Richard Gowan is a New York-based fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

The Trump administration’s relations with the United Nations are in trouble again. U.N. officials are justifiably nervous of incoming national security adviser John Bolton. The Bush administration’s pugilistic representative in Turtle Bay in 2005 and 2006 once quipped that “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference” if 10 stories of the organization’s headquarters building disappeared. He still nurses a grudge toward the U.N., amply chronicled in multiple op-eds for The Wall Street Journal, and could easily use his newfound power to launch more attacks on it.

Bolton may be too busy with Washington politics to devote much time to his old globalist nemesis in New York. Even so, tensions between the U.S. and other powers over the Iran nuclear deal and Israel are already creating deepening discord in the Security Council. The risk of a major breakdown in U.N. diplomacy, comparable to that over Iraq in 2003, is very real.


Can anyone persuade the U.S. to ease off?

Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a canny reader of U.S. politics, tapped a veteran American diplomat to help him navigate the looming storm. He picked Rosemary DiCarlo, a deputy U.S. permanent representative to the U.N. in the Obama era, as his next undersecretary-general for Political Affairs. The job comes with a host of responsibilities, many of them thankless, from backstopping mediation in Syria to overseeing the U.N.’s vestigial discussions of decolonization. But since former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon first put an American in the post in 2007, it has also involved managing U.N. relations with Washington.

Guterres will hope that DiCarlo, who left the foreign service before Trump’s election, can help him persuade the U.S. not to persecute the U.N. too harshly, without making it look like the institution is selling out to the administration completely.

It won’t be easy. Fans of the U.N. like to say that the Political Affairs chief is the organization’s “foreign minister.” DiCarlo, a no-nonsense expert on the organization, will know that this is overblown. Leading a department of just a few hundred staff covering the entire gamut of global issues, the undersecretary-general lacks the resources and intelligence assets that a minister in even a middle-sized country can expect. The U.N.’s members watch their every move exceedingly closely and are quick to stamp out initiatives they dislike.

But a smart operator can still use this post to try out diplomatic gambits that officials in larger, better-resourced organizations might avoid. The U.N. may be short on resources, but it retains just enough moral authority and international access for the organization’s leaders to create unexpected openings in major and minor crises. DiCarlo’s predecessor Jeffrey Feltman, another erstwhile State Department official, underlined the potential of the position by making a high-profile visit to North Korea last December.

While there, Feltman reportedly pressed home the dangers of confrontation with the U.S. and need for Kim Jong Un to get talking to South Korea to avoid a catastrophe. Nobody other than Kim really knows if the visit had a significant impact on the North’s ensuing diplomatic opening to Seoul, but few other envoys could have carried this message to Pyongyang as effectively. As a U.N. official, Feltman enjoyed the cover of the organization’s impartiality. And as a former U.S. diplomat, he was presumably able to give a highly credible take on American thinking—not least because Trump officials quietly encouraged the trip.

This visit was indicative of Feltman’s action-oriented approach to his U.N. job, which he took up after stepping down as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs in 2012. While at State, he had forged close working relations with Hillary Clinton, who ran the department until stepping down to begin planning her presidential bid in earnest in 2013. Coming from the upper echelons of U.S. foreign policy-making, Feltman initially seemed to find the U.N. machine too stolid and protocol-obsessed for comfort. He soon became known for his ferocious work ethic, fast thinking and his willingness to back up international envoys working on solving conflicts in the field when the going got tough.

But his tenure developed a tragic tinge as the wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya ground on. While Feltman, a Middle East specialist, devoted a huge amount of time to these conflicts, there was little he or any other U.N. official could do to resolve fundamental splits in the Security Council over how to end them. He expanded his focus on other regions, in particular Africa, where the U.N. could achieve more. His priorities in his last year in office ranged from keeping the Colombian peace process on track and coaxing the prickly Eritrean government to open up to the outside world.

While few observers doubted Feltman’s personal commitment to his work, advocates of the U.N.’s independence worry about the optics of an American running the political department. In 2014, Russian sources leaked a recording of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland describing talks with Feltman about what the U.N. could do to help a pro-Western government in Ukraine. The tape became notorious for Nuland’s firing off a sexual expletive about the European Union, but some non-Western diplomats in New York worried that the U.N. seemed too close to Washington.

When Guterres ran to replace Ban as U.N. Secretary-General in 2016, he reportedly floated the idea of appointing a non-American to run political affairs with the Obama administration. Washington was apparently unmoved, and other big powers like France and Russia insisted that they should be able to fill other senior posts in his team. Feltman agreed to stay on for one year before retiring.

A significant number of well-qualified State Department officials are said to have made a pitch to replace him, hoping for a way out of the dysfunctional Trump-Tillerson-era foreign policy machine. U.S and U.N. officials rate DiCarlo as a wise pick. There is widespread relief that Washington did not attempt to impose a right-wing ideologue on the organization. Having served under Susan Rice and Samantha Power at the U.S. mission to the U.N. from 2010 to 2014, DiCarlo also has a reasonably up-to-date picture of the current problems and players in Turtle Bay, and a reputation as a firm and thoughtful diplomat.

Nonetheless, the diplomatic scene facing her is daunting. While the Trump administration risks a breakdown over Iran in the Security Council, the West’s overall relations with Russia in the council are in free fall. The day after appointing DiCarlo last week, Guterres told journalists that he fears Moscow and Washington could stumble into an even more direct confrontation if they do not set up mechanisms to manage their “new Cold War.” It may not be a coincidence that DiCarlo is not only a U.N. specialist but a Russia expert. She may need to spend a good chunk of her time talking to the Russians about how to ease tensions over Ukraine, Syria and Iran, especially if the Security Council is paralyzed.

But her No. 1 priority will be working out how to protect the U.N. from the threat of an even more assertive, Boltonized Trump administration. Guterres has done an impressive job of negotiating on budgetary headaches with U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley. But DiCarlo will need to find more maneuvers, like Feltman’s Pyongyang outing, to underline the U.N.’s relevance to Washington. At a highly dangerous moment in American diplomatic history, the new undersecretary-general for Political Affairs will have to build on her predecessor’s energetic work to convince Trump and Bolton that multilateral diplomacy still matters.