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(AP) — The United Nations chief is warning that the world body faces “imminent financial collapse” unless its financial rules are overhauled or all 193 member nations pay their dues — a message likely directed at the United States and the billions it owes.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a letter to all U.N. member nations obtained Friday by The Associated Press that cash for its regular operating budget could run out by July, which could dramatically affect its operations.
“Either all member states honor their obligations to pay in full and on time — or member states must fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse,” he said.
While Guterres didn’t name any country in the letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters, the financial crisis comes as the U.S., traditionally the largest donor, has not paid its mandatory dues to the United Nations.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the United Nations has potential but has not lived up to it. His administration has withdrawn from U.N. organizations like the World Health Organization and the cultural agency UNESCO, while pulling funding from dozens of others.
The U.S. now owes $2.196 billion to the U.N.’s regular budget, including $767 million for this year and for prior years, according to U.N. officials, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The U.S. also owes $1.8 billion for the separate budget for the U.N.’s far-flung peacekeeping operations, and that also will rise.
The country second on the list for not paying dues is Venezuela, which owes $38 million, the official said. The country, whose economy was struggling before the U.S. military raid this month that deposed then-President Nicolás Maduro, has already lost its right to vote in the General Assembly for being two years in arrears.
Guterres said the U.N. ended 2025 with a record $1.568 billion in outstanding dues, more than double the amount outstanding at the end of 2024. The U.N. official said the Trump administration did not pay any dues last year.
Because so much is owed, the U.N.’s liquidity reserves nearly have been exhausted, Guterres said, and unless payments drastically improve, the U.N. will not be able to fulfill the $3.45 billion regular budget for 2026 approved unanimously in December by the assembly’s 193 members.
The secretary-general stressed another major problem that he has raised repeatedly: Under U.N. financial rules, the organization is required to pay back unspent money from the regular budget to member states — even if it hasn’t received that money in payments. He urged U.N. member nations to change the requirement immediately.
“I cannot overstate the urgency of the situation we now face,” he said. “We cannot execute budgets with uncollected funds, nor return funds we never received.”
The U.S. mission to the U.N. didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
“Dismantle the United Nations” by Melanie Phillips
“After the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Galant—on the basis of malevolent falsehoods and serial abuses of its own processes—people said in outrage that it was high time the ICC was defunded and dismantled.
After the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) was found to be working hand in glove with Hamas, with UNRWA teachers and other workers moonlighting as Hamas terrorists and with virtually every UNWRA school or hospital doubling up as a weapons dump or terrorist hub, people said it was high time that UNWRA was defunded and dismantled.
After the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July falsely accused Israel of illegally occupying the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria—having previously given serious consideration last February to a grotesque claim that Israel was committing genocide by defending itself against genocide—people said the ICJ was a travesty of a court that systematically misused the law to delegitimize and destroy Israel.
When are people going to join the dots? It’s not just these bodies that have been corrupted and need to be dismantled. It’s the whole panoply of international law and “human rights” that’s become an onslaught against truth and justice and has knocked the entire world off its moral compass.
At the very center of this vortex of moral corruption is the United Nations.
Set up after World War II as the global custodian of peace and justice, it has systematically betrayed that core aim by its obsessional malice against Israel. It has singled out the only democracy in the Middle East for wildly disproportionate and wholly unfounded denunciation as the world’s worst abuser of human rights while ignoring or downplaying the terrible and all-too-real abuses by tyrannical member states.
The appalling accusation of genocide hurled at Israel throughout the West ever since the Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel has its roots in the United Nations, the parent body of the ICJ. Accusations against Israel of genocide, apartheid and crimes against humanity bounce around it, the ICJ, the ICC and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. They feed these claims into each other’s reports, and then repeat and recycle them to create an infernal echo chamber of Israel demonization.
The claim of genocide is of course as ludicrous as it is grotesque. Genocide is the intentional annihilation of a people. That’s precisely what Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah openly and repeatedly declare is their aim in the planned eradication of Israel and the killing of every Jew.
In defending itself against this mass slaughter, Israel has gone to unprecedented lengths to protect Gazan civilians by repeatedly moving them en masse out of harm’s way, allowing in thousands of tons of humanitarian aid and enabling the Gazan population actually to increase over the course of the war by more than 2%.
Despite these demonstrable facts, the United Nations has made feverish attempts to accuse Israel of the crimes being committed against the Jewish state.
On Nov. 8, the U.N. Human Rights Office published a report that accused Israel of grave violations of international law from November 2023 to April 2024—when Israel was being targeted by thousands of attacks committed by Hamas and Hezbollah, every one of them a war crime.
The U.N. report repeated the blood libel that Israeli forces had caused unprecedented levels of killings, death, injury, starvation and disease; and referencing the ICJ’s ruling, demanded that Israel fully and immediately protect against and punish acts of genocide. Which it has clearly never committed.
On Nov. 14, the U.N. Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices (whose very title demonstrates a positively paranoid level of prejudice) announced that it had found “serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws” and “the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank.”
The United Nations hammers home the message that Israel’s just war of defense against genocide is genocide, thus demonizing Israel while giving true genocidists a free pass.
More than that, it actually elevates and honors them: Iran, the terrorist rogue state that’s flouting the nonproliferation treaty in its race to develop nuclear weapons, is preposterously chairing the U.N. Conference on Disarmament.
And as The Wall Street Journal reported this week, the U.N. official who tried to fight the world body’s Orwellian hijack of the term “genocide” has now been forced out.
The United Nations has refused to renew the contract of Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the Kenyan special adviser on the prevention of genocide, because she has firmly maintained that Israel’s war with Hamas is not genocide. She gave the world body a lesson in what genocide actually is. That was most definitely not what it wanted to hear.
The United Nations is consumed by efforts to delegitimize Israel for no other reason than wanting the Jewish state to disappear because so many member states want it to do so. To service this vast apparatus of demonization, it has employed legions of Israel-bashers and Jew-haters.
Its three-member commission of inquiry into Israel’s presumed crimes, which was set up uniquely to exist in perpetuity, is headed by Navi Pillay who had previously called for sanctions against “apartheid Israel.” The second commissioner, Miloon Kothari, had ranted about “the Jewish lobby.” The third, Chris Sidoti, had sneered that “accusations of antisemitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding.”
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has repeatedly accused Israel of committing crimes of which it is not only innocent but have been committed against Israel by Hamas. These include hostage-taking, using civilians as human shields and sexual assault.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” has repeatedly equated Palestinian suffering with the Holocaust, falsely accused Israel of war crimes and genocide, and in 2019 wrote that America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Last year, she told Hamas: “You have a right to resist.”
Albanese has been condemned by France and Germany for antisemitism. The U.S. State Department has said it “firmly concludes that she is unfit for her role or any role in the United Nations … we will continue to stand against antisemitism.”
Except, of course, they don’t. Standing against antisemitism means dismantling the United Nations. Instead, they carry on funding and dealing with it as if its malice against Israel doesn’t exist. The nations of the so-called civilized world behave as if the world body really does what it says on the tin.
The United Nations was created after World War II to bring the world together to promote peace and justice. Yet most countries aren’t democracies and don’t uphold human rights. It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that the world body does not uphold peace and justice but promotes the precise opposite.
Its institutionalized malice against Israel has spread evil far more widely than in the Middle East.
The lies and distortions about Israel regurgitated by the United Nations and its satellite institutions and NGOs, along with the courts dispensing international “human rights” law, are treated as unchallengeable truths by the West because this whole “humanitarian” infrastructure is treated as a veritable religion of peace and justice.
In fact, it’s an unstoppable geyser of moral and intellectual corruption. In teaching the West that lies about Israel are truths and truths are lies, it has turned what the West tells itself is morality and conscience into an agenda of evil.
This has ensured that the West can no longer distinguish more generally between victim and oppressor, reality and propaganda, right and wrong.
The United Nations should be dismantled. It’s the pivot of the apparatus that has twisted the Western mind. Treating it and international law as the moral arbiters of the global order is not just a sick joke. It has made the world sick, too.” Melanie Phillips