World leaders arriving at the United Nations for the annual high-level meetings of the General Assembly next week will find an organization that essentially has settled into a state of permanent crisis. The situation in Turtle Bay, the U.N.’s New York City neighborhood and insider nickname, may not be as fragile as it was during their last conclave a year ago, when U.S. President Donald Trump had just cut swathes of U.S. funding for the world body and diplomats and U.N. officials speculated that he might announce that the United States would abandon it altogether. As it happened, he gave a meandering speech about problems with a U.N. escalator and his teleprompter. Now, the fear that the United States is on track to tank the organization has subsided, but the U.N. is still in poor shape.
The challenges facing the U.N. include recurrent financial shortfalls, political irrelevance in major crises from Ukraine to Sudan to the Persian Gulf, and operational headwinds even where it does retain a foothold. As U.S. budget cuts have taken a toll, U.N. officials have had to shrink blue helmet peace operations by up to a fifth of personnel and reduce humanitarian aid to millions of civilians in need. Some diplomats are pinning their hopes on the fact that a new secretary-general will replace incumbent António Guterres at the start of 2027, and a fresh leader could breathe new life into the organization. But the Security Council, required by the U.N. Charter to recommend a candidate to the General Assembly, seems quite far from deciding on who should fill the position.
But the annual General Assembly show must go on. Politicians and diplomats will spend next week dashing between speeches, side events, receptions, and “high-level breakfasts.” There will be opportunities to underline why multilateralism matters. There will also be warning signs of how hard countries find it to cooperate these days. Here is our guide for what to watch out for at “UNGA.”
The Speakers: Absentees, Farewells, and Disruptors
More than 130 presidents and prime ministers will be in New York, roughly the same number as last year, but there will be some notable absentees. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is visiting Washington to meet with Trump on Sept. 24, has not scheduled time for a dog-leg to New York. Xi has only attended the General Assembly in person once, in 2015. The fact that the leaders of the world’s two main powers will be meeting bilaterally while their counterparts from smaller countries continue to give speeches in New York could make the U.N. look like a sideshow. There are rumors around the U.N. that Xi might make a last-minute appearance. If he were to do so, he could attract almost as much attention as Trump and stoke discussions of China’s potential to act as a leader in U.N. affairs. But he may still stay away.
A number of other significant, non-Western leaders will not show, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. In fact, more than half the leaders of the 11 current members of the BRICS grouping, which just had its summit in India, will skip the U.N. General Assembly gathering, which may be a sign that some of the major players in the so-called “Global South” prefer the smaller grouping (which expanded from its core five members in 2024). Russia’s Vladmir Putin, who was at the BRICS meeting, will keep his distance as well. Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva chose to send a minister to India and will attend the U.N. in person, but he has the incentive that Brazil – by time-honored tradition – is the first member state to speak in New York.
Those looking for liberal champions will mourn the fact that Canada’s Mark Carney, who has gained a reputation for hard-hitting diagnoses of the state of global order, may drop by the U.N. but is not expected to give Canada’s formal address to the General Assembly as he needs to attend to parliamentary business in Ottawa. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose country ranks among the U.N.’s top five largest funders, is not expected to attend, as his party is facing difficult local elections. The majority of European leaders will, however, be present. French President Emmanuel Macron, known for his fluent if lengthy defenses of multilateralism, will make his final appearance at the General Assembly before next year’s French elections. His Finnish counterpart Alexander Stubb, who like Carney, has emphasized the need for greater middle-power cooperation in defense of the international system (though in a decidedly different vein from BRICS), will lead a special discussion on “reaffirming the promise of peace.”
Outgoing Secretary-General Guterres will have a last chance to make his case for global solidarity, which he has continued to champion despite the fragmentation of the world order around him. U.N. insiders also will be listening to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who specializes in powerful speeches demanding greater global cooperation. For a time, Mottley was widely cited as a possible heir apparent to Guterres, but she has made clear that she will not vie for the office, as the Trump administration has attacked her priorities of development and climate change.
Diplomats will give equal or more attention to leaders from the countries at the center of current crises. While Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy have been the center of attention in recent U.N. gatherings, President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will inevitably be in focus given the roiling crisis in the Middle East. Both are liable to strike defiant tones. Pezeshkian used his own appearance at the BRICS summit to underline that the United States and Israel are guilty of aggression against his country, while faulting the U.N. Security Council for failing to resolve the war. He is unlikely to veer from those lines. Netanyahu, a past master at giving combative speeches from the General Assembly podium, will probably mount an especially robust defense of Israel’s policies with an eye to upcoming parliamentary elections at home. He may have particularly choice words for new U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who will be appearing at the U.N. for the first time, for his government’s decision to impose sanctions on Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied territories.
All Eyes (Still) on Trump
However well or poorly most leaders perform, Trump’s appearance early in proceedings on Tuesday, Sept. 22, inevitably will garner the most attention. After his bizarre speech last year – which covered the poor quality of marble in the U.N. building and autocue incidents – nobody can be sure what exactly he will say, including his speechwriters.
A brief survey of U.S. policy towards the U.N. in the last 12 months offers mixed clues. The administration has continued to bash the multilateral system, pulling out of 31 U.N. entities in January that the president deemed “small and obscure,” though they included prominent institutions addressing women’s rights (the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as U.N. Women) and climate change (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC), among others. The Trump administration also has launched an assault on the International Criminal Court even more severe than during his first term. Trump’s brief campaign to elevate his Board of Peace – originally approved by the Security Council specifically as a mechanism to implement a ceasefire for Gaza and provide post-war governance – as an alternative international peacemaking center to the U.N., flopped. But taken together with the administration’s decisions to ride roughshod over the U.N. Charter in its attacks on Venezuela and Iran, not to mention its threatened gunboat diplomacy against Greenland, Trump’s flirtation with the Board left officials in Turtle Bay fearful of further U.S. steps to weaken the U.N.
Yet at the same time, parts of the administration have been working through the U.N., not solely around it. The State Department has restored roughly $4 billion in funding to U.N. relief agencies since December, effectively acknowledging that organizations like the World Food Programme (WFP) – led by a U.S. national since 1992 – can deliver humanitarian assistance at a scale that others cannot. Washington is also processing a payment of $725 million towards the U.N.’s regular budget, which will ensure that it does not lose its vote in the General Assembly for serial non-payment, and has promised to catch up on some of its missed financial contributions for blue helmet peace operations. While U.S. officials still insist that U.N. deployments should shrink and become more cost-efficient, they have turned to the world organization for logistical support for anti-gang operations in Haiti and acknowledged that U.N. missions in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo can support U.S. peace efforts.
Diplomats in New York give credit to U.S. Permanent Representative Mike Waltz, who was assigned to New York after a difficult run as National Security Advisor and arrived in post last September, for striking a tough but pragmatic approach to multilateral deal-making. While Waltz is sometimes highly critical of the U.N. in public and on social media – insisting that it must go on a fiscal “diet” – he has convinced his counterparts that he sees the organization as genuinely useful to U.S. interests. U.N. officials say that mid-ranking U.S. officials also are relatively pragmatic in their dealings – though this differs issue by issue – and a little less insistent on wholesale deletions of the word “diversity” and “gender” from U.N. documents than they were early in the administration.
Nonetheless, everyone recognizes that Trump will strike a tone of his own choosing. If he feels like it, he could complain about recent cases in which U.N. bodies have failed to back U.S. priorities. These include the crisis in the Persian Gulf, as China and Russia have used their vetoes to stop the Security Council from endorsing U.S.-backed resolutions encouraging international action to open the Strait of Hormuz. Beijing and Moscow have also pushed back strongly on a recent U.S. proposal to expand a U.N. arms embargo that currently covers Darfur to all of Sudan, in an effort to get the country’s warring factions back to the negotiating table. Trump may not be aware of the finer points of such negotiations. But if the administration continues to encounter pushback on its diplomatic initiatives in New York, it could dampen some enthusiasm from the U.S. to work through, and not around, the U.N.
Crises In and Out of the Spotlight
Given the turbulence of the past year, it might seem natural for the General Assembly to focus on resolving some of the many crises on the global agenda. But discussions of these theatres are likely to be piecemeal and without major breakthroughs. Last year, there were intense discussions of the still-festering Gaza conflict in and around the opening weeks of the annual General Assembly session, including the culmination of a French-Saudi drive to get more countries to recognize the State of Palestine. While France will convene a follow-up meeting on the two-state solution this year, it will likely lack the urgency and attention of last year’s gathering. Since the Security Council endorsed the U.S. ceasefire proposal between Israel and Hamas last year, discussions of the Palestinian question have notably decelerated in both the Assembly and the Council, although Arab and European countries have tried to focus attention on Israel’s accelerated de facto takeover of the West Bank. As was the case last year, U.S. visa restrictions mean that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will only be able to give his speech via video link.
France, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month, will also convene a high-level meeting of the Council on Ukraine, most likely on Sept. 23. While the war has escalated over the summer, it is now difficult to get non-European U.N. members to focus on that conflict. When the Council held a similar meeting on Ukraine last September, ministers from NATO countries turned out in large numbers to speak, but virtually no ministers from other regions, other than those holding elected seats on the Council, turned up. Few see advantage in intervening on the war when doing so will mean offending Russia, and the U.S. position on ending the war continues to swing in a highly unpredictable fashion.
European countries will try to focus renewed attention on the civil war in Sudan, which by many measures is the biggest humanitarian emergency globally, but has been overshadowed by Gaza and Ukraine. However, similar diplomatic pushes on the issue, including one supported by the Biden administration in 2024, have petered out without much effect. Last year, 151 leaders referred to Gaza in their main speeches, but only 62 cited Sudan. The response may sadly be similarly muted this year, too.
But the biggest gap in the General Assembly’s discussions of global crises may be the situation in the Persian Gulf. Since shortly after this year’s U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28 and Tehran’s subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, many U.N. members have been worried about the impacts on their food and energy supplies. Guterres has floated ideas for a U.N. role in facilitating safe passage of essential goods through the Strait. It would seem logical for the General Assembly to debate the issue. In 2022, the Biden administration organized a well-received set of meetings related to food security associated with the Russia-Ukraine War. There is no over-arching convening of that type this year, although Germany, the WFP, and a coalition of organizations focusing on food supplies will host a meeting on Sept. 22 focused on “realigning global food action for food crises in times of disruption.” (As an indicator of how the General Assembly works, the fact that this will take just 75 minutes tells you all you need to know.) The Gulf crisis will echo through other meetings: Ireland is holding an event on humanitarian diplomacy, while India is trying to draw attention to the fate of seafarers in conflict after many of its nationals were trapped in the Gulf. But for admirers of the U.N. who want to see the body manage global crises, there is not very much to go on.
AI and Pandemics
Two globally relevant issues that will be in the limelight at the General Assembly are artificial intelligence and pandemics. Talks on AI within the U.N. are broadly divided between states that believe the regulation of AI should be in the hands of a small circle of technologically advanced nations and firms or a wider group of international actors. These divergent approaches will be reflected across the various side events during high-level week. Guterres is putting his weight behind a Digital Cooperation Day on Sept. 21 organized by the U.N. Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET, which focuses on the technological interests of the Global South), with an eye towards setting up a new fund to channel money to help developing countries benefit from AI. The United States and European countries are skeptical of this approach, and the potential costs. Separately, AI firms such as Anthropic and Open AI are hosting events of their own during high-level week, with an emphasis on responsible private-sector leadership. These divergent approaches point as much to global divisions as to shared interests.
This debate may take on a new edge after a phalanx of AI industry leaders in the United States announced in recent days that they favor slowing the development of the technology to ensure safety measures can keep pace to reduce existential threats to humanity. Some might argue that this shows the companies are gaining a sense of responsibility – or that more global regulation is necessary to avoid a disaster. That simplifies a complex debate, and some tech companies and U.N. members are trying to straddle the divide. But the standoff between modes of managing AI may be a growing theme at the U.N.
Those who think U.N. members will ultimately opt for a cooperative approach to collective problems should also cast a nervous eye at a high-level meeting on Sept. 25 on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR). Five years ago, many observers believed that the COVID-19 pandemic offered clear proof of the need for better multilateral cooperation in response to global threats. Yet this meeting has turned into a demonstration of why such cooperation is hard: The U.S. is opposing any references to the World Health Organization – which the Trump administration has quit – and aligning with Russia to oppose references to gender issues. As a result, the outcome text, meant to be adopted by consensus, will have to go to a vote instead, sending a message that the U.N. cannot even unite to fight global plagues.
And What About That Secretary-General Race?
As officials while away their time listening to politicians make pro-forma speeches, attention may drift to the question du jour at U.N. headquarters: Who will replace Guterres as secretary-general next year? Adding to the excitement, the Security Council will hold the third in a series of straw polls on Friday, Sept. 18, with all 15 members voting anonymously. The polls, to date, have favored three candidates of the eight currently in the running: senior U.N. trade official and Costa Rican national Rebeca Grynspan, Argentinian director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi, and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s popular ambassador to the U.N. Council members and individuals associated with the various campaigns all admit that the numbers are liable to shift. It is not yet clear who the United States, China, and Russia in particular can agree upon. There may be more clues after the high-level week, as France (as Council president) could run a fourth straw poll shortly afterwards with colored ballots to differentiate between the Council members having veto powers and the elected members.
It is possible that one of the current candidates could firm up their pathway to success through September. Both Guterres and his predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, managed to lock up their races in October 2006 and 2016 respectively. But cynics inside the U.N. system speculate that the veto powers, and in particular the United States, may upset the race by introducing some new candidates late in the process.
In recent weeks, diplomats have started to speculate seriously about a scenario in which the Security Council is unable to agree on any candidate at all by the end of the year, causing a succession crisis. That is still improbable, not least because the veto powers in the Security Council that dominate the process will understand that such a breakdown would raise doubts about their competence to manage U.N. affairs more generally. But the mere fact that it is now a regular talking point is a sign of exactly how chaotic U.N. diplomacy has become in recent years. We’ve heard that one European foreign minister involved in the selection asked secretary-general candidates why on earth they would want to run the organization at this time. We do not know their replies. But when leaders, officials, and the global media leave the U.N. bubble at the end of the high-level week, they may agree it is a good question.
