World leaders will gather at the United Nations in the last week of September after one of the roughest years in the world organization’s recent history. The war in Gaza has largely dominated UN business since last October, leaving diplomats dispirited. In theory, the annual high-level session of the General Assembly should supply a useful jolt of energy. Roughly 150 presidents and prime ministers will attend. The UN will also host a “Summit of the Future” on 22 and 23 September that Secretary-General António Guterres billed as a unique chance for leaders to recommit to pragmatic multilateralism.
Yet the prevailing mood in Turtle Bay is a mixture of listlessness and nervousness. Negotiations on a Pact for the Future – the main outcome document for the Summit – have been rocky as UN members have grappled over topics ranging from international financing to nuclear weapons. As late as last Friday, there was no agreed final text, and some diplomats were wondering if it wouldn’t be best to call the whole thing off. Most politicians who descend on New York won’t be concentrating on the Summit anyway. The crises in Gaza and Ukraine – and to a lesser extent Sudan – will greatly consume their attention. A key topic of private conversations will be the U.S. elections, and the risks of a Trump administration that would treat multilateralism with disdain.
Headaches over the Summit of the Future
This was not the scenario that Secretary-General António Guterres hoped for when he first suggested the Summit in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Guterres saw the global health crisis as an opportunity to make the UN’s members grasp the need to reboot international cooperation. He laid out a wide-ranging agenda for discussions, ranging from standard UN priorities like economic development to new fields for diplomacy, such as regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Three years on, parts of that original vision survive. UN members are set to agree on a Global Digital Compact that, while non-binding, is a step toward building cooperation around AI and related technologies.
But talks on the main Pact for the Future – which has paragraphs on advancing almost every aspect of multilateralism imaginable – have been tense. Developing countries have pushed hard for the document to include pledges on reforming the World Bank and IMF to help them get easier access to financing. Richer states, led by the United States, have refused to offer truly significant concessions on this file. While this has been the single biggest headache, there have been small but persistent fights on other topics. Russia, which has been openly skeptical of the entire enterprise, has been most resistant to the Pact saying anything serious on nuclear disarmament. Major energy producers have gotten language on fossil fuels and climate change in the Pact watered down to the point that the formulations are often less ambitious than that in previous UN texts.
Germany and Namibia, which have facilitated talks on the Pact, circulated a 29-page version of the text in late August. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, various states and groups lodged a total of between 100 and 200 complaints about parts of the document, according to UN officials.
A lot of this was tactical. Pretty much all big UN summit processes go to the wire. The outcome of the 2005 World Summit was finalized less than 24 hours before the summit itself. Multilateral old-timers expect the Pact of the Future to work out in the end, in part because nobody – including the United States and Russia – wants to be singled out as the final spoiler that blocks the agreement. This will lead to an outburst of relief, and the Pact does contain genuinely useful, if not especially media-friendly, hooks for future policy discussions on issues like UN peace operations. But getting to consensus has meant cutting it close.
A glimmer of hope on Security Council reform?
Curiously, one section of the Pact that is causing relatively few last-minute palpitations is a section on Security Council reform. This was inevitably a sensitive issue, given the Council’s failure to act meaningfully on either Ukraine or Gaza due to Russian and U.S. vetoes. Austria and Kuwait facilitated stand-alone talks on this part of the document and – to nobody’s surprise – were unable to forge consensus on any one model for reshaping the Council, or setting hard limits on the veto. Yet they did manage to get agreement on a broad set of principles for accelerating reform discussions, including the need to give states from Africa and other under-represented regions a greater voice on the Council. Last week, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield went a step further and announced support for African states to have two permanent seats on the Council, albeit without vetoes, and called for the General Assembly to get straight into text-based negotiations on a draft resolution on Council restructuring.
The fact that there has been some progress on Council reform – usually last area to expect good news in a UN negotiation – is probably down to three things. The simplest is that, after Gaza and Ukraine, nobody can pretend the Council is working well. Even the permanent members have to acknowledge the need for change. Secondly, almost all factions in the UN are keen to court African states, which are a decisive voting bloc on many topics and have other financial and military importance to other states. Recognizing their interests in the Council is one way to recognize their interests and court them. The third is that Council reform remains an uphill climb, requiring complex negotiation, approval and ratification procedures, which will give states ample time to barter over any real change down the road.
Biden and after
President Biden, who will address fellow-leaders on 24 September but is leaving Secretary of State Blinken to attend the Summit of the Future, has had mixed relations with the UN. Early in his term, the United States rejoined various UN agreements and bodies – such as the Paris climate change agreement and Human Rights Council – that President Trump had quit. The administration also did a good job rallying votes in support of Ukraine at the UN after Russia’s all-out assault in 2022.
Yet other UN members have always sensed that Biden and his inner circle had limited interest in the UN. In contrast to the Obama administration, which used these annual UN gatherings to drive global support for peacekeeping and refugees, and worked through the institution in forging pacts like the Paris climate accord and Iran nuclear deal, Biden’s team seemed more interested in working through alternative mechanisms like the “Quad” with Japan, India, and Australia. Far more damagingly, the White House’s adamant refusal to support any UN calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024 alienated the bulk of the UN membership, many of whom have a long memory.
Nonetheless, UN-based diplomats are acutely conscious of the looming U.S. elections. Some had hoped that Vice President Harris would appear at the Summit of the Future, but for now she seems more likely to stay on the campaign trail. Few UN members have much idea of what a Harris presidency would mean for the organization, although many expect general continuity with Biden. By contrast, many worry that a Trump administration would go out of its way to undermine the world organization. Trump would surely re-withdraw from those bodies, like the Human Rights Council, that he has exited once already. Congressional Republicans have been agitating for sweeping cuts to the UN budgets in light of the criticisms of Israel over Gaza by the General Assembly, Secretary-General and other UN forums and officials. Though few if any leaders will raise these points in their UN speeches, Trump will be an ever-present at their feast.
Three wars
One issue that most leaders will reference directly will be the war in Gaza. Arguments over the war consumed the UN from last fall to this summer. While these debates eased after the United States tabled a (to date unimplemented) ceasefire resolution in the Security Council in June, the Palestinians and their friends are forcing the topic back up the agenda in advance of the high-level week. On 18 September, the General Assembly will vote on a Palestinian-backed resolution affirming the July International Court of Justice ruling that Israel must end its occupation of the Palestinian territories. This is proving divisive – not least because the draft resolution calls for sanctions against Israeli officials – but many leaders will focus in their UN speeches on a ceasefire in Gaza and progress toward a two-state solution.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has a long history of provocative speeches at the UN is set to address the General Assembly on 26 September, can expect an extremely chilly reception. One wild card is that a three-judge panel of the International Criminal Court may have approved a warrant for his arrest by then. By contrast, Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, who speaks on the same day will receive a lot of sympathy. In the margins, donor countries will be huddling to talk about the financial state of UNRWA, the UN agency that assists the Palestinians, after the United States halted funding over Israeli accusations that some UN staff were complicit in the events of 7 October.
It is less certain how many speakers will prioritize Ukraine. Events in the Middle East have overshadowed Russia’s war of aggression at the UN through the last year. Ukrainian diplomats were concerned when Slovenia, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council for September, did not schedule a ministerial Council meeting on the war to coincide with the high-level week. After lobbying by Kyiv and its friends, there will now be a Council session on the war on 24 September, and President Zelenskyy is set to speak in the Council, the Assembly and at the Summit of the Future. But non-Western UN members, who have increasingly questioned the value of UN talks on the war, are likely to stick to pro forma calls for a rapid diplomatic solution. There may also be less value in holding some of these talks until after the U.S. presidential election decides a winner, presumably just a few weeks following the Summit.
A third war that is likely to get significant attention, although not a specific Council meeting of its own, will be the horrific conflict in Sudan. The Biden administration has been trying to push the Sudanese situation up the UN’s agenda this year, and many UN members feel that the organization’s inability to halt the war – which does not involve great power interests as acutely as Ukraine or Gaza – is a particularly egregious failure for the organization. As my colleagues at the International Crisis Group have noted, the UN envoy for Sudan Ramtane Lamamra, has made incremental progress on coordinating mediation efforts in Sudan over the last year in parallel with U.S. envoy Tom Perriello. Many leaders will make at least token references to the need to redouble these efforts in the months ahead. In the short term, the priority is to get humanitarian aid to the Sudanese, including 10 million civilians who have been driven from their homes.
UN members will have a further opportunity to reference these cases – and others such as the civil war in Myanmar and gang violence in Haiti – at a Security Council meeting Slovenia is convening on “leadership for peace” on 25 September. (This is an open debate, so non-Council members can register to chip in with their views.) Some diplomats think the title is a little over-ambitious, given the rather obvious lack of leadership for peace at the UN on many current crises, but Slovenia’s concept note for the event makes it clear that it wants speakers to reckon honestly with the Security Council’s failings, and flaws in UN conflict management tools like peacekeeping. It is unlikely that a thematic debate can turn the UN around. But it is a sign of the times – and how frustrated many UN members are with the organization’s recent performance — that a Security Council president is willing to point out the poor state of international cooperation so bluntly.
Methane and Microbes
Beyond the Summit of the Future and discussions of individual crises, the General Assembly provides a platform for a host of other meetings on all aspects of multilateral work, featuring such appetizing titles as “Turning Methane Pledges into Action” and the “World Leader Summit of Love and Peace.” Health ministers will be in New York to talk about the threat of anti-microbial resistance to medicines. Once all these high-level events are in motion, the UN briefly feels to many like the center of the world for a few days. The mere fact that so many leaders are still willing to come to the General Assembly is a timely affirmation of the UN’s pulling power. But the last year of agonizing diplomacy over Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan – and bickering on the Summit of the Future – have been reminders of its deeper weaknesses.