What to Expect When You’re Expecting the U.N. General Assembly

As world leaders descend on the United Nations headquarters in New York City, the international body is fighting to maintain its relevance in a world it wasn’t built for when it was established nearly 80 years ago.

Global powers are increasingly circumventing the unwieldy U.N. system to conduct multilateral diplomacy, such as through the G-7, G-20, and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) blocs. Eight years ago, the U.N. outlined an ambitious batch of goals to tackle global poverty, gender equality, climate change, and other pressing global issues by 2030. But so far, the world is way off target in meeting those goals.

The war in Ukraine has frontally challenged one of the U.N.’s most fundamental purposes, enshrined in its foundational charter, of averting major wars. Moves to condemn the war at the Security Council have been shut down by Moscow, leading to revived calls to reform and modernize the council by adding new permanent members or reforming its veto structure.

“The U.N. is still at the core of multilateralism and rule-based order, and yet the impression one gets from the Security Council in particular is that it is not fully fit for purpose anymore,” said Rein Tammsaar, Estonia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“This stark reality undermines directly the credibility of the council, as well as of the U.N. and its authority,” said Tammsaar, whose country is one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters within the U.N. and NATO.

The Western world’s laser focus on the conflict in Ukraine, meanwhile, has frustrated other countries in the global south as other dire humanitarian catastrophes—conflict in Sudan, coups across Africa, the migration crisis in Central America, and a lot of climate-related disasters—struggle for resources and high-level attention.

Some of the world’s most influential leaders are skipping the U.N. General Assembly High Level week, underscoring the challenges the institution faces to maintain its status as the go-to multilateral forum for tackling global challenges. The leaders of China, Russia, India, France, and the United Kingdom are passing on the confab. U.S. President Joe Biden will be the sole leader of the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members to attend.

“With how fractured everything at the U.N. is these days, UNGA may become more a space for grandstanding than a space for any meaningful diplomacy to happen,” said Akila Radhakrishnan, the president of the Global Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Many officials and experts are skeptical the U.N can adapt to changing times. Then again, as the U.N.’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjold, said: “[T]he United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.”

The U.N. still serves as a powerful venue for smaller states to make their voices heard. Its annual summit is an important barometer for what world leaders aim to tackle in the coming years, and a litmus test of whether the United Nations can revive momentum in its ambitious sustainable development goals and efforts to tackle climate change. Here’s what to expect next week.

1. Zelensky steals the show

The U.N.’s sustainable development goals and the war in Ukraine are likely to dominate next week’s meetings, but not without some tension. In the early days of the war, Western officials rankled their counterparts from the developing world in failing to balance the shock of the Russian invasion with other pressing global issues. “You had Western diplomats going into meetings about famine in the Horn of Africa or sea level rise and talking about Russia and Ukraine. That created a lot of resentment,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, who added that Western messaging around the conflict has since improved.

An in-person appearance from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is all but guaranteed to be the focal point of the media’s coverage at least, as the comedian-turned-president has perfected the art of making barnstorming speeches before world leaders.

“If there’s any issue at the U.N. that currently has traction, it’s Ukraine,” said Radhakrishnan. “That is a good thing, but it means Ukraine is crowding out the space for attention on a lot of other crises,” she said, citing Syria, Myanmar, and Sudan.

Another leader who is likely to draw a lot of attention is Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva. With the Russian, Chinese, and Indian leaders expected to skip the summit, Lula is the de facto spokesperson of the world’s major non-Western powers, but he’s also someone that Washington can work with. “He is the charismatic face of the global south,” Gowan said. The Brazilian president is scheduled to co-host an event on labor protections with Biden.

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2. Grim News on the U.N.’s Development Goals

In 2015, with much fanfare and optimism, the United Nations launched a collection of “sustainable development goals,” or SDGs, aimed at tackling some of the most pressing global challenges—poverty, access to clean water, environmental protection, gender inequalities, and quality education—with specific targets to hit by 2030. This General Assembly marks the halftime review of how the world is progressing on those goals, and the results are not good. Take gender equality, for example. At the current global rate of dismantling barriers for women’s rights and gender inequalities, it will take 300 years to achieve full gender equality, according to the U.N.’s own reports.

Many experts and U.N.-based diplomats say progress was stalled, and in some cases reversed, thanks to the global coronavirus pandemic, as well as the global effects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other major humanitarian and environmental disasters. But member states’ own inaction and lack of ambition had a lot to do with it, too.

“Unless we act now, the 2030 Agenda will become an epitaph for a world that might have been,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres wrote in a midterm progress report on the SDGs released ahead of the upcoming summit.

Guterres is holding out hope that the SDG Summit, organized on the sidelines of the General Assembly, will recharge momentum for the 2030 agenda.

“I love the idea that we’re all about to go into the locker room at halftime on the SDGs,” Michelle Milford Morse of the U.N. Foundation said in a piece for the nonprofit advocacy organization. “And we’re down and we’re losing, and, yes, we feel a little demoralized. But we’ve got to get back on the field, and we need to imagine winning this game.”

3. Can Guterres catalyze action on climate change?

Another year of record-shattering heat and a cascade of deadly environmental disasters fueled by human-caused climate change has ramped up pressure on world leaders to tackle what Biden called the “only existential threat humanity faces.”

An influential U.N. panel on climate change warned that the world could, within a decade or so, pass a crucial “tipping point”—the point at which the earth warms 1.5 degrees Celsius, triggering cascading and more calamitous climate change effects. Guterres has made and will make climate change his focus. But the audience is distracted.

“His speeches have gotten more and more dark over the last couple of years. He is basically up there screaming doom to the assembled policymakers,” said Anjali Dayal, an associate professor of international politics at Fordham University.

Guterres and other U.N. leaders want member states to cut carbon emissions but also to get climate finance operative; the countries worst-hit are those that have done least to deserve it. At the G-20 summit last week, countries for the first time agreed it would cost almost $6 trillion for the developing world to meet climate goals by 2030, with a further $4 trillion required every year if they are to reach net-zero emissions targets by 2050.

“We see this story now almost every year, it’s a sort of tragic cycle where the U.N. releases more data showing we’re not doing enough on climate change. There is a side event at the General Assembly that is meant to trigger a new level of ambition. Then everyone descends on COP, and the results are ultimately underwhelming,” said Gowan, of the International Crisis Group.

4. Paralysis over security council reform 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine laid bare the impotence of the Security Council to deliver on its primary goal of maintaining international peace, and reinvigorated long-standing calls for reform. The problem is, the Security Council’s ills are a feature, not a bug.

“In order to make sure that the Security Council can fulfill the tasks set by the U.N. Charter, there is no alternative to adjusting the structure and working methods of the Security Council while further reinforcing the power of the U.N. General Assembly,” said Tammsaar, the Estonian ambassador.

There has been progress around the fringes. Biden endorsed expanding the Security Council to include new permanent members from Africa as well as Latin America and the Caribbean. “The Security Council should reflect today’s global realities, not global realities from nearly eight decades ago,” Biden’s envoy to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said during a speech in April.

A resolution, presented by Lichtenstein and adopted last year, will see members of the permanent five come before the General Assembly each time they wield their veto power to explain their decision. Another measure by France and Mexico in 2015 and supported by a majority of member states calls on the five to voluntarily suspend their use of the veto in instances of mass atrocities. “There should be no veto right if there is a suspicion that the one who uses it may have acted against the international law,” Tammsaar said.