An obituary for the United Nations is bound to be premature. The U.N. may never actually die, if only because it is worth more alive than dead to its most powerful members—or rather, member. A case in point: Last November, Donald Trump, who has heaped more contempt on the U.N. than any other U.S. president since its founding, sought the blessing of the Security Council for his personal bid to end the Israel-Hamas war. The council agreed to his Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, 13 votes to none. (China and Russia abstained.) Trump can now claim—and apparently wished to claim—that his Board of Peace, which will direct this ill-fated plan, enjoys U.N. legitimacy even though no other permanent member of the Security Council has agreed to join it.

But just how alive does that make the U.N. and its chief diplomatic instrument today? The Security Council agreed to remove itself from a grave Middle East conflict in favor of a privatized body concocted by a world leader who regularly makes a mockery of the U.N. guiding principles. The plan to which it gave its imprimatur offers no role to Palestinian bodies and no long-term solution Palestinians can accept. It does, however, provide many veto points to Israel, whose actions in Gaza, according to an independent U.N. inquiry, constitute genocide. Only the United States and Israel regarded the plan’s terms as just. Why, then, the vote? Because there was no better choice. As one intensely critical report on the decision noted, “Trump’s plan constituted the only available mechanism for ending the suffering and stabilizing the situation on the ground.”

An obituary for the United Nationsis bound to be premature. The U.N. may never actually die, if only because it is worth more alive than dead to its most powerful members—or rather, member. A case in point: Last November, Donald Trump, who has heaped more contempt on the U.N. than any other U.S. president since its founding, sought the blessing of the Security Council for his personal bid to end the Israel-Hamas war. The council agreed to his Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, 13 votes to none. (China and Russia abstained.) Trump can now claim—and apparently wished to claim—that his Board of Peace, which will direct this ill-fated plan, enjoys U.N. legitimacy even though no other permanent member of the Security Council has agreed to join it.

But just how alive does that make the U.N. and its chief diplomatic instrument today? The Security Council agreed to remove itself from a grave Middle East conflict in favor of a privatized body concocted by a world leader who regularly makes a mockery of the U.N. guiding principles. The plan to which it gave its imprimatur offers no role to Palestinian bodies and no long-term solution Palestinians can accept. It does, however, provide many veto points to Israel, whose actions in Gaza, according to an independent U.N. inquiry, constitute genocide. Only the United States and Israel regarded the plan’s terms as just. Why, then, the vote? Because there was no better choice. As one intensely critical report on the decision noted, “Trump’s plan constituted the only available mechanism for ending the suffering and stabilizing the situation on the ground.”

That was a new low. But the U.N. has been bumping downhill for a long time now. When I went looking for articles commemorating the organization’s 80th anniversary last year, I was struck by how few I found. The U.N. no longer qualifies as newsworthy. The New York Times did run a story. Its headline read: “U.N. Gathers Amid Its 80th Anniversary and a ‘Free Fall.’” The author noted that the organization had been helpless to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine or Israel’s in Gaza—though, to be fair, the U.N. has rarely been able to end wars involving great powers.

What was new was that Trump had brought the world body’s work on climate change to a standstill and devastated its humanitarian efforts through budget cuts. And then he beat up on the U.N. some more. Addressing the General Assembly in September, Trump complained that the U.N. brought nothing save “empty words” to global conflicts, leaving the hard work of peacemaking to him, Donald Trump.

The U.N. is not just the Security Council, of course. It is a norm-setting body that establishes rules around issues of human rights, common goods such as space and the seabed, and global problems such as climate and disease. It sends peacekeepers and political officers to hot spots around the world. Many poor nations depend on the U.N. bodies that offer humanitarian assistance and development aid. Yet in these functions, too, the U.N. cannot function without the funding and the active engagement of the big members, above all the United States. Only rarely over the last eight decades has it enjoyed that support, since the great powers have often been at odds with one another. The attitude of the United States isn’t the only variable; it is, however, the biggest one.

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In his book Mixed Messages, international relations scholar Edward Luck wrote that the United States had been profoundly ambivalent about global organizations from the first debates over the League of Nations. If the United States was, as virtually all of its statesmen believed, an “exceptional nation,” global bodies offered the means to internationalize its domestic values and thus produce a global order in its own liberal image. Yet how could such a nation bind itself to the will of lesser, self-aggrandizing states? And why should a great power protected by two oceans limit its freedom of action by submitting to that will?

Joining the League of Nations, said U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, its most relentless adversary, “would only cripple us in the good work we seek to do.” The body went down to defeat; the U.N. won Senate approval only after a second, and even more catastrophic, war had demonstrated that the United States could not stand apart from the world. But fears over loss of sovereignty, and over foreign entanglements, only went underground.

The U.N. had been constructed on the hope, barely plausible even in 1945, that the world’s great powers would act out of shared interest in preserving peace and stability. The organization was to enforce the international will through its own military, raised from members, and to lead a global campaign of disarmament. But the Cold War paralyzed the Security Council almost from birth. The founding vision lived on only through strange vestiges. One of the legends of Turtle Bay—perhaps it’s even true—is that the military attachés of the permanent members, as remnants of that dream, ritually convene every month and then immediately adjourn and go off to lunch.

Yet even though for its first 40-odd years the U.N. couldn’t do very much, it nevertheless occupied a cherished place in the liberal American imagination. The big newspapers assigned their best reporters to the beat. The secretary-general was a prize get at the showiest New York parties. What mattered most about the U.N. was that it was there, the beating heart of the liberal order in New York City, the beating heart of the world. Somehow, scholar John Ruggie wrote, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower had built a “conceptual bridge” between American exceptionalism and the idea of a global order.

The U.N. was that bridge. Even Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, both vexed by a U.N. dominated by the voices of the “emerging world,” cared enough about defending the U.S. reputation there that they appointed leading intellectual figures—Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, respectively—to do so.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed with shocking speed. Suddenly, both China and Russia wanted access to Western capital, know-how, and goodies. The impediments to Security Council action vanished. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, violating Article 2 of the U.N. Charter, which guarantees state sovereignty against external aggression, President George H.W. Bush, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., won council approval to lead a global coalition to right that wrong. Soon, with very uncharacteristic euphoria, Bush was prophesying the rise of a “new world order” with the U.N. at its very heart.

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Everything seemed possible in that new dawn. The Security Council authorized ambitious state-building missions in Cambodia, Haiti, and Timor-Leste. Peacekeeping expanded dramatically, in scale and scope, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. The world looked to the U.N. to “deliver us from evil,” to quote the title of William Shawcross’s 2000 book on the institution. But that was too much to ask; the U.N. had neither the military force nor the political standing its new role required. Peacekeepers proved helpless to stop a genocide in Rwanda and mass killings in Bosnia. Technocrats and rule-of-law experts couldn’t put Haiti back together again. It was precisely because so much was expected of the organization that its failures seemed so damning.

This was the moment—glamorous, melodramatic, pregnant with great hopes and great fear—when I showed up to the Secretariat Building. In early 1998, I was assigned to follow Secretary-General Kofi Annan to Iraq as he tried to persuade Saddam to give U.N. inspectors access to suspected weapons sites. The Clinton administration had asked him not to go; President Bill Clinton was prepared to bomb Iraq into submission. But so many—heads of state, religious leaders, New York socialites—implored Annan to do so. I described at the time the “moral romance” of this soft-spoken, solitary man of peace confronting the Iraqi lion in his den. Annan emerged victorious—“the most dramatic achievement by a Secretary General since the era of Dag Hammarskjold,” I wrote in the New York Times in March 1998. Then Annan returned to the United States to hear himself denounced as an appeaser by Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

The Annan era was a time of nonstop crisis for the U.N.—which is to say, an era when the U.N. still mattered very much. Liberal idealists looked to the world body to deliver us from evil, while right-wing cranks, some in the U.S. Congress, imagined a secret army of globalists plotting world domination from their black helicopters. The crackpots, as always, were more intensely mobilized than the liberals, and soon it was open season on the U.N. in Congress. In 2000, I watched U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke cajole and seduce hard-liners to pay back dues of $1 billion. The General Assembly was threatening to revoke the U.S. vote. The prospect of that humiliation moved very few of them; what finally carried the day was Holbrooke’s argument that U.N. peacekeepers kept the lid on hot spots for a low price and zero U.S. casualties.

Yet even President George W. Bush and his team of bellicose unilateralists found that they couldn’t get along without the U.N. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush that he couldn’t join him in a war in Iraq without the blessing of the Security Council, Bush sought that blessing. Bush ultimately went ahead without a clear mandate, yet he turned to the U.N. again when the Iraqis refused to cooperate with their U.S. occupiers. Annan’s very reluctant acquiescence, like the council’s deference to the Board of Peace, made the U.N. seem simultaneously indispensable and ineffectual. The failure of that mission came very close to destroying Annan’s tenure.

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That era of turbulence and tragedy is a distant memory. The U.N. continues to play an important norm-setting role—for example, through the Sustainable Development Goals, first issued in 2015—but to Western publics, which tend to measure the organization by its role in the great questions of war and peace, it has visibly shrunk. The U.N. did itself no favors by choosing the colorless and painfully cautious Ban Ki-moon to replace Annan in 2007, but Ban’s successor, Guterres, the more telegenic former Portuguese prime minister, has not restored the organization’s luster. It isn’t really the secretary-general’s fault: We seem to have returned, after a century’s interval, to a world in which great powers are prepared to wage war in pursuit of national interest. Article 2 of the U.N. Charter, sacrosanct in 1990, is in danger of becoming a dead letter. Financially, of course, the place is running on fumes.

So long as Americans thought of themselves as exceptional, the U.N. remained an instrument to be both used and abused. That once appeared to be a fixed part of the cosmos; now we know it’s not. Trump believes neither in binding global rules, as the liberal idealists did, nor in the transformative effects of U.S. power, as the neoconservatives did. He simply believes in power. The U.N. Charter treats sovereign equality as a sacred principle, but in Trump’s mind, nations have only as much sovereignty as they can force others to respect. Iran, not so much; Venezuela, none. Denmark is being captious in resisting his demand for Greenland. The president wishes to uphold neither global norms nor U.S. ones.

It’s true that Trump’s vanity is flattered when the Security Council bows before the Board of Peace. He even accepts the usefulness of some peacekeeping missions; according to U.N. figures, the United States has paid $684 million for peacekeeping this year, leaving it only $2.2 billion in arrears. On the other hand, Trump admits he’s still mad that the U.N. didn’t let him do the work on its renovation 20 years ago. He seems to think that the organization should be paying him instead of the other way around. Trump has plunged the U.N. into a fiscal crisis by paying only $160 million of the United States’ assessed dues to the regular U.N. budget, for a total shortfall of more than $4 billion. He has said he wants to see “reform,” but that appears to mean reducing the U.N. to a subsidiary of the Board of Peace.

Many of the most important U.N. members do, of course, continue to care about it very much: countries in Europe as well as middle powers such as India and Brazil. China hopes to inherit from the United States the role of protector of the world order, albeit a very different order from the one Washington created. Yet none has volunteered to help make up the shortfall created by the United States; China, in fact, has delayed paying its own dues. Everyone has fiscal problems of their own, but it is also clear that the long habit of permitting Washington to take disproportionate responsibility for the world order in exchange for exercising disproportionate control over it has now created a void that no one is likely to fill.

The U.N. was built to protect and perpetuate a liberal Western order that is now fading away. Perhaps it can be repurposed for a different order in which nonliberal, undemocratic states hold far more sway. In that case, however, it would be the U.N. in name only. I feel lucky to have been present at the last moment when the organization really mattered. We shouldn’t expect that era to return.