United Nations Archive

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss President Donald Trump’s week at the United Nations, including his speech to the General Assembly and the Security Council session he chaired. For the Report, Cara Tabachnick talks with WPR’s senior editor, Robbie Corey-Boulet, about how Belgium and other European countries are dealing with citizens returning from fighting with ISIS in Syria. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your […]

U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly yesterday for the second time since taking office. Trump opened with what seemed more like a campaign stump speech than a foreign policy address, touting the domestic accomplishments of his administration in such hyperbolic terms that the audience chuckled. He went on to defend his actions in the global arena, with particular emphasis on his controversial decisions to withdraw the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The rest of his address revisited similar themes from his U.N. speech […]

Can the U.S. and its main geopolitical rivals bury their differences? World leaders are in New York for the United Nations General Assembly this week. The main question on everyone’s mind is what President Donald Trump will say. Last year, Trump struck a bellicose note during his first U.N. appearance. He effectively promised to rip up the Iranian nuclear deal, a pledge he has since kept, and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea unless it gave up its own nuclear ambitions. Trump’s speech presaged a rough year in U.N. diplomacy, as the Security Council has since then hobbled from dispute […]

Is it time to stop panicking about peacekeeping? Discussions of United Nations peace operations are always tinged with a sense of crisis. Blue-helmet operations have been through a rough patch in recent years, struggling to stay on top of crises from the Central African Republic and South Sudan to the Golan Heights. As I noted last week, many experts fear that U.N. forces in trouble spots like Mali have stumbled into counterterrorist and stabilization missions that they cannot sustain. This is just one aspect of a broader malaise. The U.N. has endured a long series of revelations about indiscipline, corruption […]

Seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the “war on terror” is still stumbling along. From the Sahel to the Philippines, governments and international coalitions continue to battle jihadi groups. In an era of mounting international competition, political leaders, generals and spies continue to agree that transnational terrorism is a common threat. Global organizations like the United Nations cannot insulate themselves from this tendency. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has made consolidating the institution’s counterterrorist activities a priority. Last week, World Politics Review ran a trenchant piece by Larry Attree and Jordan Street of Saferworld, warning that […]

From Bosnia to Rwanda, United Nations peacekeepers have always faced tough choices that come with operating in complex, dangerous environments. Today, the climate is no less challenging. Record fatalities and injuries for U.N. personnel have increased pressure from some quarters to embolden U.N. peacekeeping and political missions with stronger, more aggressive mandates. But recent decisions made by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, such as a mandate to support a regional, non-U.N. counterterrorism unit in Mali, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, risk plunging blue helmets into the quicksand of unwinnable wars. This short-term thinking poses considerable long-term risks […]