Assembly is in session, the deputy ambassador from Austria told me, it’s like “diplomatic speed dating.” Helicopters hover above the complex, and the Coast Guard sets up shop in the East River. But for now, the assembly hall was eerie and still. Pale-olive seats and aisles of mint-green carpet faced the central, lower rostrum, which featured an emerald-green, marble-tiled desk that Trump once derided as looking “cheap.”

On my way back downstairs, I pushed open a door that set off an alarm. I scurried away with no consequences, and decided to search for the MALU office, assuming that someone there would give me a brief and friendly orientation. For the better part of an hour, I careened down hallways and up escalators and then back and forth across the street, struggling to understand the logic of the place.

When at last I located the correct office, I found only a row of empty cubicles and, ultimately, a single employee who seemed to resent my wanting her to do any liaising. She sighed and redirected me to the lengthy and unhelpful Media Access Guidelines and to U.N. Web TV, a streaming platform that broadcasts certain meetings and events. “Interviews must be prearranged,” she said, with a withering look that seemed to imply that no one would ever speak with me anyway. This was the last time that I interacted with the MALU and the beginning of my real education in the workings of the United Nations.

Over the next few months, I came and went as I pleased. I observed meetings and attended panels and schmoozed at receptions. I memorized acronyms and learned to decode jargon and did my best to keep a straight face when people expressed excitement about the “thirteenth anniversary of HLPF reviewing SDG 5,” or said things like “If we all work together, we have a very beautiful world.”

On any given day, there might be a discussion in the Security Council about chemical weapons and “the situation in the Middle East”; a plenary meeting of the Statistical Commission; a lecture about gender equality and “inclusive diplomacy”; a meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; a press briefing by the spokesperson for the secretary-general; and a photo opportunity with Secretary-General António Guterres himself.

Most meetings seemed meandering and fruitless. An example: Women and Critical Minerals, a panel hosted by U.N. Trade and Development and the International Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals, and Sustainable Development, which, in only an hour and fifteen minutes, tried to address protecting women miners from the disproportionate violence they face at work and on their way to work, getting more women into decision-making roles, women who live near mines but do not work at mines, the job losses that would come from switching combustible-engine jobs to electric-vehicle jobs, the role of child labor, and a story about “electric buses driven by women for women.” Everything was so cursory, and the statistics and anecdotes so overwhelming, that I couldn’t imagine anyone finding it useful.

“There’s no doubt that there are too many long meetings and long statements, and it can get very frustrating,” one recently retired senior officer told me. “For headquarters to have, once again, the same annual round of meetings on this, that, or the other thing, you sort of wonder, What’s the point of it all?”

Even in the Security Council Chamber, there seemed to be little serious debate, conversation, or engagement. This is, of course, where the real power of the United Nations is meant to reside. The council’s five permanent members—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have veto power over any resolution, sanction, or conflict intervention. The General Assembly votes to admit another ten countries at a time, for two-year terms, but they lack the ability to veto.

At the center of the Security Council Chamber is a horseshoe-shaped wooden table, where the delegates gather to read prepared statements in flat, affectless tones. Their colleagues stare down at their phones. Everyone at the table appears insignificant, dwarfed by an eighteen-by-twenty-nine-foot mural meant to resemble a church fresco, with a white phoenix at the center and shackled gray men ascending past a fiery, coiled dragon, toward joyful scenes of multicultural harmony.

“Fifty years ago, you would actually talk and make your case,” a European diplomat said of the Security Council. “Now it’s formal and clinical.” Some of this he blamed on technology. Drafts of resolutions pass between delegates and their political leaders back home, who often try to soften the language through endless rounds of edits. “The wording of resolutions used to be more robust. Now they’re abstract and baroque.”

With Russia present on the council, no resolution about the invasion of Ukraine passed during the first three years of the war. Because of China, no resolution about the Uighurs has ever passed. Still, as the retired senior officer pointed out to me, any resolution the Security Council passes is just words on paper. “It’s inherently and fundamentally flawed, because there aren’t any clear enforcement mechanisms,” he said. So much of the United Nations, I was coming to see, was about conducting long and difficult negotiations to find watered-down compromises that led to little action.

This is particularly true when it comes to the thankless position of secretary-general, the person nominally in charge of the entire organization. In 1944, the outgoing leaders of the short-lived League of Nations, which had failed to stop World War II, wrote that if the United Nations wanted to do better, its secretary-general ought to possess “common sense, courage, integrity, and tact.” The actual criterion, however, has tended to be a sort of weak-willed, inoffensive obsequiousness, such that all the countries on the Security Council will approve of you—and can use you as a scapegoat whenever necessary.

Many at the United Nations are nostalgic for the tenure of Kofi Annan (1997–2006), who was both admired as a statesman and had the fortune of being in charge when the world had only one superpower. But otherwise, the secretaries-general have been almost uniformly disliked. There was the Burmese guy who used astrology to predict world events (U Thant, 1961–71); the Austrian guy who turned out to be a former Nazi (Kurt Waldheim, 1972–81); and the Norwegian guy who signed a secret agreement with the U.S. State Department to help look for Communist spies (Trygve Lie, 1946–52). One secretary-general actually garnered respect by taking more initiative and personally mediating in a handful of crises, but he died in a plane crash that many people believe to have been an assassination (Dag Hammarskjöld, 1953–61).

Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, fits the tradition. Multiple people described him to me as unpopular and arrogant. All winter, at lunches with world leaders and ambassadors, Guterres had been talking through what would happen once Trump returned. The tone, according to someone who was often present for these discussions, was “generally pessimistic.” Another former high-level U.N. official told me they’d heard a rumor that Guterres might resign before the end of his term, in order to run in the presidential election early next year in his home country. “You can be the secretary-general here and everyone hates you, or you can be the president of Portugal,” one diplomat told me. It was obvious which was preferable.

On my trips to the United Nations, I’d often attend events in the Delegates Dining Room, where floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the East River. Countries sometimes throw parties there to help convince other delegations to vote them onto the Security Council. Michael Woods, the operations manager, used to work in five-star hotels, and found the United Nations baffling by comparison. At the end of one party, he and I watched huge trays of rice and hummus and stuffed grape leaves being carted off. “Unfortunately, a lot of it gets thrown away,” Woods said. “The staff takes what they can carry. It’s really horrendous.”

Waste, it seemed, was everywhere at the United Nations. In 2023, the U.N. budget was about $68 billion, most of which comes from so-called donor countries like Germany, Japan, and the United States, and is earmarked for specific programs.

In 2021, a young Indian auditor mounted a quixotic campaign for secretary-general, claiming that only 29 percent of the money spent by the United Nations went to what she deemed “actual causes,” while the rest went to “salaries and overhead,” including travel. In Afghanistan, one diplomat told me, it was even worse. Only 14 cents of every dollar went to development projects. The rest went to things like interpreters, transportation, and security. It was a similar story in Iraq, where the diplomat had also been posted: “You would invest five million, and maybe six hundred thousand goes into what you’re actually doing.”

For how much money was being spent, he said, there was very little positive outcome. “Some projects were wishful thinking and everyone in the field knew it was insane, but it looked good in the press,” he told me. He recalled a project to help Afghans become chicken farmers, even though plenty of cheap chickens were coming in from Pakistan. “No local could compete,” he said. “All the chicken farmers went under.” All that reckless spending, he thought, had simply stoked inflation, making it harder for ordinary Afghans to afford basic needs.

Examples like this came up in almost every conversation I had: A proposed overhaul of a digital platform that cost $100 million and failed. An expensive, yearlong contract with a top consulting firm to analyze how U.N. offices across the world were tracking resources like vehicles and flashlights, and how those inventory systems might be consolidated, that ultimately resulted in nothing. All the business-class tickets to conferences. The reimbursed tuition costs for employees’ children. The salary multipliers necessary for U.N. Headquarters to be located in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Then again, examining every dollar spent could be its own waste of time and money: lawyers and accountants demand high salaries, after all.

One evening, as the year drew to a close, I met Andrew Saberton, a ruddy English accountant who has been at the United Nations for twenty-five years. He had spent time all over the organization—at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. Industrial Development Organization—but now served as the deputy executive director for management at the U.N. Population Fund, or UNFPA,² which focuses on sexual and reproductive health.

Saberton told me his favorite job at the United Nations was this one, because it “actually makes a difference, versus just trying to stop nuclear war.” But he was resigned to the changes that looked to be coming once Trump took office. “Every Republican since George H. W. Bush has defunded UNFPA,” he said. Though the organization doesn’t fund or provide abortions, it does offer condoms, IUDs, and emergency contraception, as well as family-planning education, which can include information about abortion in countries where it is legal. I asked Saberton what he would do if the funding went away. At that exact moment, the lights in the dining room went out, and Saberton quipped, “Turn off the electricity!”

The lights flickered back on in less than a minute, and Woods came running by, exasperated. “They’re on some kind of timer!” he said.

Saberton’s joke reflected a real strategy, though. A few years ago, when money was tight, U.N. Headquarters turned off the fountains and the escalators for several months. But for now, the escalators were moving, and Saberton was enjoying the hors d’oeuvres while they lasted.

Even after a number of trips, I could never predict when my U.N. key card would open a door and when I’d be denied access. But I soon learned that, as long as I didn’t barge into a closed meeting or attempt to enter the private Delegates Lounge without a chaperone, no one was going to question my presence.

Just when I thought I had started to blend in, I met a development-agency worker from Guyana. We were at a reception after a lecture, standing near some tall windows overlooking a courtyard. The sun had set, the bar was open, and she was telling me about the book she wanted to write. I’d been asking her the kinds of things I asked everyone I spoke with, when she said, “Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said.

“Well, where are your parents from?” she asked.

“Also New York,” I said. “And my mother’s parents both grew up in the Bronx!”

She looked unsatisfied. “Lewis isn’t an American last name!”

I laughed, out of surprise, and said, “It definitely is, actually!” My impulse was to explain that Lewis was in fact such an American name that my father’s father, who grew up in Atlantic City, had changed his last name from Levy to Lewis to seem more American and less Jewish. But then it finally occurred to me what was happening. When this woman looked at me, she saw the curls, she saw the nose, and she thought of Israel. And Israel has few defenders at the United Nations.

The animosity has long been mutual; in many ways, the story of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the story of the United Nations and how it has fallen short from the very beginning. In 1947, the United Nations created a plan for adjacent Israeli and Palestinian states, but neither party was satisfied. To quell tensions, the United Nations sent in a truce commissioner, who was assassinated; a mediator, who was also assassinated; and a truce supervision force, which was unable to prevent a war or the displacement of more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians.

After failing to achieve a two-state solution and failing to keep the peace, the United Nations settled for creating a special agency to manage Palestinian refugees and perform many of the functions of a state: the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. Ever since, Israel has essentially refused to take orders from the United Nations, relying instead on the United States for protection and support.

In the Sixties, as many former European colonies in Africa and Asia gained independence, and the number of countries in the United Nations nearly tripled, the power dynamics in the General Assembly began to shift. The West was outnumbered. To maximize their influence, the newly independent states banded together, calling themselves the Non-Aligned Movement and creating the G77. By 1975, the Non-Aligned Movement had aligned itself with the Palestinians, and the General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that Zionism is racism.

In the years that followed, the United Nations repeatedly condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, but this hardly made a difference. Before the October 7 attacks, at least a third of Palestinians remained in UNRWA refugee camps.

After I apologized to the agency worker from Guyana for bothering her and extricated myself from our conversation, I saw her surreptitiously trying to take my photograph. It made a certain amount of sense: some U.N. officials have been undercover intelligence officers, and a Jewish woman asking questions about whether the United Nations causes harm could have been an Israeli spy. (I am not.)

Despite the failure of the United Nations’ truce-supervision force in 1947, along with ill-fated efforts to enforce Middle Eastern ceasefires with U.N. troops, the United Nations has continued trying to calm hostilities worldwide through the use of what are now called peacekeepers, the multinational soldiers known for their distinctive blue helmets. Many of the people I spoke with had serious criticisms of how peacekeepers are deployed. They are mostly meant to act in self-defense, but the rules of engagement can be confusing and therefore counterproductive. Peacekeepers were present in Rwanda in 1994, but didn’t react quickly enough to effectively respond to the genocide. In other cases, peacekeepers have been too slow to leave. In 2010, a cholera outbreak in Haiti was caused by peacekeepers after their primary mission had been fulfilled. “If they’d gone home, we could have avoided cholera,” a U.N. official who was involved in the situation told me. Peacekeepers have also been involved in some of the worst abuses in U.N. history: beatings, rapes, and murders of the very people they were assigned to protect. Responsibility for monitoring and punishing these kinds of offenses is usually spread among multiple institutions, across several countries and agencies, all of whichtend to be far from the scene of the crime or the home countries of the peacekeepers, further delaying any kind of response.

Peacekeepers are effective only when the warring parties have gotten tired of all the killing, Wells told me. Otherwise, “Locals get resentful because you’re just standing by and not helping.”

Danielle Cosgrove, a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project and a former officer at the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me she thought that this kind of resentment was key to understanding how the United Nations can create conflict. According to Cosgrove, the United Nations has been a major contributor to the rise of terrorism and violent extremism, particularly in the twenty-first century. “If the U.N. intervenes too aggressively, it violates sovereignty, and it risks fueling extremist backlash,” she said. “If the U.N. fails to intervene, it’s going to be criticized for neglecting humanitarian crises.” Her biggest concern was “violations of sovereignty that are predicated on supposed humanitarian grounds but are ultimately selective and reflect other motivations.” Meaning: the United Nations’ decisions about when to get involved and when to ignore a problem largely reflect the political priorities and cultural values of the United States. “Interventions come across as impositions of Western priorities,” she said, which was what she said had happened in Libya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. “And then you’ve seen inaction in Yemen, in Syria, and in Palestine.” If the United Nations was truly a world body, and not just a tool for American foreign policy, she asked, shouldn’t there be a consistent standard?

Less than a week before Trump’s inauguration, I was back in the Delegates Dining Room for a reception thrown by the mission from Iraq. For some, it was business as usual. A diplomat from Oman was working the buffet line, handing out business cards and asking everyone for opportunities to “cooperate.”

But the room was also nervous with anticipation. “Everyone is worried right now about Trump,” a Latin American diplomat told me. Looking for a place to eat, I found a small table in the back, where two men were sitting. It turned out they were the ambassadors from Luxembourg and the Czech Republic, Olivier Maes and Jakub Kulhánek. Maes was tall, handsome, and confident. Kulhánek was shorter and scragglier, with dirty-blond hair and a stubbly chin.

“I tend to stick with him, because he’s funny,” Kulhánek said.

“We are soulmates. European soulmates,” Maes replied.

“We actually try to avoid each other,” Kulhánek said. “Really, if you want to achieve something, you need to build bridges. Personal relationships here matter a great deal.”

“There’s a lot of camaraderie among the diplomats,” Maes said.

“We don’t risk our lives,” Kulhánek said. “It can be quite fun!”

At that moment, both men stood to greet the ambassador from Pakistan, who was walking by. When they sat down again, Maes and Kulhánek began discussing Trump’s then nominee for U.N. ambassador, the U.S. representative Elise Stefanik, from New York. What had anyone heard? What was she like? Not that her past really mattered, they said, because once she arrived, the institution would change her. “Being here, it shapes or molds you,” Kulhánek said. “Obviously we all report to our respective countries,” he went on, but being at the United Nations had a way of shifting your priorities. “Here, we try to tackle all these global issues.”

Nondiplomatic employees told me that working at the United Nations had a way of changing them, too, by draining them of motivation. Good work, I heard again and again, was never rewarded, and bad work never punished. “The culture is really, really shocking,” said Salil Shetty, who directed the U.N. Millennium Campaign from 2003 to 2010. “It’s not based on performance and all that. It’s: How do you keep the bosses happy?”

In 2016, a former assistant secretary-general named Anthony Banbury quit after twenty-five years of service and wrote a scathing New York Times op-ed about how the United Nations’ “sclerotic personnel system” had disappeared “countless tax dollars and human aspirations.” It took too long and was too difficult to hire qualified people, he wrote, and “short of a serious crime, it is virtually impossible to fire someone in the United Nations.”

Almost everyone could give examples of awful bosses and colleagues. There was the person who demanded a motorcade, the person who regularly berated their underlings until they cried. Then there was the sexual harassment and assault, the financial misconduct, the corruption, and the bribery.

These kinds of people find their way into any organization, of course. But at the United Nations, they’re allowed to stay forever. People might be retrained or verbally disciplined, but they are almost never fired. At best, I learned, you could shift incompetent workers to a new job within the United Nations, but only if that person agrees to be moved.

As a result, “it falls on ten percent of the people to do eighty percent of the work,” one former high-level official told me. These were the stars, he said. Roughly breaking down the rest of the employees, he estimated that 60 percent were just mindlessly moving things “from the inbox to the outbox,” 10 to 15 percent were “dysfunctional and weird and odd, creating problems but not in an evil way,” and another 10 to 15 percent were “craven, bad people.” They didn’t all start out this way. “A lot of people showed up as true believers and got ground down by the system,” he said. “I’ve seen it time and time again. Really good people lose their soul—and stay for the benefits.”

The ambassadors, on the other hand, generally serve four- or five-year terms and then leave. Except for the guy from Turkmenistan, Maes and Kulhánek told me. He had been around since 1995.

Being an ambassador did sound like fun, particularly for an extrovert: all the mingling, all the time spent on WhatsApp. The diplomat from Latin America told me that the app is one of his most important lines of communication. Other diplomats complained about it. “I’m in 500 groups,” one told me. “It’s a constant flow of messages, even when I’m on holiday.”

But being an ambassador also meant working toward one of the United Nations’ most elusive goals: peace. Maes and Kulhánek told me about their efforts in the General Assembly around the war in Ukraine.

“We adopted some strong resolutions,” Maes said.

“And Russia, they didn’t like it,” Kulhánek said. “It was sending a powerful signal to the world.”

“But were there actual consequences?” I asked.

“I mean, no,” Maes said. “It’s more to expose Russia on the global stage. It’s more embarrassment.”

“And that’s something,” Kulhánek said.

“Now there are reports out there,” Maes said. “That doesn’t mean it changes how Russia approaches human rights, but it’s out there.”

“We have to be realistic as to what to expect from the U.N.,” Kulhánek said. “It’s not going to achieve world peace.” In many conflicts, the most the United Nations could do was to summon the moral authority to condemn and to document. He quoted Hammarskjöld, the late secretary-general: “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.” Maybe the goals of the U.N. Charter had been too lofty, but striving for the unattainable was better than giving up.

Maes agreed. They were humble and they were pragmatic and they believed in what they were doing. They knew they were lucky, and that they had better jobs than all the folks on the ground, in field offices and refugee camps and war zones all around the world. That was the best of what the United Nations did, anyway, Maes told me. “Health care. Education. Food aid.” The humanitarian sector, not diplomacy, was what made a real difference on a daily basis for millions of people worldwide.

The following week, Trump took office and froze all foreign aid, pending a ninety-day review. Four days later, the administration halted operations at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which in 2024 provided U.N. programs with around $8 billion. Elon Musk posted about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

At U.N. Headquarters, the diplomats remained calm, but the folks at the agencies were frantic. When I met up with a mid-level development employee for coffee, she seemed stressed. “It’s very bleak,” she said. Her office had been scrambling to map how every person and initiative was funded, so that anything reliant on American funding could be switched to a different source. “I’m devastated for the impact,” she said. “Food, contraception, education, health care: that’s heartbreaking for young girls. Lots of people will lose jobs.” Thousands had already been laid off.

Even as constitutional challenges to the USAID cuts made their way through the American courts, she didn’t think the money would ever return. Still, just in case, her office had been reviewing its materials, to remove references to any so-called DEI trigger words, such as “socioeconomic” and “equality.” For someone working in international development, this felt ridiculous.

“Because we get American money, we’re all pandering to the Americans, and we hate ourselves for it,” she said. But at the same time, she went on, “money from European donor countries might be contingent on doing exactly what the Americans don’t want us to do. So we’re screwed.” It felt like such a waste of time, she told me, managing political nonsense when they could be doing real work.

The irony, she felt, was that the United Nations had its own form of DEI: affirmative action for appointees from donor countries. It was just what she had heard Trump and the GOP describing: unqualified people keeping their jobs simply because their identity fulfilled an unspoken quota.

This was the source of a lot of the trouble with the United Nations, she said: “Bad people from important countries.” It was not a new phenomenon, and it had nothing to do with Trump or Musk or the Department of Government Efficiency. Games of power and influence and money were as old as the United Nations itself. “Behind the U.N.’s inaction, or acts of omission or commission, typically you’d find some governments,” said Shetty, the former Millennium Campaign director. The real problem was not the United Nations, he went on to say, but the way that wealthy countries manipulated it to their own ends, filling out the ranks with their allies.

“The caliber of the people is a big, big question because you are getting people chosen through political influence,” Shetty said. Many U.N. employees get their start in an expensive, entry-level program that few countries can afford to operate. Alternatively, he said, “You get parachuted in from the top.” As a result, many of the most powerful people at the United Nations have little experience in or understanding of the places they are meant to be helping. Richer countries hire the staff, set the values, and choose the priorities, but are the least affected by what goes on at the United Nations. Meanwhile, the countries on the receiving end of aid or peacekeeping end up with very little say in what’s happening on their own soil.

The Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Abbas Kadhom Obaid Al-Fatlawi, like seemingly everyone else involved with the organization, felt that it was badly in need of reform. We were sitting in Louis XV–style cabriole armchairs on the top floor of the Iraqi mission, a four-story building filled with rugs and urns and ornate carved-wood bannisters, a block away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Al-Fatlawi is bald, with a faint white mustache. Having joined the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1995, he spoke in the genteel tones of a diplomat who has endured three rather tumultuous decades, waiting out the 2003 American invasion of his country at his post in Nairobi until a new government formed and sent him to Moscow.

Why were the victors of World War II still in charge of the Security Council, he wondered, when so much had changed in the past eighty years? “It’s like a privilege to five powers,” he said. “This is one of the discriminations in the charter. It’s not equity.”

Back in the Nineties, Al-Fatlawi told me, a movement to expand the permanent Security Council membership to include Brazil, Germany, India, and Japan had prompted only a countermovement, called the Coffee Club, led by Italy, Pakistan, and Canada. Debate stretched on for more than a decade, and the permanent membership remained unchanged. “For me,” he said, “to reform the U.N., it is not only expanding the membership.” Giving more countries a veto might result in nothing but more deadlock. Developing countries deserved a greater say, but there also needed to be more oversight, more accountability, and stronger mechanisms for enforcing resolutions.

These sounded like strong words, but were standard demands in the hamster wheel of U.N. reform. “There’s many ideas, but it’s hard to get consensus,” an Australian diplomat named Hamish Fejo told me. Amendments to the U.N. Charter require the approval of two thirds of the General Assembly and all five permanent members of the Security Council. “Most people who talk about U.N. reform don’t tell you how you convince one hundred ninety-three countries of that reform,” said Ronny Patz, a German academic who studies the United Nations’ finances. “So U.N. reform literally does not happen.”

Yoshita Singh, who for fourteen years has been covering the United Nations for India’s largest wire service, told me that one of her greatest frustrations was the never-ending cycle of failed reform initiatives. Everyone agreed on the need for change, but no one could agree on what should happen. “It’s all talk and zero action and leaders not being held accountable,” Singh told me. “From the outside, and growing up as kids, we were in awe of the U.N. as this huge thing, this organization that can change the world,” she said. Now, she realized, “It can’t change the world, because it’s not able to change itself. A lot of it is rotting.” She went on: “The younger generation will just see this as a building in New York City where nothing got done.”

As expansion of the Security Council was a nonstarter, funding had become a crucial tool for influence. The charter specifies that the General Assembly manages what is known as “assessed” funding, a sliding-scale fee paid by all countries, but once it became dominated by newly independent countries, wealthier countries began using donations to get their way. Patz referred to the months the General Assembly spends debating how to use about $4 billion in assessed contributions as “shifting peanuts left and right,” while the states with more resources pour some $54 billion into their chosen causes.

Anadil Hossain, the former senior adviser to the U.N. Refugee Agency, told me that the organization’s dependence on donor states makes it much harder for the United Nations to provide efficient and essential services. A handful of U.N. agencies might be stationed in the same refugee camp, “doing parallel work,” she said, and competing over the same pools of foreign-aid money. “It’s annual, crisis-based funding,” she continued. “More money goes to the latest emergency than to situations that are just as urgent but have no resolution in sight.”

When I asked Patz how any of this might be fixed, he returned to what he saw as the fundamental obstacle to the United Nations’ ability to act as a rapid, worldwide emergency-response system, with fair and equal treatment for all: the need to find a middle ground. “A lot of what they do is avoiding diplomatic unhappiness,” he told me. Whether deploying peacekeepers or delivering medicine, the most important factor in getting the United Nations involved in a situation is finding anodyne language that geopolitical foes can agree to. Everything is written to avoid controversy, which means problems are rarely called out directly.

“Most of what the U.N. does is a mix of what everyone wants, so you get very weird mandates,” Patz told me. The weirdness of these mandates makes it much harder for the people administering a program to accomplish anything substantial. Researchers call these mandates “pathological delegation,” Patz said. “It’s the delegation of tasks that are almost impossible to achieve, but they have to pretend that they can.”

For Wells, all this pathological delegation feels like a distraction. Bureaucracies are meant to keep people busy, he told me, while those in power push through whatever they want. “You just need everybody’s stamp on it before anything can get done. Therefore nothing is really going to get done,” he said. “The inefficiencies are always costly, both in time and lives.”

What about money? I asked him.

“Money is less important,” he said. “You can always replace money. Time and people, you can’t.”

In the middle of March, the United Nations hosted its sixty-ninth annual Commission on the Status of Women, a conference chaired by Saudi Arabia, where women have only recently won the right to drive. One night the Saudis hosted an iftar dinner, to break the Ramadan fast.

On my way over, I noticed that the event required an RSVP, though the form was closed. I had spent enough time at the United Nations to know how these things tended to go, so I decided it wouldn’t be a problem. When I arrived, groups of students and conference attendees were waiting in a scrum by the elevators. A message from someone perceived to be in authority rippled through the crowd about needing your RSVP, and everyone scrolled through their phones for the confirmation email. Ten minutes passed, chaotically. A group of young women debated whether to just leave, even though they had RSVP’d. Meanwhile, ambassadors exited the elevators and were ushered around the corner, where I saw that the Saudis had set up a photo opportunity with people from their mission, wearing all-black or all-white thawbs and checkered ghutra. I elbowed my way through the students, positioned myself behind a diplomat, followed him around the corner, and then, once he was taking his photograph, strode into the dinner. “Too often, the only way to speed things up is to break the rules,” one high-level official had told me.

The Delegates Dining Room was set up as I’d never seen it before, as though it were hosting a wedding: round tables with white and rose-colored linens, centerpieces with lavender and olive branches, candles, gold napkin rings, individually wrapped dates, and before each place setting, a four-course dinner menu (vegetarian lentil soup, puff sambusa, kabsa, millet date cake).

I greeted the Iraqi ambassador and then found an empty seat. I was soon joined by a man and a woman, both senior diplomats. After the call to prayer and a welcome tea, both were eager to talk about the calamitous state of the United Nations and the world, but they asked me not to mention their names or what countries they were from, because they wanted to tell me the truth, and the truth, they knew, was not what many Americans who otherwise might agree with their politics wanted to hear.

The woman was cheerful and wore candy-colored jewelry. The man wore a suit, and quoted Gramsci and Churchill. Her country was among the fifty-one founding members of the United Nations. His country gained independence only later.

The man talked me through what he’d seen in his years as a diplomat: humanitarian projects in far-flung places that wasted millions of dollars. “Sometimes you really try to help, and you do something wrong as a consequence,” he said. So he understood why Trump and Musk disliked USAID. “Maybe scrapping the entire agency was a little drastic, but something had to be done,” he said. The United Nations had become a “delusional entity.” Maybe the world would be better off if it spent $50 billion a year instead of $68 billion. Maybe now, after many years of promises and platitudes, there was an opportunity for actual reform.

This diplomat was not the only person to express this to me. “You need an external shock for things to change,” Shetty said. “We are in an exceptionally unusual moment where we could go back to the drawing board. Things which we could not really put on the table Trump is putting on the table.”

Already, a former diplomat and Trump State Department appointee had started DOGE-UN, a think tank unaffiliated with Musk’s endeavor but promising to “X-size the waste and rogue behavior of the United Nations bureaucracy.” Patz, the German academic, told me he expected Trump to try to refuse to pay even assessed funding, setting off a recalibration process for U.N. operations that would take years to resolve. But the diplomats I sat with at the Saudi dinner weren’t there yet.

“It’s so difficult to predict the future three to five years down the line,” the man said. “We keep hearing new things every week. I can’t predict Friday.”

“We haven’t even heard what he did today!” the woman said. She told the man she was reading the news less these days, which made her feel better. She’d heard that Stefanik wouldn’t become ambassador until the summer now, at least. Or maybe she’d never come at all.³

“We are now in a revolutionary state of the world,” the man said. The woman agreed, though she thought her boss hadn’t fully processed how profound a shift was taking place in the international order.

As the second-biggest contributor of assessed funding, China might decide to step up, but why spend more money through the United Nations? Xi Jinping already has a robust infrastructure-building, and often debt-inducing, relationship with more than 140 countries through the Belt and Road Initiative. Though China has worked to achieve high-level positions across the United Nations, the country has donated virtually nothing, which may indicate a lack of interest in replicating the way the United States had used the United Nations for three quarters of a century.

Who else might have money to throw around—and a desire for influence? We looked around the room.

“Diplomatic receptions don’t normally look like this,” the man said. The Saudis had really gone all out. Missions throw lavish parties at their own embassies, including a legendary bash thrown by the Cubans every December, but no one at our table had ever attended an event this large and this fancy in the Delegates Dining Room.

Suddenly, the room grew chilly. “It’s getting colder,” another diplomat at the table pointed out.

“One of the Americans asked for AC,” the woman said. Everyone laughed.

For now, the crowd was optimistic. There was always more to do—a new delegate to meet, an updated resolution to review, another party to attend. They couldn’t let all this uncertainty get in the way. “The old world has changed fundamentally, but we don’t know what the new world will look like,” the man said. “I just hope it doesn’t devolve into something ugly.”