Global Geopolitical Series: U.S. demands for better return from U.N. funding challenge its fundamental existence

United States’ so-called adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and many others have long complained that United Nation is being used by the western alliance to move forward agendas instead of a diplomatic forum to resolve disputes.  The recent stance by the Trump administration, which is aggressively pushing its ‘America first’ mantra, seems to prove those allegations.

Demand for better return:

On April 26th, U.S. state department published a detailed report on U.N. voting for Congress and the White House to review as the Trump administration looks to make good on its promise at the beginning of the year that it would make the U.N. voting one of the key factors to determine which country has been nice to the U.S., and which are the ones that have been naughty by voting against the U.S. or against U.S. proposals.

The statement on the release of the report quoted U.S. ambassador Nikkei Haley as saying, “The American people pay 22 percent of the UN budget – more than the next three highest donor countries combined. In spite of this generosity, the rest of the UN voted with us only 31 percent of the time, a lower rate than in 2016. That’s because we care more about being right than popular and are once again standing up for our interests and values. Either way, this is not an acceptable return on our investment. When we arrived at the UN last year, we said we would be taking names, and this list of voting records speaks for itself. President Trump wants to ensure that our foreign assistance dollars – the most generous in the world – always serve American interests, and we look forward to helping him see that the American people are no longer taken for granted.”

Here is a link to the full report from the State Department, https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/281458.pdf The 10 countries with the highest voting coincidence with the United States were Israel, Micronesia, Canada, Marshall Islands, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Palau, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic. The 10 countries with the lowest voting coincidence with the United States were Zimbabwe, Burundi, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Cuba, Bolivia, and South Africa.

Is U.S. claim justified?

The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization tasked to promote international cooperation and to create and maintain international order. It was established after bloody Second World War in order to avoid similar conflict. Its budget is assessed every year based on the Gross National Product (GNP) of every country and its share on the global economy, which is subject to a ceiling rate of 22 percent of entire U.N. budget (reduced from 25 percent in 2000 under U.S. pressure). For the least developed countries, a ceiling rate of 0.01% is applied. In addition to the ceiling rates, the minimum amount assessed to any member nation, which is called as the floor rate is set at 0.001% of the UN budget.

It is an established fact that the U.S. paid 22 percent of the U.N. budget in 2016 and as a member state it can reduce its payments but that contradicts with the commitment the United States had entered with the U.N. back in 2000. During the 1980s and 90s, the US paid a minimum necessary to retain its vote at the UN General Assembly, which ultimately triggered a feud between the U.S. and the UN. After long negotiations, the U.S. and the UN negotiated an agreement where the United States would pay a large sum of the money it owes, and in exchange, the UN would reduce the assessment rate ceiling from 25% to 22%. The reduction in the assessment rate ceiling was among the reforms contained in the 1999 Helms-Biden legislation, which links payment of $926 million in U.S. arrears to the UN and other international organizations to a series of reform benchmarks. Over the years, the U.S. arrears to the U.N. have nothing but increased to several billion, which means the United States is actually in debt to the U.N. but these payments are withheld for political purpose by Washington.

Repeating the 1999/2000:

The Trump administration, with its ‘America First’ strategy not just want to reduce costs of U.S foreign aid but to use these U.N. arrears to once again negotiate its reform wishes for the organization, which fundamentally threatens the very existence of democratic right to vote as the countries’ please and the very founding of the organizations that were meant to keep a check on rogue nations by means of collective response.