Hafed Al-Ghwell

The UN enters its 81st year expecting to be viewed as a beacon of global governance — but is more like a patient in intensive care. The prognosis, derived from internal assessments and financial autopsies, is dire.

A 30 percent reduction in system-wide funding, forced by the withdrawal of its largest donor, has triggered a cascade of institutional failure. The Secretariat is on the brink of insolvency, with simulations indicating an inability to meet payroll by the end of this year. What is dismissed as mere budget shortfalls is in fact systemic cardiac arrest.

In response, the UN80 reforms initiative, touted as a rejuvenation of the institution, is nothing more than capitulation — managed decline disguised as transformation. The highly anticipated mandate review revealed a body suffocating under the weight of its own history: more than 40,000 resolutions that remain technically active, 86 percent of which lack sunset clauses or termination mechanisms, creating a paralyzing inheritance of 4,000 active directives. It is no longer a system that evolves with global needs but a collapsing museum of outdated intentions.

The organization’s fundamental dysfunction is rooted in a pathological refusal to confront its own structural decay, which is epitomized by the Mandate Implementation Review, an 18-month exercise that conspicuously failed to establish any tangible connection between the flood of directives and the financial means required to implement them. This omission amounts to an institutional admission of surrender, confirming a system content to operate in a state of deliberate fiction.

The scale of this delusion can be easily quantified by the 15 percent of new mandates that are adopted without any dedicated funding and explicitly demand execution “within existing resources.” Such phrasing has become the mantra of........

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