When U.S. President Joe Biden gives his final address to the United Nations General Assembly next Tuesday, he will have to tread carefully. Over the past four years, his administration has done much to restore U.S. ties to the organization, setting a less confrontational tone for its U.N. diplomacy and otherwise repairing the damage done by Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump. But the White House’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war, which will be the dominant topic at this year’s General Assembly, has put the U.S. at odds with most U.N. members and lost it a lot of goodwill.
When Biden came into office in 2021, he promised to revitalize multilateral diplomacy. The U.S. was quick to rejoin U.N. agreements and bodies that Trump had quit, such as the Paris climate pact and Human Rights Council. But it was less clear what exactly Biden wanted to achieve at the U.N. beyond this, even as his foreign policy priorities—most obviously building up relationships in Asia to balance China—lay elsewhere. This was a disappointment for U.N. members who recalled former President Barack Obama’s focus on big multilateral agreements like the Paris deal and the Sustainable Development Goals.
For their part, members of the incoming administration were frustrated by how difficult even basic elements of U.N. diplomacy could be. It took months for U.S. officials to get other members of the Security Council to agree to hold a full-scale meeting on the Tigray war in Ethiopia, for instance, even though Biden’s ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, had identified it as a priority.