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About the last four years in the United Nations, The international community has witnessed an alarming trend of a closer collaboration between Russia and China that raises a significant threat to the “rules based” that the United States helped design in 1945.
This increased and renewed level of cooperation presents an unprecedented dilemma for the United States and the partners of related ideas: how to maintain the existing order, warts and everything, when two permanent members of the UN Security Council are now working feverishly to subvert it.
To many UN observers, China And Russia has now reached the shared conclusion that the UN has become a tool that Washington and its allies regularly use to destabilize their regimes and reduce their global influence. Consequently, the United Nations have become a critical battlefield in the current era of “great power.”
During my more than two years as the United States ambassador responsible for the issues of the UN Security Council, I have seen first hand in the UN how these two authoritarian powers repeatedly spread and strongly falsehoods claiming:
The United States ambassador to the Robert Wood Disarmament Conference attends a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, April 19, 2018. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse)
- The UN bureaucracy is indebted to the “west”;
- That the United States and Europe continue to exploit the countries of the South Global in a “colonial” way;
- That the United States uses unilateral sanctions to impose its will on the rest of the world;
- And that the international financial system led by the West continues to subjugate those who do not have the no, those who do not have.
Spreading these false stories, Russia and China hope to persuade In development nations that the UN and its associated mechanisms do not represent its views and values and that a fundamental review of the multilateral system is urgently needed.
It is not as if there had been no warning signs. Since the war of aggression not caused by Russia against Ukraine in early 2022, and its solid international conviction, Moscow has decided to get rid of the current order, even affirming that there is no rules based on rules.
Flagrantly viola the resolutions of the UN General Assembly in Ukraine, challenging the repeated calls of the UN Member States to withdraw their troops from the country. Almost daily, it uses inflamed rhetoric and the nuclear saber in the UN Security Council to threaten and intimidate the nations that express their opposition to their war against Ukraine, their illegal military cooperation with North Korea, its flagrant interference in democratic elections and their support for authoritarian regimes that compromise the horrible atrocities against their own people.
While this type of threatening Russian behavior is not new, when seen in the context of its “association without limits” with China, a flourishing authoritarian superpower, the world must take a serious note.
Since 2016, Beijing has been in a relentless campaign to rebuild the UN in its own authoritarian image. He has worked jealously to insert in the official language of the UN documents that promotes their own national ideological and political priorities, such as the Belt and Road initiative and the global security initiative.
He has prioritized to finance the placement of Chinese national young people in the UN Junior Professional Officers Program, who trains and develops future UN officials. Through this program, Beijing’s main objective is not simply to develop a picture of Chinese citizens with experience in the UN, but to sow the multilateral system with devices focused solely on promoting the interests of the Chinese communist party.
Russia and China have been working together at the UN to undermine the influence of the United States with the Global South. Archive: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a joint press conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko after his conversations at the Gran Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
Playing the long game, China, such as Russia, also seeks to devalue the importance of human rights, individual freedoms and the role of civil society in the written UN, silently eliminating international standards and standards that the United States and the vast majority of UN Member States want to preserve. Instead of retiring from UN institutions such as UNESCO and WHO, the new administration should double its commitment in these bodies to prevent China from dominating critical areas such as AI and responses to future pandemics.
In the meetings of the Public Security Council and of closed doors, I had many verbal clashes with Russian and Chinese diplomats to firmly dispute their propaganda and their false narratives that, if repeated with sufficient frequency, begin to resonate with the states not completely familiar with the history and the facts related to a certain issue.
To court the Global South, Russia and China generally point to the growing economic inequality, the war in Gaza, supposedly unfair restrictions in access to leading technologies, and what they affirm is the instability of democracies as proof that the order -based order is failing and that the authoritarian model is the wave of the future.
Although most of the countries of the Global South do not subscribe to these points of view, it would be incorrect to say that there is no growing support for this line of thought. The call of the administration biden to the reform of the UN Security Council, and the “Pact of the UN Secretary, you generate,” Pact for the future “, a plan to take the UN, have tried to address some of the change demands expressed by developing countries.
But, if Russian and China propaganda becomes the mainstay in the Global South Speech on the UN, the demands of a fundamental review of the rules based on rules will certainly become stronger and could severely weaken support for the UN as we know it.
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The friends of the United States also warn that current political divisions in Washington and between Washington and their allies are giving Russia and China the advantage in this fight. To effectively fulfill the moment in this competitive strategic panorama in evolution and competitive, the Trump administration needs to abandon the anti-un position and, instead, urgently deploy the power of the unique call of the United States to renew and strengthen alliances in the UN.
Chinese and Russian diplomats recognize in private that a comparative advantage that the United States has over their countries are our historical values based on values. However, no matter how important alliances are, they cannot be a unique sense street.
The United States has the right to expect partners not to work to undermine their critical security interests. Nations should not expect to vote continuously against US policy priorities at the UN without having accounts. It is important that each side understand the expectations of the other.
Since 2016, Beijing has been in a relentless campaign to rebuild the UN in its own authoritarian image.
The United States also needs to actively participate in the UN press body. This was something that I religiously undertook at the UN Headquarters, making sure that the best thing I could in the view of the United States would be considered in the media reports. This must be a priority. If we do not constantly expel the narrative of the United States, our adversaries will fill the void and define that narrative so that it damages our global position and interests.
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In the last 79 years, the United States has invested substantially in the construction of the UN and the broader international system. We do not waste this huge investment. Let’s make the UN adjust to its purpose, make sure it continues to comply with the fundamental principles of its letter, protecting human rights, saving the future generations of the scourge of war, promoting a more fair world. We should work with nations, organizations and peoples of related ideas to help him survive and prosper in what will undoubtedly be an intense era of strategic competence.
We do not have a plenty of moment.
