Trump Could Veto the Next UN Leader — and He Might Want Infantino

The Worst Job Opening in the World Right Now

Here is the situation the next UN secretary-general will walk into. Two permanent Security Council members, the US and Russia, are running open-ended wars of their own choosing. A UN commission of inquiry has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, and the UN has been effectively sidelined from doing anything about it by Trump's so-called Board of Peace. The climate crisis is producing a new humanitarian disaster on what feels like a weekly schedule. And the entire philosophical foundation of the organization, multilateralism, a rules-based international order, the basic premise that countries should talk to each other instead of just bombing each other, is under genuine threat.

According to The Guardian, the UN is also facing what Guterres himself described during the summer as "imminent financial collapse," driven largely by unpaid dues from the United States. So: existential institutional crisis, active genocides, climate catastrophe, a superpower that won't pay its bills and would prefer the whole thing just went away. Great. Exciting opportunity. Lots of room to grow.

No Frontrunner, No Consensus, and Now Whispers of No Secretary-General at All

Fifteen diplomats will eventually emerge from a soundproofed room somewhere inside UN headquarters in New York and announce their pick. That is how this works. Except right now, after three informal straw polls, they cannot agree on anyone.

The Guardian reports that opposition to the two leading candidates actually increased in last Friday's vote. The frontrunners are Guyana's former foreign minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett and Costa Rica's ex-vice president Rebeca Grynspan, and UN experts think they could be good at the job, but nobody seems particularly fired up about either of them. The UK delegation is reportedly unimpressed with the entire field and has not voted in favor of anyone through the first three rounds. France is in a similar holding pattern. Both countries are apparently hoping someone better materializes out of thin air.

For the first time in the organization's 80-year history, The Guardian reports, serious internal discussions are happening about what would happen if no secretary-general gets chosen at all. That sentence deserves to sit there for a second. The United Nations might not be able to agree on who runs the United Nations.

The Veto Problem, Which Is Actually the Trump Problem

Here is the structural trap every candidate is stuck in. The five permanent Security Council members, the US, UK, France, Russia, and China, all hold veto power over the pick. That means any serious candidate needs to be acceptable to Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump simultaneously. Try writing that job application cover letter.

The practical result is that every candidate is running the most cautious, bloodless campaign imaginable. As The Guardian notes, we don't actually know where any of them stand on Ukraine, on Gaza, on the climate commitments the UN is supposed to be anchoring. Anyone with a bold platform wouldn't make it past the first straw poll. The job selects against precisely the qualities the job requires. And the main reason for that is Trump, a man who this year announced American withdrawal from 31 UN organizations, whose Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared the administration's goal to dismantle the International Criminal Court "brick by brick," and who abruptly shut down USAID in a move that, according to The Guardian, contributed to deaths around the world.

About That FIFA Angle

The New York Post reported in July that Trump has been floating Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, as his preferred candidate for UN secretary-general. Infantino. The soccer guy. The man who presided over the World Cup in Qatar, a tournament that raised serious human rights concerns and was awarded under a process FIFA itself admitted was corrupt.

The Guardian notes this is considered extremely unlikely to actually happen. But European diplomats are genuinely worried that Trump will throw his weight behind some dark horse candidate without a diplomatic background in the coming weeks, because this is, after all, the administration that handed American foreign policy to Jared Kushner and a real estate developer. Trump has said nothing publicly about the race yet, though he was scheduled to speak at the General Assembly on Tuesday. Or, The Guardian observes, a 2am social media post could upend the entire process. That is a sentence about the secretary-general of the United Nations being chosen.

The UN Is Battered But Still Breathing

It would be easy to write the UN's obituary right now and it would make for a tidy piece. But The Guardian makes a point worth sitting with: the organization is still standing, and it still matters in concrete ways. There are 11 active peacekeeping missions with more than 50,000 personnel deployed in some of the most dangerous places on earth. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change remains the only mechanism that reliably focuses international attention on the climate emergency. The office for humanitarian affairs coordination is still the best available tool for getting aid into places like Sudan.

This year the General Assembly passed two resolutions that actually meant something: one recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity, and one adopting a corrected world map that accurately represents Africa's geographic size. Small things, maybe. But the fact that these 193 countries can still sit in a room and agree on anything, given the current state of the world, is not nothing.