NEW YORK – September 25, 2026 (STL.News) The United Nations was created more than 80 years ago following the devastation of World War II with an extraordinarily ambitious purpose: to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, and organize international cooperation to address economic, social, and humanitarian problems.
The language of the United Nations Charter remains striking today. Article 1 says one of the organization’s purposes is to serve as a “center for harmonizing the actions of nations.”
That may also provide the clearest description of what the United Nations still needs to become.
The world does not necessarily need another government. It does not need an institution dictating domestic policies to sovereign nations. And it does not need another bureaucracy generating reports simply because it has before.
What the world increasingly needs is a powerful, adequately financed international infrastructure for cooperation — an organization capable of connecting countries, businesses, capital, technology, medicine, science, information and human expertise on a scale no individual government or corporation can accomplish alone.
The United Nations already has much of the architecture.
It has 193 member states. It has diplomatic access worldwide. Its Resident Coordinator system convenes United Nations country teams in more than 160 countries and territories. The World Health Organization operates globally, regionally and at the country level. United Nations Trade and Development works on trade, investment and business relationships. Other UN organizations address food, refugees, children, development, humanitarian emergencies and dozens of other international issues.
The UN does not appear to have the financial and organizational capacity commensurate with what the architecture could potentially accomplish.
That may be one of the central problems confronting the United Nations today.
A surprisingly small core budget
The United Nations General Assembly approved a $3.45 billion regular budget for 2026.
That number requires context. It is not the budget of the entire UN system. Specialized agencies, humanitarian organizations, development programs and peacekeeping operations have separate budgets and financing structures.
But $3.45 billion finances the UN’s core regular-budget activities, including political affairs, international law and justice, regional development cooperation, human rights, humanitarian affairs and public information. The 2026 regular budget is also approximately 7% below the approved 2025 level.
In the context of the world economy, $3.45 billion is remarkably small.
Consider two comparisons.
Washington University in St. Louis reported an endowment market value of $13.4 billion as of June 30, 2025. Its broader Managed Endowment Pool stood at $14.5 billion.
One American university therefore has an endowment almost four times the size of the UN’s entire 2026 regular annual budget.
Walmart provides an even more dramatic perspective.
The retailer reported $187.9 billion in revenue for the quarter ended July 31, 2026.
Corporate quarterly revenue, university endowment assets and an international organization’s annual operating budget are different accounting measurements and should not be treated as financial equivalents.
But they provide useful perspective.
The institution created to help coordinate international cooperation among almost every country on Earth operates its central regular-budget organization on a financial scale that is small compared with many individual institutions in the global economy.
That raises a question worth asking:
Has the world built a global institution without capitalizing it like one?
The United Nations is already feeling the financial constraint
This is not merely theoretical.
Secretary-General António Guterres has said the organization has experienced approximately 18% vacancies, not because those positions were eliminated through a strategic determination that they were unnecessary, but because people left and the organization lacked money to replace them amid its liquidity crisis.
Funding problems extend into the UN development system.
In June, Guterres said core development funding remained below agreed targets, much of the available funding was short-term and tightly earmarked, and the Resident Coordinator system had experienced a $46 million funding shortfall in 2025. He warned that such conditions put coordinated delivery at risk.
Meanwhile, humanitarian requirements dwarf available resources.
The UN’s 2026 humanitarian effort is seeking about $23 billion to reach 87 million people facing the most severe and life-threatening needs.
Money cannot resolve every problem confronting the UN. More money cannot eliminate geopolitical rivalries, Security Council vetoes, wars, corruption, or disagreements among sovereign governments.
And simply pouring money into an inefficient structure could create a larger inefficient structure.
- But money buys capacity.
- It buys people.
- It buys technology.
- It buys information systems.
- It buys diplomatic operations.
- It buys research.
- It buys travel.
- It buys communications infrastructure.
- It enables recruitment rather than leaving important positions vacant.
And it gives an organization the capacity to initiate ambitious projects rather than continually asking what it can accomplish within a constrained annual appropriation.
The cycle the United Nations needs to escape
The United Nations may be caught in a cycle of limited resources, fragmented organization, and limited results.
- Limited resources constrain capacity.
- Fragmentation makes existing resources less effective.
- Limited capacity and fragmentation restrict results.
- Limited results weaken the argument for substantially greater resources.
- And inadequate resources perpetuate the same limitations.
- The solution is not merely more money.
- It is to reverse the cycle.
Capital creates capacity.
- Capacity allows the recruitment of exceptional people and development of better infrastructure.
- Better people and infrastructure improve information and relationships.
- Better information and relationships create opportunities for action.
- Successful action produces measurable results.
- Results create credibility.
- Credibility creates influence.
- Influence creates additional opportunities.
- And demonstrated results make it easier to attract additional capital.
That is how the United Nations could begin moving from a constrained international bureaucracy toward a world-class problem-solving institution.
The United Nations acknowledges fragmentation
This analysis is not based solely on outside criticism.
The UN’s own UN80 reform initiative identifies many of the organizational problems.
Its official materials cite duplication, unclear divisions of labor, proliferation of meetings and reports, misaligned funding, heavy earmarking, and weak mechanisms for reviewing mandates and measuring results.
The scale of the administrative activity is remarkable.
UN officials have reported that the Secretariat organized more than 27,000 intergovernmental meetings and produced more than 2,000 reports in 2024 alone.
Twenty-seven thousand meetings.
More than 2,000 reports.
Those figures invite a basic management question.
If an organization can hold 27,000 meetings in a year, the problem may not be that it needs more meetings.
The question is whether it is having the right meetings, with the right people, pursuing clearly defined objectives — and whether anyone is accountable for what happens afterward.
- Meetings are activities.
- Reports are activities.
- Conferences are activities.
- Resolutions are activities.
The ultimate measurement should be results.
Build the world’s international operations center
A redesigned United Nations should operate continuously as the world’s central infrastructure for international cooperation.
That does not mean world government.
National governments remain sovereign and accountable to their citizens.
It means building an organization that can understand what is happening worldwide and connect the people who can improve it.
The United Nations already has country teams. Those operations could become much more integrated centers of knowledge and relationship-building.
A senior United Nations country executive should be supported by experts who understand that country’s economy, healthcare system, agriculture, infrastructure, trade, education, natural resources, security conditions, investment environment, and development needs.
Those teams should know government officials before crises occur.
They should know business leaders.
They should know physicians, universities, scientists, entrepreneurs, and community organizations.
And information should flow continuously between country operations and a sophisticated global information system.
The principle should be simple:
Think globally. Operate locally. Connect continuously.
Build the world’s great public information infrastructure
Humanity has spent centuries accumulating knowledge.
The technological ability to organize and analyze that knowledge now exceeds anything the UN’s founders could have imagined in 1945.
The UN should aspire to become the world’s principal public repository of structured international knowledge.
Not merely another website filled with speeches, reports and press releases.
A genuine information infrastructure.
Country by country, it could organize authoritative information covering trade, agriculture, healthcare, disease, medicines, water, energy, infrastructure, education, employment, demographics, natural resources, manufacturing, transportation, ports, imports, exports, investment, humanitarian needs, treaties, conflicts and development projects.
Sensitive information would obviously require security and privacy protections. But enormous amounts of public and non-sensitive information could be standardized and made machine-readable.
Then the United Nations would not need to invent every possible application itself.
- Governments could use the data.
- Universities could use it.
- Businesses could use it.
- Researchers could use it.
- Nonprofits could use it.
- Journalists could use it.
- And artificial intelligence systems could analyze it.
Interestingly, the UN itself is beginning to move in this direction.
The UN80 initiative includes development of a UN System Data Commons intended to bring public data and statistics from across UN entities together, as well as a Technology Accelerator Platform designed to expand common technology capabilities. The UN reported in May that 26 entities had committed to the Data Commons effort.
That is an important beginning.
But the opportunity is much larger.
Use information to create relationships
Information becomes especially valuable when it creates action.
Suppose a developing country produces a crop that another country imports in enormous quantities.
- Why isn’t more trade occurring?
- Maybe transportation is inadequate.
- Maybe processing facilities are missing.
- Maybe certification requirements prevent exports.
- Maybe farmers need better irrigation.
- Maybe financing is unavailable.
- Maybe the two countries simply lack the business relationships necessary to recognize the opportunity.
A sufficiently sophisticated United Nations should be able to identify the obstacle and then ask:
Who can solve it?
- Another country may possess the agricultural technology.
- A development bank may finance the infrastructure.
- A corporation may want the product.
- An investor may finance processing facilities.
- A university may possess relevant agricultural research.
- The UN’s contribution is connecting those pieces.
- That should become one of its greatest strengths.
Become a partner for global business
The same concept applies to corporations.
Imagine an American manufacturer that sells products in the United States and two foreign countries but wants to expand.
It should be able to approach the UN system and ask:
Where else in the world does our product make economic sense?
A sophisticated international economic network could identify promising countries, regulatory obstacles, potential distributors, government development priorities, infrastructure issues, and possible business partners.
Then it could make introductions.
The concept isn’t entirely foreign to the United Nations.
United Nations Trade and Development already operates a Business Linkages Program designed to develop commercial relationships between multinational enterprises and domestic small and medium-sized businesses in developing countries. UNCTAD says such relationships can improve access to international markets, financing, technology, and specialized knowledge while helping multinational companies strengthen supply chains and reduce certain costs.
The question is why that concept should remain relatively limited.
Why couldn’t the United Nations be one of the first places a company considers when it wants to establish productive international relationships?
- That would benefit businesses.
- It would benefit developing countries.
- It could create jobs, exports, and tax revenue.
- International commerce can also create relationships among countries that extend beyond commerce itself.
- The United Nations should not merely study international trade.
- It should help create productive international relationships where appropriate.
Don’t just publish the report. Make the introduction.
Turn aid recipients into trading partners
Humanitarian assistance will always be necessary when people are starving, displaced, or caught in catastrophes.
But the ultimate measure of successful development should not be how much aid was distributed.
It should include how many people and countries eventually no longer require that aid.
A developing country may possess agricultural resources, minerals, energy potential, a young workforce, tourism assets, or manufacturing possibilities.
What prevents those assets from producing widespread prosperity?
- Perhaps it needs electricity.
- Perhaps roads.
- Perhaps water infrastructure.
- Perhaps education.
- Perhaps financing.
- Perhaps access to markets.
- Perhaps stronger public institutions.
- Perhaps political stability.
The United Nations should help identify those constraints and connect countries with the governments, companies, financial institutions, and experts capable of addressing them.
The progression should be:
Emergency assistance? stability? infrastructure? productive capacity? investment? employment? exports? stronger public revenue? Declining aid dependence.
A country that once needed assistance can eventually become a customer, supplier, investor, and trading partner.
- That benefits wealthy countries too.
- Prosperous countries need customers.
- Businesses need markets.
- Manufacturers need suppliers.
- Investors need opportunities.
Global development should not be understood simply as transferring wealth from richer countries to poorer ones.
Properly structured, it can create additional wealth.
Capital already exists
The world is not devoid of capital.
The International Monetary Fund, for example, reports lending capacity of nearly $1 trillion. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) operates independently but is part of the broader international institutional architecture and pools resources from its 191 member countries.
The World Bank, regional development banks, sovereign wealth funds, governments, corporations, foundations, institutional investors and wealthy individuals control additional enormous pools of capital.
The United Nations does not need to own all of that money.
It needs sufficient internal financial capacity to become exceptionally capable — and sufficient relationships and expertise to mobilize outside capital around worthwhile problems and opportunities.
The question should not always be:
How much money does the United Nations have?
Sometimes the better question is:
How much capital can the United Nations organize around a solution?
Build permanent financial strength
The United Nations should also examine whether its long-term financial architecture matches its ambitions.
Under Article 17 of the Charter, the General Assembly approves the UN budget and member states bear the organization’s expenses according to the apportionment established by the Assembly.
That structure does not prevent the international community from asking larger questions about permanent funds, voluntary contributions, philanthropy, corporate partnerships and other carefully governed financing mechanisms.
Universities understand the power of endowments.
Foundations understand it.
Countries maintain sovereign wealth funds.
The United Nations should consider whether substantially larger permanent pools of capital could provide more predictable financing for humanitarian response, global information infrastructure, technology and other clearly defined purposes.
A hypothetical $100 billion endowment distributing 4% annually would generate about $4 billion per year before accounting for investment performance, inflation, expenses, and the need to preserve purchasing power.
At $500 billion, the same illustrative 4% distribution would represent approximately $20 billion annually.
Those are examples, not recommendations for a specific fund size or spending policy. Designing such a structure would require rigorous governance, independent auditing, investment controls, and protections preventing donors from purchasing political influence.
But the scale should not be dismissed as unimaginable.
Washington University alone has a $13.4 billion endowment.
The IMF has nearly $1 trillion in lending capacity.
Walmart generated $187.9 billion of revenue in three months.
The world has enormous wealth.
The issue is how much of it can be responsibly organized around common international purposes.
Fundraising should become part of the mission
The United Nations should become exceptionally good at raising money.
That doesn’t mean constantly asking wealthy people to write checks to an institution.
It means presenting solvable problems.
Imagine approaching governments, corporations, foundations, and philanthropists with a proposition:
A specific problem affects millions of people.
Here is the evidence.
Here is the solution.
Here are the governments participating.
Here are the experts.
Here are the companies that can supply the technology.
Here is the development bank prepared to finance part of it.
Here is what remains unfunded.
Here are the milestones.
Here is the independent audit.
Here is how we will measure success.
That is a dramatically stronger fundraising proposition than simply asking donors to support an institution.
Successful projects also create the basis for the next fundraising campaign.
Results attract capital.
Hire extraordinary people
A larger financial base would also allow the UN to compete aggressively for talent.
An institution dealing with war, global finance, international trade, pandemics, food systems, nuclear weapons and the economic development of entire countries should be capable of attracting some of the world’s most accomplished people.
Senior positions should demand experience appropriate to the responsibility.
- Former diplomats.
- Physicians.
- Scientists.
- Engineers.
- Economists.
- Trade negotiators.
- Technology executives.
- Agricultural specialists.
- Investment professionals.
- Data scientists.
- Experienced public administrators.
- Security experts.
Younger professionals should also have important roles, particularly in rapidly developing fields such as artificial intelligence and data science. But senior positions requiring judgment, executive authority, negotiation, and relationships should be filled according to demonstrated capability.
An institution cannot become more capable than the people it recruits, the information it gives them, the authority it provides them, and the standards to which it holds them accountable.
Health demonstrates the possibilities
The World Health Organization provides another example of what a more connected UN system could accomplish.
WHO’s Constitution gives it the role of directing and coordinating international health work. WHO currently operates in more than 150 locations and works with member governments and other partners.
Imagine combining that worldwide health network with a much larger public information infrastructure.
- Disease surveillance.
- Hospital capacity.
- Medication availability.
- Research.
- Vaccination.
- Outbreak information.
- Drug resistance.
- Public-health guidance.
- Country-level health statistics.
The objective would not be to replace physicians or national health systems.
It would make reliable international health knowledge easier for everyone — governments, physicians, researchers, and the public — to access and use.
The same principle applies throughout the UN.
Collect information. Verify it. Organize it. Analyze it. Connect people. Act where appropriate. Measure the outcome.
Measure results, not activity
A redesigned UN should operate with some of the management discipline expected from a high-performing enterprise while retaining the independence, neutrality and public responsibilities of an international institution.
That means developing much stronger outcome measures.
Not:
How many meetings did we conduct?
How many reports did we publish?
How many conferences occurred?
Instead:
How many conflicts were prevented or resolved?
How many ceasefires were held?
How many diplomatic relationships improved?
How much new trade and investment did UN facilitation help create?
How many countries became less dependent on humanitarian assistance?
How quickly did the UN identify and contain emerging disease threats?
How much outside capital did UN initiatives mobilize?
How many productive international business relationships did it create?
How many refugees safely returned home?
How much measurable improvement occurred because the UN became involved?
The most demanding question should be:
What happened because the United Nations acted that probably would not have happened otherwise?
Money cannot solve the political problem
None of this eliminates the UN’s fundamental political limitations.
The organization is built around sovereign states.
Major powers have conflicting interests.
The five permanent members of the Security Council possess veto power.
Governments sometimes refuse cooperation.
Wars cannot always be mediated.
Countries cannot be forced into productive economic relationships simply because an international organization believes those relationships would be beneficial.
A $50 billion regular budget would not magically produce world peace.
A $500 billion humanitarian endowment would not eliminate poverty.
Artificial intelligence will not make national interests disappear.
Those realities matter.
But they do not answer the central question.
The question is whether the institution has developed anywhere near the financial, technological, informational, and organizational capacity necessary to maximize what is possible.
The UN itself recognizes substantial shortcomings.
Guterres has described the status quo as “untenable.” The UN80 initiative is attempting to reduce fragmentation and duplication, reconfigure country operations, improve shared services, and develop common technology and data infrastructure.
Those reforms move toward a more integrated organization.
The larger question is whether the ambition is big enough.
What would we build today?
Perhaps the most useful exercise is to forget temporarily how the United Nations operates today.
Imagine humanity were creating it from scratch in 2026.
We possess instantaneous global communications.
Satellites.
Cloud computing.
Artificial intelligence.
Enormous databases.
Modern medicine.
Global financial markets.
Multinational corporations.
Development banks.
Universities connected across continents.
More accumulated scientific and economic knowledge than any previous generation possessed.
And enormous private and public wealth.
If we were creating an organization whose purpose was to bring nations together and address problems that cross national boundaries, would we build the institution we have today?
Or would we create something far more ambitious?
Perhaps we would establish strong operations worldwide.
Perhaps we would build the largest organized repository of international public knowledge ever assembled.
Perhaps we would recruit exceptional people to analyze it.
Perhaps we would partner with leading technology companies and universities.
Perhaps we would maintain a global operations center that continuously monitors problems and opportunities.
Perhaps we would build enormous permanent humanitarian reserves.
Perhaps we would aggressively raise capital.
Perhaps we would connect corporations with developing economies.
Perhaps we would connect investors with infrastructure.
Perhaps we would connect agricultural expertise with countries suffering food shortages.
Perhaps we would connect physicians and researchers across borders.
Perhaps we would help countries identify resources and economic capabilities they have never fully developed.
Perhaps the secretary-general would be among the world’s most active relationship builders — constantly talking with presidents, prime ministers and other leaders before relationships deteriorate into crises.
Perhaps the UN would become the institution everyone calls when something important needs to happen across national borders.
The world needs a bigger idea of the UN
The United Nations does not need to become a world government.
It needs to become the world’s most capable infrastructure for international cooperation.
Its influence should not come primarily from coercive power.
It should come from usefulness.
Become so useful that governments want the UN involved.
Become so knowledgeable that researchers rely on its information.
Become so connected that companies approach it when they need international relationships.
Become so effective that philanthropists want to finance its projects.
Become so credible that governments are willing to provide greater resources.
Become so valuable that countries do not want to damage their relationship with it.
That requires money.
It requires management.
It requires exceptional people.
It requires technology.
It requires organizational reform.
And above all, it requires ambition.
The UN’s current financial and organizational constraints appear to reinforce one another:
Limited resources? Fragmented capacity? Limited results? Limited confidence? continued limited resources.
The world should consider reversing that cycle:
Capital? talent ? infrastructure? information? relationships? action? results? credibility? influence? more capital.
The United Nations was founded because governments concluded that certain problems could not safely be left to nations acting independently.
Eight decades later, that fundamental insight remains.
What has changed is humanity’s ability to act on it.
The world is wealthier.
Its technology is vastly more powerful.
Its information is deeper.
Its economies are more interconnected.
Its scientists can collaborate instantaneously.
Its businesses span continents.
Its financial institutions can mobilize enormous amounts of capital.
The infrastructure necessary to connect humanity is more powerful than the UN’s founders could possibly have imagined.
The institution created to unite nations should evolve accordingly.
The question is no longer simply what the United Nations could become.
It is what the United Nations needs to become if the world expects it to operate at the scale of the problems — and opportunities — humanity now shares.
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