The arrival in office of US President Donald Trump in January 2025 for a second term has led to huge cuts in the UN’s operations and staff, culminating in an existential financial crisis for the world body. By April last year the US owed $3bn of the UN’s total regular budget and peacekeeping debt of $5bn. Portuguese UN secretary-general António Guterres was therefore forced to announce cuts of $500m to the 2026 UN budget (15% of its programming); the slashing of its peacekeeping budget by 15% and the withdrawal of 25% of UN peacekeepers from the field. This is likely to force ill-equipped and poorly resourced regional peacekeepers to take on more of the burden.At the root of these challenges is a peacekeeping paradox. A total of 44,896 UN peacekeepers were deployed globally in March (down from 94,793 UN peacekeepers two years earlier), 77% of whom were deployed to Africa. These troops tend to be relatively well resourced compared with African regional bodies but often refuse to undertake dangerous enforcement missions to protect populations at risk. By contrast, African peacekeepers have historically been more willing to do what is needed to enforce peace on their own continent but rarely receive the logistical and financial resources required.Within the UN Security Council the US ― contributor of 27% of UN peacekeeping expenses, but $1.8bn in arrears ― announced in 2025 a “back to basics” strategy to curtail global peace operations, led by its pugnacious permanent representative to the UN, Mike Waltz. Washington has thus pushed for the closing down of UN missions in Yemen (occurred by March), Lebanon (by December) and the Central African Republic (renewed until November, conditional on the mission’s eventual withdrawal). The US further threatened in February to close down the UN mission in South Sudan if the warring parties continued their obstructionism. Yet the Trump administration supported two new UN missions that served its own parochial interests: a “gang suppression force” in Haiti ― a country in its hemisphere ― in September last year and, two months later, an international stabilisation force in Gaza. Guterres initiated a comprehensive review of UN peacekeeping in 2025, led by the two UN departments of peace operations and political & peacebuilding affairs, whose publication has been delayed. Within the 15-member UN Security Council the “peacekeeping trio” of Denmark, Pakistan and South Korea held three open debates in 2025 that sought to build international consensus on the future of peacekeeping, in support of the UN secretary-general’s efforts. However, due to the deeply uncertain international geopolitical climate in which a highly disruptive US has abdicated its global leadership role, UN member states and its secretariat have been cautious about the prospects for any ambitious reform of UN peacekeeping. The talk is about a “networked approach” in which the UN shares the peacekeeping burden with regional actors such as the AU, the Southern African Development Community and the Economic Community of West African States.Some studies have noted that in half of conflict cases countries have tended to relapse into war within five years as a result of inadequate peacebuilding. The poorly funded UN Peacebuilding Commission has woefully failed to close this gap. The present US-led retrenchment of global peacekeeping is insisting on achieving narrow security and political objectives, while neglecting the concomitant peacebuilding tasks that are essential to tackling the root causes of conflicts in order to ensure the long-term success of UN peace operations. This clearly backward step is thus seeking to eliminate the essential multidimensional aspects of peacekeeping ― established under Egyptian UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s landmark 1992 An Agenda for Peace ― and ignores the lessons learnt over three and half decades of post-Cold War peacebuilding.• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.