The quiet, controlled demolition of multilateralism

The United Nations isn’t collapsing by accident — it’s being outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and replaced... quietly and systematically. Yes, even Jeffery Epstein was working to kill it.

Since its inception in 1945, the United Nations has been treated as a necessary and largely benevolent fixture of the global order. Sure it was flawed, slow, and often compromised, but it was diplomatic bedrock. You could criticize it, despise it, even ignore it, but there was never any question: the UN was vital to the world.

When faced with genocide in Rwanda, or the tragically comical urine sample chemical weapon sample Colin Powell held up in the Security Council to justify the Iraq war, or the pillorying of the useless UN weapons inspectors in the sophomoric 2004 marionette action comedy, Team America: World Police, somehow the UN persevered. Not chastened by its failings, instead it became more convinced of its importance, as evidenced by it growing global corpulence.

But something profound changed — and it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it happened. Maybe the last five years? Maybe the last 10? Ultimately it doesn’t matter because its death knell was evident for anyone paying attention to the speeches at the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

Leaders and analysts spoke openly, almost as if the key messages had been coordinated in advance, about how the post-WWII, Western-led “rules-based international order” was fractured. The future, they said, would be multipolar, transactional, and pragmatic. Multilateralism was the old plan. Time for something new: One World Government. The parasitic class is openly talking about how the old architecture no longer serves the interests of those who once upheld it.

Soon after the private jets left Davos, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, issued what may be the bluntest warning in the institution’s history, warning of “imminent financial collapse” and saying the organization may run short of cash by this summer, making it unable to function.

The United States — historically the largest contributor to the UN — has been retreating from multilateral commitments for years, withholding both mandatory and voluntary funding. Other states have followed suit, resulting in a slow suffocation that has eroded capacity, credibility, and relevance all at once.

Whether this was done on purpose is hard to say, but the more important tell is that there is little — if any — serious effort being made to save it. If an institution has value, there’s a rush to stabilize it during a crisis and its ruination is decried by all. That’s not what’s happening with the UN. Few, if any stories on the organization’s demolition dominate the headlines.

While the UN struggles to keep its lights on, real power has been relocating to ‘forums,’ without votes, charters, or pesky democratic constraints. These are places where decisions are framed as technical necessities rather than political choices. Of course, the most prominent of these is the WEF.

Long marketed as a neutral convening space, Davos has increasingly positioned itself as something else: a public-private operating system for global governance. Not lawmaking or diplomacy, but coordination via issue-specific coalitions, task forces, and “stakeholder capitalism.”

The most recently-released tranche of the Epstein files reveals a strikingly candid idea being floated between Jeffrey Epstein and president/CEO of the WEF, Børge Brende, via email in 2018. Epstein argued that Davos could “really replace the UN,” citing emerging domains such as cyber, crypto, and genetics where traditional diplomacy could not keep up. The reply from Brende, who was previously Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Environment, and Minister of Trade and Industry, was unambiguous:

“Exactly — we need a new global architecture.”

What the parasitic class propose is not a replacement that looks or acts anything like the UN — that ethos is defunct. No more universal institutions, only functional ones. No more consensus, just management. In this model, legitimacy no longer comes from nations or the public, but from expertise, capital, and crisis. In other words, technocracy.

The rise of the pay-to-play “Board of Peace” only accelerates this. Whatever the stated intent, these efforts further undermine the idea that peace and security require multilateral consensus. Power becomes something that gets brokered, not debated. Sitting at the table is no longer premised on the idea of nation states as partners, but rather as dominant and domineered.

The UN is basically a spent piece of used jet trash (to quote Tom Waits), not being violently overthrown… being quietly abandoned. No dramatic vote, no declaration of mission accomplished, no final lowering of the blue flag with a 21-gun salute. Instead, the UN is being hollowed out, financially weakened, politically sidelined, and made rhetorically obsolete, while parallel systems quietly assume its functions.

To be clear, Collapse Life is not an apologist for, or sympathetic of, the UN. Two members of the Collapse Life team worked there for some years, and they’ll gladly confirm, it was a most miserable, wasteful, unjust organization filled with useless, self-important apparatchiks. What is lamentable, however, is the passing of procedure and process. Ostensibly, there were limits to power. Ostensibly, even the smallest nation had a platform to have its concerns heard. The Old World Order pretended that sovereignty and consent mattered. The emerging system offers no accountability, no sovereignty, and no consent.

The proverbial demolition is quiet because it needs to be. Institutions don’t have to be destroyed if belief in them can be withdrawn. In the face of crisis after crisis after crisis, the mind’s bandwidth runs thin — attention has to move quickly and the ability to understand what’s actually happening through reason, logic, and analysis disappears. The parasitic class knows this and it’s how they’re pulling the wool over all our eyes. So, when the building finally collapses under its own weight, the architects of the replacement step in with a ready-made solution… after all, nature hates a vacuum.

The UN may survive in name, but probably only as long as the Boomer generation remains. And what of the UN headquarters on the East River, between 42nd and 48th Streets? Well, no doubt an idyllic condominium for the triumphant technocrats who not only get to enjoy their newfound importance, but get to live out that home run success in a building that was renovated in 2014 to the tune of $2.15 billion. Seems appropriate, somehow.

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