United Without the US: Collective Leadership and the Resilience of the United Nations

While the United States (US) has been instrumental in the creation of the United Nations (UN) and its numbers institutions, it has also repeatedly withdrawn its support from them. Not only under the first administration of Donald Trump, the US has cut funding for the UN budget, its funds and programs, including the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) or the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Moreover, the US has also (temporarily) terminated its membership in UN agencies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) or the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and related treaties, such as the Paris Agreement or the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). This paper examines the impact of US withdrawal on the UN and its institutions. It argues that collective leadership by other member state governments and international bureaucrats can ensure their ability to continue addressing pressing governance challenges. To be successful, alternative leaders must command soft power and enlist hard power among the remaining membership. I probe these expectations in two pairwise comparisons, inter alia drawing on original interview data with UN and member state representatives. To examine the impact of soft power on alternative leaders’ success in maintaining institutional resilience, I compare the case of the UNFPA, from which the US withheld its support in 2017, and the case of the UNRWA, from which the US withdrew their contributions in 2018. To probe the effect of hard power on the success of alternative leadership after US withdrawal, I compare the case of the Kyoto Protocol, which the US unsigned in 2001, and the case of the Paris Agreement, from which the US withdrew in 2017. The results underline that the stakeholders of the UN must take responsibility and actively defend multilateralism during the global polycrisis.