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This past week, as world leaders assembled for the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, issued an astonishing warning. His organization was becoming toothless. “Geopolitical divisions are undermining our capacity to respond,” he admitted. What lies ahead, he said, are “escalating tensions, fragmentation and worse.”
Guterres’ comments sound like a dirge for the UN, founded after the Second World War to protect the key pillars of an international order: peace and security, human rights, the rule of law, and development. But increasingly, it has been unable to exert any influence over the problems facing the world: geopolitical disputes, diseases, terrorism, and climate change. Even the countries that helped build the UN are noticing its growing irrelevance. Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, noted recently that “forging international cooperation has gotten more complex. Not only because of rising geopolitical tensions, but also because of the mammoth scale of global problems.”
Most prominently, of late, the war in Ukraine has paralyzed the UN’s Security Council, where Russia is a permanent member. The UN’s brokered deal to export Ukrainian grain collapsed after Russia walked away, and Moscow is also openly violating UN sanctions by entering into a weapons deal with North Korea.
Other topics at this year’s UNGA have also been fickle and hard to tackle, making for a daunting agenda. The spate of coups in African nations, the slow international response to calamities such as the Morocco earthquakes and the floods in Libya, the yawning gap in funding between the economic north and south, a crisis of violence in Haiti, and the numerous adversities of climate change have all exposed the UN’s vulnerability.
One may go further. The UN is, in fact, a part of the problem. The Security Council continues to concentrate its power into the hands of just five countries, an arrangement that reflects an outdated postwar world. India, the world’s most populous nation, does not have a permanent Security Council seat. Africa, a continent of 54 nations, lacks even a collective permanent seat; it has looked elsewhere, and the African Union was admitted to the G20 earlier this month.
On the other hand, the UN has no ability to restrain its Security Council members from breaking international law. The US and Russia have both defied the UN to start wars in this century; China’s human rights record is spotty, yet as a Security Council member, it can veto other human rights resolutions. And China is building its own informal system of patronage and alliances among countries in the global south, offering yet another parallel network—like BRICS and the G20—to challenge the UN system. If you don’t like these united nations, governments are realizing, there are others to consider.
QUOTABLE
The secretary-general of the United Nations has no power and there’s no money. What we have is a voice. And that voice can be loud. And I have the obligation to make it be loud.
—António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour
IN ABSENTIA
One sign of the UNGA’s waning importance is the fact that major governments seem to be uninterested in the discussions and resolutions unfolding in New York this year. Five important world leaders, representing more than 40% of humanity and nearly a third of global GDP, skipped UNGA this year. This included four out of five permanent members of the Security Council.
- 🇷🇺 Vladimir Putin
- 🇨🇳 Xi Jinping
- 🇫🇷 Emmanuel Macron
- 🇬🇧 Rishi Sunak
- 🇮🇳 Narendra Modi
BY THE DIGITS
51: The number of original member states of the UN
193: The number of current UN member states, in addition to two non-member states.
$3.4 billion: The UN’s budget for 2023
$60.4 billion: The discretionary funding for the US Department of Homeland Security in 2023
135: The number of member states that had contributed to the UN budget as of Sept. 21, 2023
47: The number of members states that did not pay their full share into the UN budget in 2022
A BUNGLED PANDEMIC
The UN was made for global crises like the covid pandemic—and yet it failed to step up. It failed to ensure vaccine equity for developing nations and instead blamed “multilateralism” for the deficiencies of vaccine distribution. The hoarding of vaccines by rich countries is estimated to have led to the death of at least one million people. In 2020, in the teeth of the pandemic, the then-US president Donald Trump froze funding to the UN-affiliated World Health Organization, accusing it of being controlled by China. The WHO was also accused of conspiring with the Italian health ministry to remove a 102-page report revealing the mismanagement of the pandemic. When the world came out of the other side of the pandemic, the UN was a much-shrunken force, its authority eroded and its powers circumscribed.
ONE 🔥 THING
Prior to UNGA in New York, youth groups and climate action advocates held a weeklong climate protest to push world leaders to drop the use of fossil fuels. Similar protests, organized by a nonprofit called Climate Group, proceeded in parallel in more than 50 countries, including Germany, the UK, South Korea, and India. The New York protests attracted more than 75,000 participants last Sunday, according to the organizers.
Barely two months remain for the UN’s COP28 climate summit, and the protestors around the world argued that the organization wasn’t doing enough, and that they were already experiencing the effects of extreme heat, drought, and floods. (To make matters worse, a 2020 investigation found that millions of dollars had been misappropriated from one of the UN’s environmental funds.)
To be sure, the volume of clean energy investment the world over is rising swiftly—valuable resistance to the climate crisis. But the 2015 Paris Agreement, organized under the auspices of the UN, had promised that $100 billion a year would flow from the developed world to the developing, to help them deal with climate change. This funding has fallen hugely short, and the UN has no powers to ensure that the target is met. African countries, which have contributed the least to global carbon emissions and yet stand to suffer severely from a harsher climate, have been sidelined at previous COP summits. As with covid, the UN stands to be blamed heavily for failing its poorest members in the climate crisis—arguably the biggest challenge it has faced in its 78 years.
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Have a just weekend!
—Faustine Ngila, tech reporter