The UN crisis did not begin with US President Donald Trump. The institution has long suffered from structural paralysis, selective enforcement and a fatal contradiction at its core: it claims to uphold international law while depending on the political will of sovereign powers to enforce it.
But Trump did something uniquely dangerous. He did not merely exploit the weaknesses of the post-war international system. He accelerated its moral and institutional collapse while openly mocking the idea of multilateral accountability.
Under Trump, the US, historically one of the chief architects of the modern rules-based order, has increasingly behaved not as the guarantor of international norms but as their most powerful exception.
This does not apply to only one presidency. Barack Obama authorised the use of multiple drone attacks on Afghanistan and Yemen and the killing of Osama Bin Laden (himself a product of the American School of Subterfuge — based at the CIA headquarters).
When the world’s most militarily dominant state openly treats international institutions as disposable, the entire architecture of global legitimacy begins to break down.
The UN’s core contradiction
The UN was born from the ashes of World War II, with a singular ambition: to prevent another catastrophic global war. Its founding promise rested on a fragile compromise. The major victorious powers would remain inside the system because they were granted extraordinary privileges, especially veto power in the Security Council.
In theory, this prevented confrontation between nuclear-capable states. In practice, it entrenched geopolitical inequality into the heart of international law.
The result has always been selective justice. Smaller nations can be sanctioned, investigated, isolated, invaded or disciplined. Major powers and their allies often operate under a different standard. Trump did not invent the double standard. He simply stripped away the diplomatic language that once concealed it.
Trump’s assault on multilateralism
Throughout his presidency, Trump treated international institutions less as mechanisms of cooperation and more as constraints on American unilateral power. His administration withdrew from or attacked multiple international bodies and agreements, including the Paris Climate Agreement, Unesco, the UN Human Rights Council, the Iran nuclear deal, the World Health Organisation and several arms-control frameworks.
The decisions were often framed domestically as defences of sovereignty against unaccountable global bureaucracy. The rhetoric resonated with many voters who viewed the UN system as inefficient, elitist, hypocritical or hostile to national interests.
To a degree, the criticisms were not wrong. The UN is heavily bureaucratic. It is politically inconsistent. It often fails to stop atrocities. It has repeatedly demonstrated institutional cowardice in the face of great-power pressure.
But Trump’s response is not reform. It is demolition without replacement. Rather than strengthening accountability, his administration normalised the idea that powerful states should abandon institutions whenever the institutions become inconvenient.
The logic of power without constraint
Trump’s worldview is transactional. International alliances, treaties, norms and institutions are judged not according to legal consistency or collective stability but according to whether they produce immediate strategic advantage.
This has accelerated a broader global trend: the collapse of confidence in universal rules. When powerful countries ignore international law without meaningful consequence, international law begins to look less like law and more like political theatre — a dramatic performance of power.
The perception has long-term consequences. Rules function only when states and individuals believe violations carry costs. When enforcement becomes selective, cynicism, impunity and kragdadigheid replace legitimacy.
The world risks returning to a system governed less by law than by leverage, networks and strategic advantage. As is the case with the violence being perpetrated in Gaza. The UN has increasingly become a stage for rhetoric while real decisions are made through force and strategic bargaining.
Palestine and the crisis of moral credibility
Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Palestine. For decades, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has exposed the limits of international law when major powers shield allies from accountability.
Critics of Republican and Democratic administrations have long argued that Washington’s diplomatic protection of Israel in the UN system and its veto power, undermines claims that the rules-based international order is universal. And so they have remained critics. Measly “strongly condemn” statements are often the strongest responses many governments have been able to offer.
But under Trump, that alignment hardened. His administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the US embassy there, cut funding to Palestinian institutions and refugee programmes, sidelined Palestinian diplomatic concerns and embraced a one-sided framework widely viewed as eliminating neutrality.
The broader effect was as much symbolic as it was strategic. It signalled that international consensus, UN resolutions and long-standing diplomatic frameworks could be bypassed by raw political power and Trump’s use of demeaning and ridiculing language against opposition to his decrees.
The subsequent devastation in Gaza and the mounting accusations by human rights organisations, legal scholars and multiple governments that Israel’s actions constitute genocide or genocidal conduct have intensified scrutiny of American support.
While legal determinations remain contested in international courts, the perception across large parts of the world is clear: the US and its allies appear willing to invoke international law selectively while shielding partners from consequences. The perception is significant.
The credibility of international law depends less on declarations than on consistent application. If civilian protection is applied selectively, the moral foundation of the system weakens.
The death of multilateralism?
Trump might not have created the decline of multilateralism. What he has done is reveal how shallow its foundations have become. For decades, Western powers promoted a global order built on human rights, international law, democratic values, collective security and multilateral cooperation.
Yet the principles were repeatedly compromised when they collided with strategic interests.
The Iraq War damaged the legitimacy of international law. The selective use of sanctions weakened trust in neutrality.
The unequal treatment of refugees exposed geopolitical hierarchies. Trump and his allies abandoned the language of moral multilateralism. He transformed what had often been implicit into something explicit: great powers act primarily in their own interests.
The emerging world order
The danger now is not simply American decline. It is also the risk of increasingly coercive global power politics. Political institutions designed to coordinate collective action are weakening when they are most needed. Trump’s presidency accelerated the normalisation of a world in which international accountability is treated as optional for the powerful.
The UN’s final dilemma
The tragedy of the UN is not simply that it fails. It is that it cannot succeed without confronting the powers that sustain it. It depends on major states for funding, military enforcement, diplomatic legitimacy and geopolitical cooperation.
Herein lies the paradox: the powers often resist accountability. The UN is expected to uphold universal principles in a world organised around unequal power — a case of he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Trump exposed and exploited that contradiction with unusual bluntness. He treated the UN system not as sacred international law but as an instrument to be used, ignored or bypassed, depending on American interests under the Maga banner.
The deeper fear is that future leaders might follow the same logic.
Here is the warning: if enough major powers conclude that rules apply only when convenient, then the post-1945 international order might not collapse dramatically. It might erode into irrelevance. Lest impunity is normalised and will determine a new world order.
Shabodien Roomanay is a retired teacher and the former headmaster of Islamia College in Cape Town. He is also the founder member of the Salt River Heritage Society and a committee member of the Academia Library and Resource Centre.