On September 22, 2026, United States President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly with a familiar message that has become all too repetitive: multilateralism is dead, America is great, international institutions are of little consequence, and the world must come to the understanding that it would benefit by accepting his and American leadership in all matters. His speech was full of the usual bluster and rhetoric that the public has become accustomed to, and bored with, over the years; Trump’s threats and mis-statements – better described as lies – and grotesque exaggerations were evident in his various claims of success. History shows us a vastly different record of his achievements. One year ago, from the same rostrum at the UN headquarters in New York, and hankering for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump professed utmost confidence in his ability to lead the globe into a new era of peace. He left his audience in little doubt that he believed he could influence the leaders of the world’s nations to hearken to his will and advice. One year later, in 2026, the Russia-Ukraine war is close to entering its fifth year. Israel’s depredations and abuses of human rights in Gaza remain unresolved, the illegal settlements on the West Bank continue to multiply, and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon has almost reached the gates of Beirut. Instigated by Israel, the habitual perpetrators of aggression, expansion and genocide, Trump has led the US into a costly unprovoked war with Iran that has severely damaged his political standing domestically and eroded his popularity even within his Republican Party, with likely damaging consequences for the mid-term elections in the US in early November. Several of America’s closest allies are now looking to build new alliance networks and defence capability, and diversify their economic relationships to hedge against Washington’s unreliability.The gap between rhetoric and reality was particularly stark on Iran. In his General Assembly address, Trump said he would menace Iran with annihilation if it did not choose to settle its differences with the US peacefully. But at the very same time, beyond public and media gaze, the US and Iranian delegates were closeted for hours in discussing how to end this war initiated by the US and Israel. This very combination of events revealed something of fundamental consequence; something that was obscured or belittled in Trump’s address; that even a self-deluded ‘all-powerful president’, profoundly antagonistic to multilateralism, could yet fall back on diplomacy and use the forum of the United Nations to provide cover for bilateral engagement.Despite the UN’s many undoubted shortcomings, there is unfortunately yet no other forum where each one of the 193 member nations in that body is represented at the same time, and each one has an equal vote. The UN headquarters therefore creates opportunities for conversations that might otherwise be politically or logistically difficult, if not impossible. This facility available to member countries has always been one of its most unheralded, but possibly most important functions. And for this and other reasons, irrespective of repeated assumptions of its imminent demise, the only world-wide organisation is still surviving. The funding battleThe UN began this year’s annual General Assembly cycle facing one of the worst financial crises in its history of periodic financial distress. The US government under Trump has sharply reduced its voluntary funding to various aspects of the UN organisation and furthermore, delayed its mandatory payments. However, just prior to the General Assembly debate, where leaders make their annual statements after arriving in New York, the US paid $725 million toward its regular UN dues and another $102 million for peacekeeping. Washington still certainly continues to owe billions to the UN, but this payment, obligatory for member states, ensures that Washington will retain its vote in the General Assembly until the next cycle comes around. This can hardly be construed as a ringing endorsement of the UN, yet it was also not its absolute abandonment that some sceptics had feared with Trump’s second return to the White House.And, so a financially beleaguered UN continues to hobble along by cutting costs, eliminating positions, and trying internal reforms through agency consolidations and reduction in priorities. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that the Trump administration appears to have decided that allowing the organisation to collapse is not in the US interest right now. Nowhere was this paradox more apparent than recently on artificial intelligence.Super intelligenceTrump used his speech at the UN General Assembly to reject artificial intelligence (AI) safety concerns and dismiss international efforts to establish ‘guardrails’, dismissing them as a “globalist scheme” to control the technology. This was despite appeals from both Republicans and Democrats, as well as AI industry officials, for more international collaboration on AI. Absurdly, Trump stated without elaboration or clarifications that rebranding the technology as “Super Intelligence” would solve the problem. Yet, elsewhere something quite different was happening. Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre launched an international appeal to try to ensure that frontier AI models remain under “human direction, oversight and control,” and leaders from 20 countries have joined this initiative. And then, just one day after Trump’s speech, many of America’s leading AI executives went before the UN Security Council to jointly call for combined and concerted joint action. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that international standards were necessary: “If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei echoed the call for “common global standards for testing AI models for loss of control risks and misuse risks,” saying that “no leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone.” In sum, leaders of the American AI industry sat in the UN’s paramount body, the Security Council, and argued that governments needed to cooperate to keep the technology under human control. There is also a relevant bilateral dimension of AI to the US-China relationship, the US’s pre-eminent, if not the only, competitor, today. China appears anxious to place any international governance mechanism for AI under the UN’s control, and certainly not the US’s.The Security Council meeting on AI produced no resolution or binding agreement, but that eludes the basic point that while the United Nations may have no answer on how to govern artificial intelligence. It nevertheless demonstrates why the UN remains relevant to global discourse. The organisation has hardly ever been able to oblige the great powers to act on matters they fundamentally oppose, but it can still perform the critical function of helping governments to identify common problems, develop shared norms, and build coalitions even before political consensus fully exists. That process was in evidence in 2024, when the US led the first-ever UN resolution establishing norms on artificial intelligence. Getting every UN member, including China and Russia, to agree on basic principles for governing AI was a landmark achievement, especially given the broader geopolitical disagreements such as on Ukraine and Gaza. Two years and more later, the technology has advanced enormously, the risks are clearer, and the politics ever more inflexible. Countries of the world, as well as American tech companies, are still coming to New York to figure out what comes next.Although now the United Nations is weaker, poorer and more politically divided than ever, recent events at the UN headquarters in New York suggest that reports of its demise are premature – at least for one more year.Krishnan Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary.