Facing a swirl of conflicts and crises across a fragmented
world, leaders attending this week’s annual U.N. gathering are being
challenged: Work together — not only on front-burner issues but on modernizing
the international institutions born after World War II so they can tackle the
threats and problems of the future.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued the challenge
a year ago after sounding a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the
planet: Come to a “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to
multilateralism – the foundation of the United Nations and many other global
bodies – and start fixing the aging global architecture to meet the rapidly
changing world.
The U.N. 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 “out-of-control geopolitical
divisions” and “runaway” conflicts, climate change, inequalities, debt and new
technologies like artificial intelligence which have no guardrails.
The two-day summit starts Sunday, two days before the
high-level meeting of world leaders begins at the sprawling U.N. compound in
New York City.
Whether it takes even a first step toward the future remains
to be seen. There was no final agreement Saturday on its main outcome document
– a lengthy pact that requires support from all 193 U.N. member nations to be
adopted. Diplomats said Russia and a few others still had objections to the
final text.
“Leaders must ask themselves whether this will be yet
another meeting where they simply talk about greater cooperation and consensus,
or whether they will show the imagination and conviction to actually forge it,”
said Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International. “If they
miss this opportunity, I shudder to think of the consequences. Our collective
future is at stake.”
This is the UN's biggest week of the year
The summit is the prelude to this year’s high-level meeting,
held every September. More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs
are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues at the
summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially
the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider
Mideast war.
“There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the
Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation,
and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said
Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three
wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.”
One notable moment at Tuesday’s opening assembly meeting:
U.S. President Joe Biden’s likely final major appearance on the world stage, a
platform he has tread upon and reveled in for decades.
At the 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 about a
sense of hope for them.”
To meet the many global challenges, she said, the U.S. focus
at the U.N. meetings will be on ending “the scourge of war.” Roughly 2 billion
people live in conflict-affected areas, she said.
Last September, the war in Ukraine and its president,
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, took center stage at the U.N. global gathering. But as the
first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly attack in southern Israel approaches on Oct.
7, the spotlight is certain to be on the war in Gaza and escalating violence
across the Israeli-Lebanon border, which is now threatening to spread to the
wider Middle East.
Iran supports both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah
militants. Its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, will address world leaders on
Tuesday afternoon. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to speak
Thursday morning and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday
afternoon.
Zelenskyy will get the spotlight twice. He will speak
Tuesday at a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council — called by the
United States, France, Japan, Malta, South Korea and Britain — and will address
the General Assembly on Wednesday morning.
They're trying to counter ‘a world of grim statistics'
Slovenia, which holds the council’s rotating presidency this
month, chose the topic “Leadership for Peace” for its high-level meeting
Wednesday, challenging its 15 member nations to address why the U.N. body
charged with maintaining international peace and security is failing — and how
it can do better.
“The event follows our observation that we live in a world
of grim statistics, with the highest number of ongoing conflicts, with record
high casualties among civilians, among humanitarians, among medical workers,
among journalist," Slovenian U.N. Ambassador Samuel Zbogar told reporters.
He cited a record-high 100 million people driven from their homes by conflict.
“The world is becoming less stable, less peaceful, and with
erosion of the respect for the rules, it is sliding into the state of
disorder,” Zbogar said. “We have not seen this high need to rebuild trust to
secure the future ever before.”
A key reason for the Security Council’s dysfunction is the
deep division among its five veto-wielding permanent members. The United
States, Israel’s closest ally, is a supporter of Ukraine alongside Britain and
France. Russia invaded Ukraine and has a military and economic partnership with
China, though Beijing reasserted its longstanding support for every country’s
sovereignty without criticizing Russia in a recent briefing paper for the U.N.
meetings.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s new prime
minister, Keir Starmer, will be at the United Nations this week along with
Biden. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping
are sending their foreign ministers instead. Neither Putin nor Xi attended last
year, either.
Guterres, who will preside over the whole affair this week,
warned that the world is seeing "a multiplication of conflicts and the
sense of impunity” — a landscape where, he said, “any country or any military
entity, militias, whatever, feel that they can do whatever they want because
nothing will happen to them.”
“And the fact that nobody takes even seriously the capacity
of the powers to solve problems on the ground," he said, “makes the level
of impunity (on) an enormous level.”
