US-Global Politics: World leaders gather in New York for UN General Assembly. Prospects are grim

UNITED NATIONS — As a fragmented world faces a wave of conflicts and crises, leaders attending the annual UN meeting this week face a challenge: they must work together — not only on priorities but also on modernizing the international institutions built after World War II to meet the threats and challenges of the future.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a challenge a year ago, after sounding a global emergency for the survival of humanity and the planet: Come to the “Future Summit” and make a new commitment to multilateralism – the foundation of the United Nations and many other global organizations – and begin to repair the aging global architecture to meet the world’s rapidly changing challenges.

The UN chief told reporters last week that the summit was “born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.” He pointed to “uncontrolled geopolitical divisions” and “uncontrolled” conflicts, climate change, inequality, debt and new technologies like artificial intelligence that have no guardrails.

The two-day summit began on Sunday, two days before a high-level meeting of world leaders is due to begin at the sprawling UN complex in New York.

The General Assembly approved the summit’s key document on Sunday morning – the 42-page “Future Pact” – with Assembly President Philémon Yang voting unanimously for consensus after the chamber voted 143 to 7, with 15 abstentions, against considering amendments proposed by Russia that would significantly weaken the document.

The pact is a blueprint for addressing global challenges, from conflict and climate change to artificial intelligence and reform of the UN and global institutions. Its impact will depend on its implementation by the assembly’s 193 member states.

“Leaders must ask themselves whether this will be another meeting where they simply talk about more cooperation and consensus, or whether they will show the imagination and conviction to actually make it happen,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International. “If they miss this opportunity, I shudder at the consequences. Our common future is at risk.”

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This is the most important week of the year for the UN

The summit is a prelude to this year’s high-level meeting, which takes place every September. More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are expected to speak, along with dozens of ministers, and issues from the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, notably the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, and the growing likelihood of a wider war in the Middle East.

“There will be a pretty obvious gap between the Future Summit, with its emphasis on expanding international cooperation, and the reality of the UN failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, UN director at the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be the main focus for much of the week.”

One of the highlights of Tuesday’s opening ceremony was likely U.S. President Joe Biden’s last major appearance on the international stage he has performed and enjoyed for decades.

On upcoming meetings, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters this week: “The most vulnerable around the world are counting on us to make progress, to make change, to bring them a sense of hope.”

To address the many global challenges, she said, the U.S. will focus U.N. meetings on ending the “scourge of war.” About 2 billion people live in areas affected by conflict, she said.

Last September, the war in Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took center stage at a global UN meeting. But as the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly October 7 attack on southern Israel approaches, attention is sure to turn to the war in Gaza and the escalating violence on the Israel-Lebanon border that now threatens to spill over into the entire Middle East.

Iran supports both Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, will address world leaders on Tuesday afternoon. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to speak on Thursday morning, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday afternoon.

Zelensky will be in the spotlight twice. On Tuesday, he will address a high-level meeting of the UN Security Council – convened by the United States, France, Japan, Malta, South Korea and the United Kingdom – and address the General Assembly on Wednesday morning.

They are trying to counteract the “world of grim statistics”

Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council this month, chose the theme “Leadership for Peace” for its high-level meeting on Wednesday, calling on the 15 member states to consider why the UN body responsible for maintaining international peace and security is failing – and how it can improve its situation.

“This event follows our observation that we live in a world of grim statistics, with the largest number of ongoing conflicts, with record-high casualties among civilians, humanitarians, health workers, journalists,” Slovenian Ambassador to the UN Samuel Zbogar told reporters. He cited a record 100 million people forced to flee their homes by the conflict.

“The world is becoming less stable, less peaceful, and with the erosion of respect for rules, it is falling into a state of disorder,” Zbogar said. “Never before have we seen such a great need to rebuild trust to secure the future.”

A key reason for the Security Council’s dysfunction is the deep division among the five permanent members with veto power. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, supports Ukraine alongside Britain and France. Russia invaded Ukraine and has a military and economic partnership with China, although Beijing has reaffirmed its long-standing support for each country’s sovereignty by not criticizing Russia in a recent briefing paper for UN meetings.

French President Emmanuel Macron and new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be at the UN with Biden this week. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are sending their foreign ministers instead. Neither Putin nor Xi attended last year.

Guterres, who will preside over the case this week, warned that the world was witnessing a “proliferation of conflicts and a sense of impunity” – a landscape in which, he said, “any country or military unit, militias, whatever, feels they can do whatever they want because nothing will happen to them.”

“And the fact that no one takes seriously the authorities’ ability to solve problems on the ground,” he said, “makes the level of impunity (on) a huge scale.”

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Edith M. Lederer, chief correspondent for the Associated Press at the United Nations, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years.