World leaders are holding their annual gathering at one of New York’s finest art galleries.
The masterpieces on display showcase the gallery’s founding purpose: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Non-Violence, Reuterswärd’s iconic knotted gun, originally a tribute to John Lennon, stands near the front gates. Chagall’s Peace Window casts its ethereal blue glow just footsteps from the information desk. Upstairs, Christ’s glimmering words stand out against the backdrop of praying figures in The Golden Rule — a Rockwell mosaic donated by Nancy Reagan. In the garden, a towering horseman slays a dragon fashioned from decommissioned missiles in Tsereteli’s Good Defeats Evil.
This is, of course, the United Nations, and world leaders are here for its version of the Met Gala: the high-level week of the General Assembly. Why? Because the United Nations remains the sole global forum through which all countries can pursue negotiated solutions to war. Meanwhile, its peace operations and peacebuilding fund provide world leaders with tools to solve problems that pose threats to their countries’ collective security. They embody the political, human and financial capital needed to broker and implement peace agreements, and to launch and maintain efforts toward sustainable peace and development. At a time of rising conflict and strife, one would think that the elegant glass tower on the East River would be the city’s hottest destination.
Yet the United Nations is widely said to be in crisis. Despite the escalation of violence globally, tools such as peacekeeping have trended downward: from 2015 to 2025, deployed personnel fell by nearly half (approximately 125,000 to 69,000) and budgets were cut by one-third (US$8.3 billion to US$5.6 billion). Meanwhile, violence resumed in places such as Sudan and Haiti after the Security Council closed peacekeeping missions there. Conflict persists even in contexts such as Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Security Council has asked missions to begin drawing down despite this. In some cases, national authorities and populations have accused peacekeepers of ineffectiveness and bias, as with the abrupt exit of the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission from Mali in 2023. Together, these trends have led observers to hypothesize the “twilight of international peacemaking institutions”; not unrelatedly, the United Nations is currently reviewing the future of its peace operations.
Conflict has reached its highest level since 1945 but the prevalence of negotiated agreements has declined.
But, as I argue in a forthcoming book, the United Nations — particularly its peace operations — have been effective in “holding the centre” of complex conflicts. On the ground, they create physical spaces and support norms that help foster moderation and inclusion among conflict parties and communities. Globally, they are established only when diverse member states can reach compromise and consensus on their mandate and budget. Additionally, their diverse, multinational composition helps diffuse undue influence by narrow interests. This has allowed the United Nations to navigate literal and figurative minefields as it prevents violence, limits its impact on civilians and increases the durability of negotiated settlements. If this is true, then why are the United Nations’ flagship tools flagging?
The United Nations’ Twin Crises
A signature report just issued by the secretary-general on the dramatic growth in global military expenditures worldwide may hold answers. It projects military spending could soar to US$6.6 trillion by 2035 — double 2024 levels, and five times greater than at the end of the Cold War. In my view, this trend is both a cause and symptom of the twin crises facing the United Nations.
First, the growth in military expenditures is deepening a financial crisis that presents the United Nations with a supply-side problem.
Severe liquidity challenges stemming from governments’ persistent failure to pay dues has exacerbated longstanding pressure for budget cuts. While certain top financial contributors have raised concerns about the effectiveness and conduct of peacekeepers, others have linked cuts to their growing national defence obligations. This trend applies not only to peacekeeping, but to all official development assistance — without mentioning domestic spending, for which leaders have signalled austerity in most areas but defence.
The secretary-general has cited this crisis in seeking to cut 20 percent of most parts of the UN budget, particularly amid struggles to reimburse the countries contributing peacekeeping troops and equipment and to fulfill obligations to UN vendors and contractors. Although in this context some have called for smaller UN peace operations focusing on “essential” tasks, research suggests that a mission’s size and composition, on the one hand, and its impact, on the other hand, correlate positively. Given that ramping up national defence spending creates perceived scarcity in other domains, mounting resources for the United Nations adequate to the task of “holding the centre” seem doomed to tumble down the list of global spending priorities.
Second, the growth in military expenditures stems from a crisis in diplomacy that presents the United Nations with a demand-side problem.
Conflict has reached its highest level since 1945 but the prevalence of negotiated agreements has declined. And when peace talks do occur, they are more often bilateral affairs, supplanting or diminishing a formerly more prominent role for the United Nations and its peace operations on behalf of the international community.
This highlights the waning faith of member states in the effectiveness of the United Nations’ diplomatic and operational tools in defusing the threat of conflict: in the absence of collective security, rearming might appear logical. Indeed, even where peacekeepers are deployed, observers have frequently suggested that peacekeepers have “no peace to keep” and that they lack realistic prospects for resolving conflict. Accordingly, “peace enforcement” has gained traction, with member states considering whether contemporary conflicts require defeating, rather than negotiating with, alleged enemies of peace.
Holding the Centre in a Divided World
While in New York, world leaders should tackle these twin crises for at least three reasons.
First, the evolution of conflict makes military spending an increasingly uncertain, open-ended proposition. Emerging technologies, such as aerial drones and artificial intelligence, make it less costly to start and sustain hostilities, while reducing incentives for negotiation. Although spending to support the United Nations will not substitute national defence spending, underinvesting in diplomacy, peacekeeping and peacebuilding risks depleting the tools most needed when battlefield deadlock and societal exhaustion set in.
Second, investments in these tools make for good business. UN peacekeeping operations together constitute one of the world’s largest deployed military forces, yet represent under 0.5 percent of global military spending. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has found that each US dollar invested in conflict prevention can return up to 103 dollars when accounting for the long-term economic costs of conflict. Modest spending therefore promotes not only peace and stability but economic growth, eventually enabling countries to assume more responsibility for their own defence and development. The voters who governments are trying to persuade to accept sacrifices implied by increased military expenditures should be shown data highlighting the economic rationale for devoting their tax dollars to the United Nations.
Third, military expenditures can be consistent with enabling the United Nations to “hold the centre.” For one, peacekeeping military activities can separate warring factions and deter aggression. Additionally, by bringing together civilian, police and military components, missions create security and offer protection that allow mediators, technical specialists and civil society to address conflict drivers such as socioeconomic exclusion, natural resource exploitation or the proliferation of weapons and landmines. While most member states consider UN dues a foreign affairs expenditure, there’s a strong argument for characterizing dues used to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war as reinforcing national defence, not diverting from it.
By “holding the centre” to uphold collective security, the United Nations brings value to an increasingly divided world. Nevertheless, it will struggle to continue playing that role unless leaders recognize and communicate to voters the inseparability of national and international security.
World leaders should therefore use high-level week as an opportunity to safeguard and strengthen diplomatic conflict prevention and resolution efforts, even while increasing national defence spending. If leaders find themselves lacking inspiration, they might consider stepping away from the hubbub to contemplate the art that makes that gallery unique. It might remind them why they’re there, after all.
