There is a growing sense that the UN is facing a legitimacy crisis due to a loss of trust. Reflecting this concern, UN member states committed to “rebuild trust in global institutions” in the Pact for the Future that they unanimously adopted in September 2024. Since then, the multilateral system has plunged even deeper into crisis, largely due to draconian funding cuts from the second administration of Donald Trump. At a Security Council meeting in February, member states referred to the “crisis of confidence in the UN,” a “palpable loss of trust,” “ruinous mistrust,” and an “unprecedented crisis of credibility.”

But what does “trust in global institutions” mean? It is often used to refer to the trust of member-state governments in the multilateral institutions they belong to. World leaders have increasingly criticized the UN, especially the Security Council with its outdated structure and growing dysfunction. Long-standing criticism from far-right leaders has also reached an apotheosis under the second Trump administration, which has put the UN squarely in its crosshairs.

Yet “trust in global institutions” can also refer to the trust of the general public. Public perceptions of the UN are hard to assess. There are only a handful of multi-country surveys that have asked about public perceptions of the UN across multiple years (see here for an overview of recent surveys). All of these underrepresent countries in the Global South, and only two of them have data from within the past year. These surveys variably ask about trust in the UN, confidence in the UN, and favorable views of the UN, each of which can be interpreted differently. It’s also hard to reliably poll about something most people don’t understand or feel strongly about—in one 2020 global survey, over half of respondents said they didn’t know much about the UN and saw it as remote from their lives.

Nonetheless, the survey data we have can provide some insight into what the global public thinks about the UN. This can help us understand whether the crisis of trust is primarily among political leaders or also the broader public.

Recent Trends in Public Perceptions of the UN

Until recently, trust in the UN had held fairly steady over the past several decades, as detailed in a previous Global Observatory article in February 2023. While trust had gradually eroded over the course of several decades, there was little evidence of a major, widespread drop in trust in the UN despite major crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, confidence in the UN was fairly tepid overall and quite low in some parts of the world, especially the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.

This graph displays average favorability toward the UN across 11 countries from the Pew survey and average trust across 27 countries from the Edelman survey. Edelman reports data from each fall in the following year (e.g., the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer reflects data collected in Fall 2024). Click here for the full graphic>>

In the two years since then, public opinion of the UN has more clearly deteriorated. In the Edelman Trust Barometer, 23 out of 27 countries registered a drop in trust in the UN between fall 2021 and fall 2024, with the biggest drops in 2022 and 2023 (about 2 and 3 percentage points respectively) followed by a leveling off in 2024.Similarly, in the annual Pew survey, the UN’s favorability declined in 12 out of 14 countries between spring 2021 and spring 2024, with average favorability across all countries surveyed in both years falling from 65.2% to 59.7%. Most of this decline happened between 2023 and 2024. (It’s worth bearing in mind that these surveys were conducted before Trump’s second inauguration.)

While the overall trajectories of the Edelman and Pew surveys have largely aligned, they do not align for all individual countries. For example, in the Pew survey, since 2021, the largest decreases (all over ten percentage points) happened in Spain, Italy, Germany, and France. Edelman, by contrast, registered smaller drops in Italy and Germany, little change in France, and a slight increase in Spain. Caution is therefore warranted when interpreting the results for individual countries.

It’s also important to keep these numbers in perspective. Despite the recent decline, public perceptions of the UN remain largely positive in most countries surveyed. For example, in the Edelman Trust Barometer, a majority of respondents across all countries surveyed in 2024 (58%) expressed trust in the UN. In only 3 out of 28 countries was trust below 50%, while trust was higher than 70% in 6 countries. Similarly, the average favorability of the UN across the countries surveyed by Pew is 57%. The UN’s favorability was less than 50% in 8 out of 35 countries and higher than 70% in 7 countries.

Moreover, the current level of mistrust in the UN is not historically unprecedented. In the Edelman survey, the recent drop in trust had been preceded by several years of growing trust; this means that trust in the UN is back to around what it had been in 2018. In the Pew survey, the UN’s favorability is low by historical standards but only slightly lower than in 2013.

Yet even if perceptions of the UN remain largely positive, there are signs that the public is not happy with the current state of international cooperation. A 2023 Stimson Center survey of 12 countries (the G7 and the original BRICS) found that only 39% of respondents thought the world was doing well on global cooperation, while 49% thought it was doing poorly.

Why Has Trust in the UN Fallen?

Even if the overall decrease in support for the UN has been relatively small, it still begs the question of why trust has fallen in the past few years. While definitively answering this question would require more detailed research, it’s worth reflecting on a few possible factors that could explain the drop in support, at least in certain countries.

First, trust could have declined because of specific international events, though this is difficult to know with certainty. For example, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on perceptions of the UN was mixed. More recently, the war in Gaza may have had an impact. At the very least, it has almost certainly decreased trust in the UN in both Israel and Palestine. Even before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the UN’s favorability was lower in Israel than in any other country surveyed, and it plunged a further 10 percentage points after the attack. This can likely be attributed to Israelis’ deepening perception that the UN is biased against their country—a perception exacerbated by the Israeli government’s aggressive actions, rhetoric, and disinformation campaigns against the UN. At the same time, many Palestinians have felt abandoned by the UN. Polls conducted in 2024 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that only around 13% of Palestinians were satisfied with the UN’s performance in the current war, though satisfaction was considerably higher in Gaza (24%) than in the West Bank (5%).

The war in Gaza may also have contributed to declining trust in the UN in other countries. Both Edelman and Pew found an overall drop in trust between their surveys taken before and after the start of the war in Gaza. Looking at specific countries, the 2023 Edelman survey (conducted about a month after the October 7th attacks) registered the sharpest drops in trust in the UN in Ireland, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia—all countries where the public is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Ultimately, however, attributing this to the war in Gaza is speculative, especially as the decline in trust was already underway beforehand.

Second, decreased trust in the UN could be a result of broader trends that are decreasing trust in all institutions. Historically, trust in the UN has been correlated with trust in national institutions. This could explain some of the wide regional variation in trust in the UN. People in Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa have relatively high levels of trust not only in the UN but also in national institutions; people in Latin America and the Middle East have relatively low trust in both the UN and national institutions.

It follows that a broader decline in institutional trust would likely also erode trust in the UN. Indeed, as trust in governments and parliaments fell significantly between 1999 and 2022, trust in the UN also fell, though more gradually. The UN’s 2025 World Social Report attributes this broad decline in institutional trust both to long-term factors such as growing insecurity and inequality and to events like the 2008 financial and economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, between 2019 and 2024, the percentage of people who rated their government as competent and ethical fell by more than 10 percentage points, according to Edelman, and the percentage who fear that government officials lie to them rose by a similar margin. Such a broad shift in attitudes toward political leaders is unlikely to be confined to the national level. At the same time, the general erosion of institutional trust seems to affect other institutions more than the UN, as the UN remains more trusted than national governments, other multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund and International Criminal Court, and regional organizations like the European Union and African Union.

Third, trust could have declined in certain countries due to the growing strength of far-right, anti-globalist parties and politicians. This trend is apparent in many parts of the world. In Europe, for example, far-right parties are now winning more support than at any time in modern history. In some countries, people on the political right—particularly the far right—have historically had more negative views of the UN than people in the center or on the left. This is especially true in the US. A 2024 Pew survey found that 71% of Democrats had a favorable view of the UN versus just 34% of Republicans. This partisan divide on the UN has existed at least since the 1970s, but it has widened since the late 1990s and has continued widening in the past couple years. For example, between 2022 and 2024, the percentage of Republicans agreeing that the US benefits from UN membership dropped from 49% to 42%, while agreement among Democrats remained steady at around 78%. The UN’s overall decline in favorability among Americans in this period—from 61% in 2022 to 52% in 2024—is thus largely driven by Republicans.

Trust in the UN is also lower on the far right in several other countries, including New Zealand, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Canada, and Hungary, based on World Values Survey data from 2018 to 2022. But the US is still an outlier in the extremity of its ideological divide. A 2022 four-country survey found that the US was the only country where the UN was viewed as a left-leaning institution (the other countries surveyed were Brazil, Germany, and Indonesia). In fact, confidence in the UN is lower on the far left than on the far right in many countries, including Spain, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Libya, and South Korea. Beyond the US, the impact of growing right-wing political movements on trust in the UN is therefore unclear.

Moreover, politicians’ influence over public perceptions of the UN may be less strong than often assumed. One 2015 survey in Germany, the UK, and the US found that negative communication by governments about the UN did not have a statistically significant impact on the UN’s public legitimacy. Similarly, a 2021 cross-regional survey of 10 countries found that governments’ attempts to delegitimize the UN had little impact on public perceptions. There is therefore little evidence that politicians’ anti-UN rhetoric will translate into a significant decrease in public trust in the organization.

Trump’s Moves against the UN Lack Broad Public Support—though the Partisan Divide Is Growing

Considering the number of actions the second Trump administration has taken against the UN, including withdrawing from several UN bodies and seeking to slash UN funding, it’s worth briefly returning to what Americans think. As in much of the world, Americans’ trust in the UN has clearly fallen over the past few years. Only 33% of Americans thought the UN was doing a good job in 2024, according to Gallup, down from 45% in 2021. While this is hardly an encouraging number, it’s about the same as it was in 2018 and higher than the all-time low of 26% in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis. It’s also higher than it was at various points in the 1970s and 1980s. As is also true globally, Americans’ current levels of trust in the UN are not far out of line with historical fluctuations.

In the US, the biggest change is not overall trust in the UN; it’s the growing partisan divide. This partisan divide both feeds and is fed by Trump’s hostility toward the UN. But this hostility is not backed by the broader American public. Trump’s actions against the UN are unpopular. While Trump has proposed ending US funding for UN peacekeeping, 60% of Americans support the US paying its peacekeeping dues on time and in full, while only 23% are opposed, according to a 2024 Morning Consult survey. And while Trump has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), 59% of Americans say the US benefits from its membership in the WHO, while only 39% say it does not, according to a 2024 Pew survey. This is an important reminder that just because leaders turn against the UN doesn’t mean the public will follow. Even if most people don’t love the UN, they still see its value.

Albert Trithart is a Senior Fellow and Head of Publications at the International Peace Institute (IPI). Felix Romier is the Editorial Intern at IPI.