UNITED NATIONS — Disband Unrwa, defund peacekeeping missions, and turn the 18-acre headquarters at Turtle Bay into condos: The United Nations could be dramatically slimmed down and made over if President Trump, wary of multilateralism and bent on “America First,” wins the presidency.

That’s what sources here at the United Nations or close to it tell the Sun, albeit facetiously when it comes to the condos. It’s unclear how much political capital Trump would dedicate to the United Nations in a second term, as he hasn’t made it a talking point on the campaign trail. Yet it is clear how the 45th president, who has threatened to pull America out of NATO, feels about the United Nations, founded in 1945 to maintain international peace and security after World War II.

“If the United Nations is to be an effective organization, it must focus on the real problems of the world,” Trump told the General Assembly in a September 2020 speech. He referenced terrorism, the oppression of women, forced labor, drug trafficking, human and sex trafficking, and religious and ethnic persecution. Back in 2016, he called the world body “a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.”

America is just one of 193 member states that are members of the world body, but as the UN’s biggest financial backer, it holds sway on what work gets done in its specialized agencies, who is promoted to its highest ranks, and where it stands in international esteem.

“I think the president would take a very close look at funding for the United Nations and any agencies that fall under the United Nations,” a spokeswoman for the Department of State under Trump, Heather Nauert, tells the Sun. “America and the world can’t assume that the United States would continue to fund the UN and other agencies at its current level.”

While president, Trump and his UN ambassadors, Nikki Haley and Kelly Craft, proposed cuts to UN financing and withheld contributions to some UN bodies. If he is re-elected, Ms. Nauert says he might turn to a zero-based budgeting program with the help of accountants and policy professionals to assess which UN programs are good investments of American tax dollars. 

“What are we, as promoters of democracy and human rights, getting out of the United Nations?” Ms. Nauert asks. “I think the answer is we’re not getting enough.” 

President Biden set a record for American funding to the UN, providing $18.1 billion to the UN system in 2022. That’s more than a third of all government revenue the United Nations received that year. The sum included $3.1 billion in assessed contributions — dues that each member state must pay — and $15 billion in voluntary contributions. Decades of American charity has created an “international entitlement mentality,” a former member of the UN’s committee on contributions, Brett Schaefer, who was appointed by the General Assembly in 2019, tells the Sun. 

Generosity does not necessarily lead to influence. The state department reported in 2022 that other countries — including some of the biggest recipients of American foreign aid — voted with America in the General Assembly on average only 41 percent of the time. On the Security Council, where America is a permanent member, alongside Communist China, France, Russia, and Britain, votes almost always go against a key American ally, Israel.

“It’s great when multilateralism works, but when it becomes a swamp and you just become one voice in a chorus and get lost, that’s a problem,” a spokesman for Mrs. Haley during her tenure at the UN, Jonathan Wachtel, tells the Sun. “The United Nations creates that environment at times.”

The spiraling situation in the Middle East following the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas threw a spotlight on this “swamp.” Amid reports that a dozen employees at a UN agency, the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, were involved in the operations of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, urged member states to continue funding it. The agency was subsequently cleared of wrongdoing in a UN-commissioned investigation that critics said was “rigged.”

Trepidation is growing at the United Nations that the world body could be pressured by a Trump administration to become friendlier toward Israel. That’s according to the president of an international crisis management firm, Eve Epstein, who worked as a consultant to Secretary-General Kofi Annan. She bases that assessment on conversations with staffers currently at the UN, who she says are also fearing for their jobs and the future of the world governing body — and whether it will even exist in its current form.

“If we should have one takeaway after October 7th, it’s that it’s time to pull our funding of the UN’s regular budget,” an official in Trump’s National Security Council, Richard Goldberg, tells the Sun. “Our contribution should be all voluntary, where we see it’s in our interest, where we see an organization not working on behalf of the CCP or Moscow or Tehran.” 

In addition to Unrwa, other specialized UN agencies that could see scrutiny under a Trump administration are the World Health Organization for its questionable practices related to the Covid pandemic; Unesco, which is subject to anti-Israel bias; and the Food and Agricultural Organization, whose Chinese director-general has been accused of using the agency to further Beijing’s foreign policy agenda.

“I think Trump would be willing to use U.S. financial leverage to secure various reforms and changes inside the organization,” the former UN contributions committee member, Mr. Schaefer, says. He adds that fears of an isolationist Trump presidency are overblown: “We know what Trump will do. It will be very targeted, it’ll be selective and it’ll be aimed at doing specific objectives.”

It’s likely America would withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council as it did under the leadership of Ms. Haley in 2018. She and Secretary Pompeo argued that the council, whose 47 member states included countries with poor human rights records and a shared anti-Israel bias, needed to be reformed to fulfill its mission. America rejoined the council under the Biden administration, and Trump could pull back from it again and potentially replace it with a new structure outside the UN system.

The outcome of the American election could also affect the race for the next secretary-general to replace Mr. Guterres after two terms in power. Trump would likely support a candidate who is less critical of Israel — the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has repeatedly urged Mr. Guterres to resign — and whose values align with a Republican administration.

Mr. Guterres led Portugal’s socialist party for a decade. Ms. Epstein argues that “if Trump wins, you need somebody who can work with him so that the US doesn’t take all its funding away.” The selection process for the next secretary-general begins in 2026. 

Asked about how a victory by Trump might affect the UN, the spokesman for the secretary-general, Stephane Dujarric, tells the Sun, “U.S. participation and engagement is critical to the work of the United Nations. We always work cooperatively and constructively with U.S. administrations.”

The kinds of reforms a Trump administration would pursue depends, of course, on whom the president would appoint as his envoy to the world body. If he chooses a firebrand like his former ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell, a MAGA enthusiast who’s already courting right-wing populists overseas, more dramatic reforms might take place. As President Reagan’s director of personnel, Scott Faulkner, once said, “Personnel is policy.”

Rather than aggressively reform the UN, a Trump administration might instead seek to manage it via an envoy he trusts, as he did during his first term. “He sees the UN, I think, as an opportunity to advance US policies through his ambassador,” Ms. Haley’s chief of staff at the American mission to the UN, Steven Groves, tells the Sun. “The UN is just one more forum to protect and advance US national security and foreign policy.”

Yet as war threatens to engulf three theaters — Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia — how effective is that forum? According to the “America First” agenda, the United Nations is an obstacle, not a conduit, to solving global challenges. Trump and his allies seem willing to sidestep the institution and rely on the state department to pursue its foreign policy plans, where they might advance more expediently, unencumbered by opposition from adversarial nations.

Getting business done at the UN, Mr. Wachtel says, is a bit like swimming with sharks: “You put on your swimsuit and jump into the Security Council and you’re swimming with the bad boys and try to do what you can. And at one point you’re like, what am I doing in this pool?” For the former president, the answer might be: Get out.