There appears to be a growing number of global leaders embracing President Donald Trump’s mold, with one of the leading candidates to be the next United Nations secretary general even vowing to “make the U.N. great again.”
Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal, is one of the leading candidates under consideration for the top administrator role at the U.N. He is also a supporter of Trump’s foreign policy. In an interview with Breitbart, he called Trump “a peace builder” despite “some problems today with Iran.”
Sall lauded the U.S. as “the first power in the world to be with the U.N.,” while emphasizing, “They need to be with the UN.” At the same time, he admitted that “the U.N. also should be reformed to be efficient,” saying, “With other member states together we can build a better UN, or to MUNGA — we can Make the UN Great Again.”
Sall is not the only one holding this sentiment. According to Hugh Dugan, a U.N. insider with decades of experience in the body, the “MUNGA” slogan, first coined by Trump’s U.N. ambassador Mike Waltz, has become a familiar rallying cry at the global organization.
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Dugan served as a U.S. delegate to the U.N. for 26 years and advised 11 U.S. ambassadors during that time. He served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term and currently leads Multilateral Accountability Associates, a nonprofit dedicated to holding the U.N. and other international bodies accountable.
He explained that the MUNGA push is feeding on a growing dissatisfaction by U.N. member states over the body being mired in bureaucracy and unable to fulfill its core functions of maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly international relations and promoting international cooperation.
“It’s a clever slogan to say MUNGA, but I think the fact is that there’s been a long-time dissatisfaction among the broader membership at the U.N. on this very matter,” he explained.
The current U.N. secretary general, former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres, will be leaving office in 2027 after taking office in 2017. During his 10 years as U.N. secretary general, the world underwent some of the most intense conflicts and problems in decades, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Throughout this period, Trump has been highly critical of the U.N. during both of his terms. In an address to the U.N. in New York City last September, Trump went so far as to ask, “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”
Trump stated the U.N. “has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.”
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Yet, despite these criticisms and media reports suggesting otherwise, he believes the president is “not migrating away from the U.N.”
“He sent his very strongest team he could there, and he remains very strongly engaged,” said Dugan, pointing to Trump’s decision last week to resume U.S. funding to the U.N.’s humanitarian work to the tune of $1.8 billion.
“So, this idea of distancing from the U.N., it’s something that his opponents and antagonists want to promote. But in fact, it’s not the case,” he said.
In the meantime, Dugan said many at the U.N. share Trump’s frustrations. He likened it to “still operating with an abacus when everybody else is on a supercomputer.” In line with this, he emphasized that there is broad support for the next secretary-general to be someone “who can demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency in the role.”
In his interview with Breitbart, Sall said that he is uniquely positioned because he has witnessed U.N. waste firsthand.
“Because I was in Africa, I saw how sometimes these [U.N.] peace operations are wasting money, and they have no efficiencies.”
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He cast himself as the candidate who could enact these reforms.
“I have the capacity as a political leader,” Sall told Breitbart, adding, “Of course, we need to reform, we need to optimize the management, and to cut the cost that I’m sure if I have the support of United States, I can work very closely and put them together with the other partners — particularly Europe, Asia, China and Russia and Africa.”
At the end of the day, the next secretary general will have to gain broad enough support and avoid a veto from any one of the members of the “P5” Security Council: the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom.
After serving as president of Senegal for 12 years and president of the African Union from 2022 to 2023, Sall said, “I am able first to talk to all the leaders from the West, and from the East.”
Dugan framed the selection of the next secretary-general as “the most consequential decision for the future relevance of the U.N. [on whether] … the corporate culture of the U.N. will be at the service of its member states and not to be its own deep state with entitled bureaucrats.”
“The big word in the end that I think encompasses all of this is the word accountability,” he said. “In a major corporation, they have to be accountable to shareholders and the market and interest rates … The UN bureaucracy doesn’t feel those pressures, and therefore, we need to create a culture of enhanced accountability among the international civil service for the use of resources.”
