If the U.S. Defunds UN Peacekeeping, Then Get Ready for More War
Trump is taking aim at a pillar of global security
I removed the paywall from this piece because this is a story not well covered by my media colleagues and ought to be shared widely.
One of the most effective tools for global stability is suddenly on the chopping block.
The Washington Post obtained an eye-popping memo crafted by senior Trump administration officials outlining a plan to slash State Department spending by about 50%. The memo includes massive cuts across the board — funding for the National Endowment for Democracy would end, and dozens of diplomatic outposts would be shuttered.
But one proposed cut stands out for its potential to destabilize the international system: a complete elimination of U.S. contributions to UN Peacekeeping. The line item reduces American support from $1.2 billion to zero.
We don’t yet know if these cuts will make it into the final version of the White House budget request. And we don’t know if Congress would be willing to go along with such a sweeping denuding of American diplomacy. But as a journalist who has covered the UN for nearly 20 years, I can tell you exactly what would happen if the United States suddenly and completely ends its support for UN Peacekeeping:
The fallout would be immediate. Dangerous. And global.
How UN Peacekeeping Works
UN Peacekeeping is not included in the UN Charter. Rather, the modern idea of armed but neutral peacekeepers was born during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Israel, Britain, and France invaded Egypt after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. A Canadian diplomat named Lester Pearson recognized that the conflict risked escalating into a broader war — especially with Cold War tensions flaring. So, he proposed the bold idea of sending neutral, international troops to the Sinai Peninsula to separate the warring parties and facilitate a peaceful withdrawal. The contingent was known as the United Nations Emergency Force — the first armed UN peacekeeping mission.
Over the decades, the contours of individual UN peacekeeping missions have varied, but the general idea — deploying international troops as neutral monitors to uphold a peace agreement or ceasefire rather than to fight a war — gained traction. Armed groups that sign a peace agreement often need time and space for the agreement to take hold. This sometimes means physically separating armies with neutral peacekeepers; other times, it means peacekeepers help disarm fighters and perform other critical tasks necessary to implement peace.
The track record of UN peacekeeping is strong. To be sure, there have been failures — particularly in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s. But over the last 25 years, UN peacekeeping has played an outsized role in sustaining peace.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in West Africa — particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire. In the early 2000s, these countries were ravaged by brutal civil wars. The peace agreements that ended these conflicts were backed by sizeable UN peacekeeping missions — tens of thousands of Blue Helmets — that provided the security required for the political transformation of each of these countries into the multiparty democracies they are today. Peacekeeping worked so well in West Africa that there are no peacekeepers there today. They worked themselves out of a job. The Sierra Leone mission ended in 2005, the Côte d’Ivoire mission in 2017, and the Liberia mission concluded in 2018.
Today, more than 68,424 personnel serve in eleven peacekeeping missions led by the UN’s Department of Peace Operations. Of those, only 22 are Americans, and relatively few come from other Western countries. Instead, the bulk of UN peacekeepers come from a relatively small number of countries with a proud tradition of troop contributions, including Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Rwanda. This reflects an unspoken arrangement that has emerged over the last quarter century: developing countries provide the boots on the ground, while wealthier countries provide the bulk of the funding to deploy and sustain these missions.
And here, it’s important to note that the peacekeeping budget is quite small — just $5.6 billion this year. Compared to the cost of deploying conventional militaries, that figure is minimal. The United States has historically been the largest single contributor to UN peacekeeping and, by agreement, covers about 27% of the cost of each mission. China contributes about 19%, followed by Japan (8%) and Germany (6%). The rest of the world picks up the remaining tab.
That arrangement is now at risk of falling apart — and with it, the ability of UN peacekeeping to enforce peace agreements and prevent festering conflicts from spiraling out of control.
These eleven missions vary widely in scope and function. In South Sudan, for example, UN peacekeepers have provided protection to hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled to UN bases amid civil war. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, peacekeepers are in near-daily conflict with a rebel group ravaging the eastern part of the country. In Lebanon, peacekeepers help uphold a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
There are also several older missions — often called “legacy” missions — that monitor frozen conflicts to prevent them from reigniting. In Cyprus, for example, a peacekeeping mission has been in place since 1964 to prevent Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots from resuming civil war. About 1,000 personnel are deployed to that mission, and their job is largely to make sure very local disputes don’t spiral into wider conflict. (And it’s worked. Even without a political settlement, this small deployment has kept the peace — and prevented the chaos and, frankly, the diplomatic headache that would come with two NATO members fighting each other.)
Chaos Will Ensue
But now, each of these missions is under dire threat. They simply cannot function with a major reduction in funding caused by the elimination of U.S. contributions. The consequences of peacekeepers being unable to do their jobs are easy to imagine. In the DRC, for example, Rwanda-backed M23 rebels could advance on Kinshasa and topple the government, triggering a major regional war in a country the world depends on for critical minerals used in our electronics. South Sudan is already on the brink of another full-scale war, fueled by capricious leaders stoking ethnic tensions — where will civilians facing slaughter flee if peacekeeping bases disappear? In Lebanon, the risk of renewed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah — and the regional escalation that could follow — would grow dangerously high.
The point is: a world without UN peacekeeping is a more chaotic and dangerous place. Though it often flies under the radar in the West, UN peacekeeping has become a pillar of international peace and security. The Trump administration’s move to withdraw U.S. support effectively removes a key source of stability. This will directly affect the people living in places where peacekeepers deploy, who can expect even more hardship and deprivation. But it will also profoundly impact global security. Long-festering conflicts may escalate. Long-frozen conflicts may thaw into violent eruptions. If these cuts to peacekeeping are enacted, there will be, in short, more war and less peace.
Considering the myriad global challenges facing world leaders right now — from a trade war with China, to hot conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, to escalating humanitarian crises — the relatively modest American financial contribution to UN peacekeeping is certainly worth the return. These missions are often the last thing standing between a tenuous peace and open war. Slashing funding won’t just create chaos in faraway places; it will boomerang back in the form of instability, displacement, and crises the world is ill-prepared to manage in this particularly crisis-addled moment.
UN Peacekeeping doesn’t often make headlines — but it will when it’s gone. And if these cuts are enacted, that day will come fast.
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