The Veto Against Everybody: Donald Trump and the Constitutional Crisis of the United Nations
By Matthew Parish
Sunday 11 October 2026
he United Nations is approaching what may prove to be the most serious constitutional crisis in its eighty-one-year history. The administration of President Donald Trump has reportedly decided that none of the seven candidates currently seeking to succeed António Guterres as Secretary-General is acceptable to the United States. The objection is not apparently to their competence, diplomatic experience or personal integrity, but rather to their collective failure to embrace the American President’s conception of what the United Nations ought to become. According to reporting by Politico on 10 October 2026, citing two people familiar with internal administration discussions, Washington wants an entirely new selection of candidates, preferably individuals committed to a radical transformation of the organisation. This remains a reported administration position rather than a formal veto cast in the Security Council, but its implications are potentially extraordinary.
There is something characteristically Trumpian about rejecting every candidate for a position that the United States does not itself control, while nevertheless possessing sufficient constitutional authority to prevent anybody from being appointed to it. Yet the question is rather more serious than another episode of transatlantic diplomatic theatre. The term of António Guterres expires on 31 December 2026, and the United Nations Charter provides no unambiguous mechanism for appointing his successor if the Security Council cannot agree upon a recommendation. The prospect therefore arises that the world’s principal international organisation, responsible for supervising peacekeeping operations, administering humanitarian programmes, coordinating international development and maintaining the institutional framework of international law, may enter 2027 without a lawful and undisputed chief executive.
This is not merely a dispute about personalities. It exposes a contradiction at the heart of the United Nations, established in 1945 upon the ruins of the Second World War. The organisation is founded upon the formal sovereign equality of its member states, yet its most consequential decisions remain subject to the privileges of five permanent members of the Security Council. It claims an independent international civil service, yet the head of that service cannot be appointed without the acquiescence of the great powers. It professes the supremacy of international law, yet its constitutional arrangements permit a single government to prevent an essential organ of the institution from being properly constituted.
The central question is whether President Trump is attempting to reform an international institution that has become inefficient and politically compromised, or whether he is using the organisation’s constitutional vulnerabilities to subordinate it to American foreign policy. These explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, the danger is that both may be true, and that a legitimate demand for institutional reform may become the justification for an exercise in political coercion that irreparably damages the United Nations’ claim to independence.
The contest for the succession
The immediate circumstances are straightforward enough. Guterres, the former Portuguese Prime Minister who assumed the office of Secretary-General on 1 January 2017, is completing his second five-year term. Although there is no express Charter prohibition upon a third term, established institutional practice strongly favours a maximum of two. His departure has therefore been anticipated for years, and the selection process for his successor formally began in November 2025.
The principal candidate currently appears to be Rebeca Grynspan, a Costa Rican economist, former Vice-President of her country and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. She has emerged ahead of a field containing Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Argentine Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, a former Foreign Minister of Guyana; María Fernanda Espinosa, a former Ecuadorian Foreign Minister and President of the UN General Assembly; former Senegalese President Macky Sall; the Ugandan diplomat Olara Otunnu; and the Ecuadorian diplomat Ivonne Baki. The former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, once considered a prominent contender, has withdrawn her candidacy.
On 7 October 2026, Grynspan received nine favourable indications and six unfavourable indications in the fifth informal ballot conducted among the fifteen members of the Security Council. Although nine affirmative votes would ordinarily be sufficient for a substantive Security Council decision, the preliminary ballots do not establish which candidates are acceptable to the five permanent members. Grynspan’s numerical advantage therefore confers no guarantee of eventual appointment, and the reported American opposition to the entire field threatens to make the existing proceedings largely futile.
There is also an important symbolic question. For the first time, the United Nations has a serious opportunity to appoint a woman as its Secretary-General, and the informal convention of geographical rotation favours Latin America. Neither consideration creates a binding legal entitlement. Nevertheless, both reflect the understandable desire of the broader international membership to see an institution historically dominated by powerful states and male European diplomats acquire a leadership more representative of the world it claims to serve.
The Trump administration appears relatively indifferent to these considerations, or at least unwilling to allow them to prevail over its demands for reform. Washington wants a Secretary-General sympathetic to its view that the United Nations has become excessively bureaucratic, ideologically interventionist, financially undisciplined and insufficiently attentive to the sovereign interests of its member states. The difficulty is that these criticisms, some of which possess considerable merit, do not necessarily entail that the Secretary-General should share the political convictions of the incumbent President of the United States.
The constitutional machinery of the United Nations
The legal framework governing the appointment of the Secretary-General is remarkably simple, and therein lies much of the present difficulty. Article 97 of the United Nations Charter provides that the Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. The two organs therefore possess complementary constitutional functions: the Council recommends and the Assembly appoints. Neither can ordinarily complete the process without the other, and there is no provision allowing one organ to substitute itself for the other merely because political agreement proves impossible.
Article 27 of the Charter establishes the Security Council’s voting arrangements. A substantive decision requires at least nine affirmative votes among the fifteen Council members, and none of the five permanent members—the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom—may cast a negative vote. An abstention by a permanent member does not ordinarily prevent adoption, but an express negative vote does. The recommendation of a Secretary-General is treated as a substantive decision, and hence falls within this veto system. Once a recommendation reaches the General Assembly, appointment can ordinarily be approved by a simple majority of members present and voting, although the Assembly can determine that a two-thirds majority is necessary.
It follows that the United States possesses an entirely lawful power to prevent any particular candidate from being recommended. Indeed, no provision in the Charter requires Washington to supply reasons for exercising its veto, nor is there a judicial mechanism by which the General Assembly could compel the Security Council to recommend an individual whom the American government finds unacceptable. The power is political in its motivation but constitutional in its legal foundation, reflecting the original compromise under which the great powers consented to participate in an institution that would otherwise have been incapable of commanding their support.
Nevertheless, an important distinction must be drawn between announcing opposition to all existing candidates and actually exercising seven vetoes. The confidential preliminary ballots currently being conducted are not formal Security Council decisions. An indication that a candidate is discouraged, even if it originates from a permanent member, does not have the legal effect of a veto. Nor can the United States issue some universal constitutional declaration invalidating every present and future candidate. Each formal recommendation must be considered according to the Council’s procedures, and a candidate can be blocked by an American negative vote only when the relevant substantive decision is put to a vote.
This distinction may appear technical, but it is significant. Washington’s reported position does not yet create a constitutional crisis. It creates the threat of one, and that threat may be intended to produce precisely the political concessions that the United States seeks. Other governments may withdraw candidates, nominate new individuals or negotiate an alternative before the formal exercise of the American veto becomes necessary. The legal consequences therefore depend not merely upon what President Trump says, but upon what the United States actually does within the Security Council.
There is a further constitutional paradox. Article 100 of the Charter requires the Secretary-General and the international civil service not to seek or receive instructions from any government. Member states are correspondingly required to respect their exclusively international responsibilities. A Secretary-General may properly support administrative reform, financial prudence and a more disciplined interpretation of the organisation’s mandate, but a Secretary-General appointed upon the understanding that he or she will implement the political ideology of an individual American President would be placed in an inherently uncomfortable constitutional position. The distinction between being acceptable to the United States and being obedient to the United States is fundamental to the independence of the institution.
This is not to suggest that Washington’s concerns are inherently illegitimate. The United Nations is an organisation of member states, not a sovereign authority above them, and those states are entitled to insist upon responsible administration of the resources they provide. Nevertheless, the Secretary-General is not supposed to be the representative of the organisation’s largest financial contributor, any more than the President of the World Bank should simply be regarded as an employee of the government exercising the greatest influence over that institution.
What happens if the Americans veto everybody?
Suppose that Washington maintains its opposition and that no compromise candidate emerges before 31 December 2026. Guterres’s present appointment would expire at the end of that day. He would not automatically continue in office merely because the Security Council had failed to recommend a successor, and the other principal organs of the United Nations could not simply presume that he remained Secretary-General indefinitely.
The organisation itself would not dissolve. Its Charter would remain in force, its member states would retain their rights and obligations, its General Assembly and Security Council could continue to meet, and its agencies and programmes would not automatically cease to exist. The international legal personality of the United Nations is independent of the individual who occupies its highest administrative office. However, substantial difficulties could arise concerning the exercise of powers specifically conferred upon the Secretary-General, including appointments, administrative delegations, institutional representation and certain functions relating to international peace and security.
One possibility would be to extend Guterres’s existing term, either for a few months or until a successor could be agreed. This would be constitutionally straightforward if the Security Council recommended an extension and the General Assembly approved it. There is no express Charter prohibition upon a third term or a shorter transitional extension. Yet an extension requiring a fresh Council recommendation would itself be vulnerable to an American veto, and there is little reason to suppose that President Trump would welcome retaining an incumbent with whose approach his administration has frequently disagreed.
The more interesting possibility is that the General Assembly might attempt to extend Guterres’s term without a fresh Security Council recommendation. This would not be an entirely unprecedented exercise, because the United Nations has already confronted almost precisely this constitutional problem.
In 1950, the Soviet Union refused to support the reappointment of the organisation’s first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, largely because of his support for United Nations action during the Korean War. The Security Council could not agree upon a recommendation, and the General Assembly adopted Resolution 492(V), extending Lie’s existing tenure for another three years. The Soviet Union denounced the arrangement as unlawful and refused to recognise Lie as Secretary-General, but the institution nevertheless continued to operate.
The historical irony is particularly striking because the United States supported the controversial extension. American State Department documents from 1950 expressly contemplated the proposition that the General Assembly could preserve continuity in office when the Security Council was paralysed by a permanent-member veto. Washington argued that the Assembly, having participated in determining the original term of appointment, could modify that term in order to prevent an institutional vacuum. What might be politically convenient for the United States in 1950 could therefore become an argument advanced against it in 2026.
The legality of this approach is nevertheless debatable. The difficulty is that Article 97 expressly requires a Security Council recommendation for an appointment, and the procedural distinction between extending an existing appointment and making a new one cannot necessarily be used to defeat the purposes of that provision. Lie had originally been recommended by the Council, which gave the Assembly a stronger basis for extending his tenure than it would have possessed for appointing an entirely new individual without Council approval. The constitutional controversy remained unresolved, and Lie ultimately resigned in 1952.
A second possibility would involve an interim administrator exercising the ordinary functions of the Secretariat while political negotiations continued. The Deputy Secretary-General, currently Amina Mohammed, might appear the obvious person to assume such responsibilities. Yet the Deputy Secretary-General’s office was established long after the Charter, and its functions presuppose the existence of a Secretary-General whom the deputy assists or represents. It is far from clear that the deputy automatically inherits the constitutional powers of the Secretary-General when the latter’s term expires without a successor.
There is some relevant historical experience. After Dag Hammarskjöld died in an aircraft crash in September 1961, senior officials maintained administrative continuity pending the appointment of U Thant. However, Thant’s appointment as Acting Secretary-General in November 1961 followed a recommendation by the Security Council and a decision of the General Assembly. The historical episode demonstrates that the United Nations can continue functioning temporarily without an appointed Secretary-General, but it does not establish an unrestricted right for subordinate officials to exercise all the powers of the vacant office.
The General Assembly might also attempt a more radical solution by appointing a completely new Secretary-General without any Council recommendation. Such an initiative could attract support among the wider membership, particularly if the United States appeared determined to paralyse the organisation for ideological reasons. There might even be arguments for invoking the General Assembly’s emergency powers under the Uniting for Peace procedure, although that procedure cannot straightforwardly override the express terms of Article 97. Such an appointment would be highly vulnerable to constitutional challenge and might create rival claims about who was authorised to speak for the United Nations.
A General Assembly attempt to bypass the Council would consequently risk replacing a vacancy with a contested officeholder. The legal problems associated with disputed authority to represent an international organisation are particularly acute where that authority extends to treaties, institutional appointments, operational instructions and financial decisions. It is one thing for the General Assembly to make recommendations upon matters of international peace and security when the Council is paralysed, and quite another for it to dispense with an express constitutional condition governing the appointment of the organisation’s principal administrative officer.
Ultimately, the most likely solution to a persistent American objection remains political compromise rather than constitutional improvisation. The permanent members could agree upon a previously unconsidered candidate, perhaps somebody drawn from international finance, national government or the management of a large international institution. Such a person might be sufficiently sympathetic to American demands for administrative reform while remaining acceptable to Russia, China and the wider membership. Whether a candidate capable of satisfying such contradictory requirements exists is another matter.
The lessons of previous American vetoes
There is also a more recent precedent for American hostility towards a particular Secretary-General. In November 1996, the Clinton administration vetoed the reappointment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, notwithstanding the support of the other fourteen members of the Security Council. Washington considered his leadership unsatisfactory and was determined to prevent him from obtaining a second term. Boutros-Ghali initially resisted pressure to withdraw, and the dispute generated considerable resentment, particularly among African governments.
Nevertheless, the crisis was resolved when the Security Council recommended Kofi Annan of Ghana on 13 December 1996, and the General Assembly subsequently appointed him. Annan went on to become one of the most prominent and independently minded figures in the history of the organisation, demonstrating that an American veto does not necessarily produce an American puppet as Secretary-General.
The crucial difference between 1996 and the present circumstances is that President Clinton objected to an identifiable incumbent, whereas the Trump administration is reportedly rejecting an entire generation of prospective leaders. The former position could be overcome by finding an acceptable alternative. The latter implies that the problem is not necessarily the individual candidate but the intellectual and institutional culture from which the candidates emerge.
This is a substantially more profound challenge. If every diplomat with a conventional United Nations background is considered unacceptable because he or she believes in the organisation’s established conception of multilateralism, then Washington is demanding not simply a change of leadership but a transformation of the intellectual premises upon which the institution operates.
The United Nations has always been obliged to accommodate the interests of the great powers. Its Secretaries-General have never been completely detached from the geopolitical compromises necessary to secure their appointment. But there is a distinction between selecting an individual who can communicate effectively with rival governments and selecting one whose conception of international relations is required to conform to the ideological programme of a particular administration in Washington.
A legitimate demand for reform, or an attempt at institutional capture?
It would be a mistake to dismiss the Trump administration’s criticisms of the United Nations merely because they are expressed in the President’s characteristically combative language. The United Nations has developed an immense institutional superstructure, containing numerous agencies, commissions, committees and special programmes whose responsibilities are frequently overlapping. Administrative incentives encourage the preservation of budgets and institutional mandates, while member governments themselves often resist eliminating programmes that they regard as serving their national interests.
Moreover, the organisation has experienced serious controversies concerning procurement, sexual exploitation by peacekeepers, inadequate financial oversight and the political manipulation of humanitarian assistance. These are not imaginary problems invented by American conservatives. They are longstanding features of the international bureaucracy, and meaningful reform is necessary if the institution is to maintain public confidence.
Indeed, the United Nations has already embarked upon a substantial reform process under the UN80 initiative. Guterres proposed significant reductions in expenditure and staffing, consolidation of administrative functions and improvements in institutional coordination. The General Assembly approved a regular budget of approximately $3.45 billion for 2026, roughly seven per cent below the previous year’s approved budget. Thus, the claim that the organisation is wholly unwilling to reform would be difficult to sustain, even if the adequacy of its current reforms remains open to legitimate criticism.
The American government’s position must also be understood in the context of its broader withdrawal from elements of the international institutional system. In January 2026, President Trump directed the withdrawal of American participation or funding from numerous international bodies and United Nations entities considered inconsistent with national interests. The administration has also challenged international judicial institutions, questioned established approaches to climate policy and advanced alternatives to traditional multilateral diplomacy. The selection of a new Secretary-General has consequently become one theatre in a much larger contest about the distribution of political authority between sovereign states and international organisations.
From the perspective of the Trump administration, there may be a coherent theory underlying these actions. International institutions, it may argue, have gradually acquired ideological and administrative autonomy beyond the purposes for which their founding states established them. They have developed political programmes concerning human rights, development, climate change and international justice that are not always supported by democratic electorates within their principal contributing states. Reasserting national sovereignty may therefore be presented as an exercise in democratic accountability rather than as an attack upon international cooperation itself.
The opposing argument is equally substantial. International institutions exist precisely because there are questions that individual sovereign states cannot resolve satisfactorily through unilateral action. Their capacity to operate independently of the governments that finance them is essential if they are to mediate disputes, document violations of international law and protect vulnerable populations without being wholly subordinated to the national interests of the strongest states.
An organisation whose senior officials are obliged to obtain the ideological approval of the American President before they can perform their duties would not retain much credibility as an impartial institution. Indeed, other permanent members would reasonably demand equivalent ideological assurances, producing a system in which every Secretary-General would have to satisfy mutually contradictory requirements imposed by Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
There is something intrinsically unworkable about such an arrangement. A Secretary-General cannot simultaneously be an American nationalist, a Chinese advocate of state sovereignty, a Russian defender of Moscow’s geopolitical sphere and an independent custodian of the United Nations Charter. The office is necessarily one of diplomatic compromise, but compromise is not the same as ideological submission.
The practical consequences of American financial pressure are also significant. Reduced contributions can weaken humanitarian programmes and international administrative capacity long before any formal constitutional crisis emerges. On 9 October, Reuters reported new American funding pledges to certain United Nations bodies in Geneva, suggesting that Washington continues to distinguish between institutions it wishes to influence and those from which it intends to withdraw. The administration’s approach therefore cannot fairly be characterised as a simple determination to destroy the entire UN system. It appears instead to be an effort to reshape that system through a combination of selective support, financial pressure and institutional leverage.
That makes the present dispute particularly difficult to resolve. The United States remains indispensable to the effective functioning of many international institutions, yet the methods it employs to secure reform may themselves undermine the institutional legitimacy upon which successful cooperation depends.
The danger of a permanently weakened United Nations
The consequences of the current confrontation extend considerably beyond the question of who occupies the Secretary-General’s office in January 2027. The deeper concern is that an already weakened institution may emerge from the dispute with its independence further diminished, its internal administration disrupted and its credibility among the wider international membership seriously damaged.
The United Nations was never intended to be a world government. Its founding architects understood that the principal military powers would not consent to an institution capable of imposing binding decisions upon them in matters touching their essential national interests. The Security Council veto was therefore the price of great-power participation in the post-war legal order.
Yet the veto has gradually become a source of institutional paralysis. Russia can prevent effective Security Council action against its own aggression in Ukraine. The United States can block resolutions that it considers prejudicial to Israel. China can prevent decisions that it regards as inconsistent with its strategic interests. This is not an accidental defect in the organisation but a consequence of the constitutional bargain upon which it was founded.
What makes the present circumstances unusual is that the veto may now be deployed not simply to prevent an objectionable decision upon a substantive international dispute, but to prevent the organisation from appointing the individual necessary for its ordinary executive administration.
If this becomes an accepted instrument of coercion, the precedent could be devastating. Any permanent member dissatisfied with the direction of the United Nations might threaten to leave the Secretary-General’s office vacant unless its preferred institutional reforms were adopted. The organisation would become vulnerable to repeated leadership crises whenever its senior officials displeased one of the great powers.
Other governments might respond by seeking to amend the Charter and restrict the veto in matters concerning institutional appointments. However, Article 108 requires Charter amendments to be ratified by two-thirds of the membership, including all five permanent members of the Security Council. Consequently, the very governments whose privileges would be curtailed possess the legal ability to prevent such reforms from taking effect. Constitutional reform is therefore possible in theory but extraordinarily difficult in practice.
This creates a fundamental dilemma for the wider membership. If the organisation cannot reform its constitutional arrangements through the established procedures, and if those arrangements increasingly obstruct its ability to function, governments may begin creating alternative institutions outside the United Nations system.
Some of this fragmentation is already occurring. Regional organisations, informal coalitions, bilateral security arrangements and specialised international initiatives have assumed responsibilities that the United Nations might once have been expected to coordinate. The danger is not necessarily that the United Nations will be formally abolished, but that it will gradually become peripheral to the most important decisions concerning international peace and security.
An institution can survive indefinitely as a legal entity while losing much of its political relevance. The League of Nations offers the obvious historical warning, although the analogy should not be exaggerated. The League did not simply perish because governments disagreed about its leadership; it became ineffective because the principal powers ceased to regard it as an indispensable instrument of international order. The United Nations could suffer a comparable deterioration without experiencing any dramatic moment of formal dissolution.
The particular implications for Ukraine
For Ukraine, the consequences of this dispute are especially troubling. The United Nations has already demonstrated the limits of its ability to constrain Russian aggression, not least because Russia itself occupies a permanent seat on the Security Council and can veto substantive decisions directed against it. From the Ukrainian perspective, the constitutional structure of the organisation embodies an uncomfortable historical reality: the international legal order remains organised around the privileges of powers whose conduct may be most in need of restraint.
Yet the United Nations continues to possess practical importance for Ukraine. Its humanitarian agencies assist civilians affected by the war, its General Assembly provides an international forum in which the overwhelming majority of states can express their rejection of territorial conquest, and its institutions contribute to the documentation of human rights violations and the maintenance of international humanitarian standards.
The activities of the United Nations are frequently frustrating, and its declarations are often inadequately supported by effective action. Nevertheless, there is a difference between an institution incapable of preventing every violation of international law and an institution that serves no useful purpose. The latter proposition does not follow from the former, and Ukrainians have compelling reasons to appreciate that distinction.
A prolonged crisis in the organisation’s leadership could weaken its ability to coordinate humanitarian responses, negotiate access to vulnerable populations and maintain administrative discipline over programmes that operate in exceptionally difficult conditions. Although essential field activities would not automatically cease in the absence of a Secretary-General, uncertainty at the apex of the institution would hardly improve the quality of its performance.
There is also a geopolitical irony. American efforts to undermine the independence of the United Nations might ultimately strengthen the relative influence of China, which has increasingly presented itself as a defender of multilateral institutions and the international system based upon the Charter. Whether China’s own conduct consistently accords with that description is another question, but the diplomatic opportunity would be substantial.
Russia, meanwhile, might welcome an American initiative that further diminishes the authority of an institution whose General Assembly has repeatedly condemned its invasion of Ukraine. Moscow could exploit Western disagreements over the succession to argue that international legal institutions are merely instruments of competing great-power interests, without any independent moral authority.
For Ukraine, the preferable outcome is therefore not the destruction of the United Nations but its reform into an organisation more capable of upholding the principles upon which it was founded. That includes confronting the structural privileges that allow permanent members to shield themselves from effective collective action, while preserving the humanitarian and legal functions that remain indispensable during wartime.
The limits of American power
For all President Trump’s formidable constitutional leverage, his ability to dictate the future of the United Nations is not unlimited. The United States can prevent an unacceptable candidate from receiving a Security Council recommendation, but it cannot unilaterally appoint its preferred candidate. Any American nominee or favoured alternative must still obtain sufficient Council support, avoid objections from the other permanent members and secure appointment by the General Assembly.
Moreover, the wider membership is not obliged to accept every institutional reform demanded by Washington. The Secretary-General’s powers derive from the Charter and decisions of the competent United Nations organs, not from an agreement between the successful candidate and the American administration. A new Secretary-General sympathetic to American views would still encounter constitutional limits upon what could lawfully be changed through unilateral administrative action.
The United States also has its own strategic interests in preserving the institution. A world in which international organisations no longer provide predictable mechanisms for cooperation would not necessarily be advantageous to Washington. American diplomacy would face more fragmented negotiations, stronger regional blocs and additional opportunities for rival powers to construct alternative institutional arrangements.
This is why a compromise may eventually prove attractive to all sides. Washington could secure an individual demonstrably committed to administrative efficiency and reduced institutional expenditure, while other states could insist upon independence, geographical representativeness and fidelity to the Charter. There is no inherent incompatibility between these objectives, provided that the United States is prepared to distinguish genuine reform from ideological conformity.
The danger is that the President may regard the selection process as a contest of political wills in which compromise itself becomes evidence of weakness. In that event, the legal structure of the United Nations provides him with considerable opportunities for obstruction but remarkably few means of compelling a constructive result.
The probable outcome remains the eventual selection of a compromise candidate, perhaps after a period of intense diplomatic negotiation and the emergence of an entirely new name. Nevertheless, the possibility of a vacancy is sufficiently serious that member governments ought already to be considering how the organisation could lawfully preserve administrative continuity if agreement proves impossible.
The future of the international legal order
The most profound question raised by President Trump’s reported opposition to every existing candidate is whether the United Nations can continue functioning as an independent international institution in an era when the world’s principal powers increasingly reject the constraints of multilateral diplomacy.
The Charter was drafted for a world in which sovereign governments were expected to disagree profoundly, but nevertheless recognised that some common institutional framework was preferable to the unregulated exercise of national power. The organisation’s constitutional structure deliberately accommodated great-power privileges, yet it simultaneously established an international civil service whose loyalty was supposed to be directed towards the institution rather than towards any particular government.
That compromise was always uneasy. It rested upon the assumption that the major powers would exercise their constitutional privileges with at least some regard for the continued functioning of the organisation itself. A permanent member could veto decisions contrary to its interests, but there remained an expectation that the Security Council would ultimately discharge the responsibilities assigned to it under the Charter.
An American determination to block every candidate for Secretary-General would test that expectation severely. It would demonstrate that the constitutional machinery of the United Nations can be used not merely to influence the organisation’s decisions, but potentially to prevent the organisation from maintaining its own executive leadership.
There may ultimately be a constructive outcome. The threat of an American veto might induce governments to nominate a genuinely exceptional reformer, capable of addressing the organisation’s administrative deficiencies without compromising its constitutional independence. Such an individual might prove better equipped than any of the existing candidates to restore confidence in an institution whose reputation has undoubtedly suffered.
But there is an equally plausible and considerably darker possibility. The new Secretary-General might emerge from the selection process politically diminished, constrained by private understandings with the great powers, and conscious that any vigorous defence of the Charter could provoke retaliation from the governments responsible for securing his or her appointment.
The essential function of the Secretary-General is not simply to administer an international bureaucracy. It is to provide a measure of institutional continuity, legal authority and independent judgement in a world otherwise dominated by competing national interests. A Secretary-General who has been appointed only after promising political obedience to a powerful government may possess the title and the office, but would struggle to exercise the moral and diplomatic authority traditionally associated with the position.
For the United Nations, therefore, the succession crisis of 2026 represents something more than another confrontation with Donald Trump. It is a test of whether the international legal order can preserve a meaningful sphere of institutional independence when the sovereign governments upon which it depends are increasingly unwilling to tolerate restraints upon their freedom of action.
The great irony is that the United States helped create the United Nations precisely because the exercise of unrestricted national power had twice brought the world to catastrophe during the first half of the twentieth century. American statesmen understood that institutions would sometimes frustrate American preferences, but that a world governed entirely by competing national ambitions would ultimately be more dangerous than one in which those ambitions were moderated through imperfect international rules.
Eighty-one years later, another American President appears determined to discover how far the constitutional privileges of the United States can be employed to reshape the organisation that his predecessors helped establish. He unquestionably possesses the legal power to veto its prospective leaders. Whether he can exercise that power without fatally weakening the institution whose future he professes to wish to improve is a question that the coming months may answer.
The United Nations has survived wars, diplomatic boycotts, financial crises, institutional scandals and the collapse of the geopolitical order in which it was created. It may well survive this confrontation too. But an international organisation whose chief executive can be held hostage to the ideological preferences of a single government is an organisation whose constitutional promise of independence has become increasingly difficult to reconcile with political reality.
Ultimately, the danger is not that Donald Trump will bring the United Nations to an abrupt end. It is that he may accelerate its transformation from an imperfect but indispensable institution of international cooperation into an increasingly marginal forum in which governments continue to exchange speeches while conducting the serious business of international relations elsewhere. The choice confronting the member states is therefore not simply who should succeed António Guterres, but whether there remains sufficient political commitment among the world’s principal powers to preserve the United Nations as something more than an elaborate monument to the diplomatic ambitions of 1945.
