UNGA Kicks Off Amid Dysfunction

The annual pilgrimage of world leaders to the United Nations headquarters in New York struck a false note on Sunday—though it certainly wasn’t the fault of renowned soprano Renée Fleming, who serenaded the delegates as they took their seats. Events quickly took an interesting turn as the Russian delegation, engaging in last-minute brinksmanship, tried to shoehorn in a surprise amendment to the outcome document of the Summit of the Future, which came ahead of the high-level U.N. General Assembly week.

Joe Biden will address the assembly for the last time as the president of the United States on Tuesday amid other speeches this week from royalty, presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers. But for the two days beforehand, politicians and top diplomats convened at the Summit of the Future, a one-off event initiated by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who urged world leaders to rethink the U.N. system, which he perceives as not fit for purpose to solve modern-day problems.

However, the acrimonious negotiations over the summit’s outcome document—the Pact for the Future—only underscored the U.N. system’s dysfunction. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and amid spiraling conflict in the Middle East, many U.N. watchers say the system has become a venue for posturing rather than a place for parties with different interests to come together to reach compromise.

The 56-page Pact for the Future covers topics from artificial intelligence to gender equality and reflects input from the 193 U.N. member states. Much of the text treads familiar ground, but Guterres hoped to spark debate that would reshape global governance structures. It’s far from clear if that will be the eventual outcome. David Miliband, the chief executive of the International Rescue Committee and a former U.K. politician, preferred to reframe the debate: “The point about international humanitarian law is not that it needs to be changed—it needs to be observed,” he said.

Down to the wire, challenges persisted from 19 countries—particularly petrostates that aimed to soften the pact’s stance on climate change. Some diplomats griped that in certain regards, the document fell short of the standards set at the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference, known as COP. “We’re just trying to bring ourselves back to language agreed at COP,” one senior diplomat said last Friday, dubbing Russia’s lengthy list of objections to passages on topics such as disarmament and digital technology as “mischief.”

On Sunday morning, the U.N. General Assembly was compelled to consider a last-minute amendment proposed by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin that would have diluted the pact and called on the secretary-general to submit a report next year, slowing down the process. Vershinin said Russia would “distance itself from the consensus on this document and on the Global Digital Compact” if its amendment was not included in the pact’s text.

Representing Africa’s 54 member states, which opposed Russia’s amendment, the Republic of Congo made a motion not to vote on it. Only seven countries including Russia supported the amendment, while 143 voted not to consider it. Then, the assembly shrugged off the objections of Russia and a handful of like-minded member states and celebrated the approval of the pact by consensus.

Despite the contentious negotiations, much in the pact could help shape everyday life, especially on issues such as climate change and new digital technology, said Robert Wood, the deputy U.S. envoy to the United Nations. He said U.S. diplomats had invested significant time and energy, from the early stages of drafting the document more than a year ago to building as much consensus as possible, particularly with countries in the global south.

Guterres, who may have conceived of the Pact for the Future as a legacy-building project, spent much of last week publicly pleading delegates to compromise. His remarks betrayed some exasperation, such as when he said at a curtain-raising press briefing that “the secretary-general of the United Nations has very limited power, and it’s also absolutely true that he has very little capacity to mobilize financial resources. So, no power and no money.”

At the U.N. headquarters, the tension is palpable amid global conflicts, as well as financial challenges within the organization. Guterres’s plea to member states that are in arrears on their financial contributions to the U.N. to pay up reflects this strain more than a year into a hiring freeze and other cutbacks. “Many of the staff remain worried about the state of the U.N.’s budget and the implications that will have both on their contract renewals and the amount of work placed on them because of the hiring freeze,” Maya Ungar, a U.N. analyst at the International Crisis Group, wrote in an email.

There was a notable absence at the Summit of the Future: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president. Last week, rumors circulated in the corridors of the U.N. that she might take the stage in what some diplomats hoped would be a dress rehearsal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke on Monday instead. The fear of a second term for former President Donald Trump runs deep at the United Nations; as president, he showed disdain for multilateral institutions and made funding cuts to U.N. organizations.

The high-level week at the U.N. General Assembly will feature a few debut appearances. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, elected in July after the death of his predecessor Ebrahim Raisi, will address the assembly on Tuesday; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who also took office in July, will speak on Friday. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron will return after a year’s absence and speak on Wednesday amid challenges with his new government back home. As for China and Russia, Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will again delegate representation at the summit to their ministers.

Doubtless all eyes will be on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Netanyahu will address the assembly ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that plunged the region into renewed conflict—and amid escalation across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Zelensky scored a hat trick: speaking to the Summit of the Future on Monday, a Security Council session about Ukraine on Tuesday, and the General Assembly on Wednesday.

Zelensky stole the show at the opening of the last year’s high-level week; this year, Ukraine hasn’t even made some lists of top concerns at the United Nations. Nevertheless, the Security Council will convene for a briefing on Tuesday about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the Security Council will hold an open debate on peace and security that will include the often-overlooked conflict in Sudan. Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf will speak, and the meeting will be chaired by Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob, whose country holds the rotating Security Council presidency this month. “Each of these conflicts endangers regional peace and security, and the threat of a veto should not cause us to shy away from discussing these topics and trying to find solutions,” Golob wrote in a message.

The conflict in Sudan is gaining increased attention this year in New York. Renewed clashes between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have left the U.N. on the sidelines for more than a year, even as the threat of famine looms. Diplomats believe that as the Sudanese conflict doesn’t align with the geostrategic interests of any of the five permanent Security Council members—either directly or indirectly—the U.N. should be able to do more to address the crisis.

The real action at the U.N. high-level week takes place in the wings. Zelensky will be busy with meetings on the margins to secure support for Ukraine’s peace proposal and seek fresh arms and permissions to use them to strike inside Russia. Netanyahu will likely advocate for Israel’s security concerns at the U.N., where he once served an unhappy stint as the country’s envoy. Last week, deepening conflict in Gaza and Lebanon took center stage every day.

At afterparties this week, one hot topic may be recent remarks by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the Council on Foreign Relations, in which  she expressed the U.S. commitment to support two new permanent Security Council seats for Africa and a rotating seat for small island developing states.

Wood, the deputy U.S. envoy, told Foreign Policy that the United States fundamentally disagrees with the view that the Security Council is not a useful mechanism to address the problems of the world today while expressing commitment to trying to bring about Security Council reform through the intergovernmental negotiations process. “We think now this is an opportunity to reshape the council in a way that makes it more credible, legitimate, and effective in the eyes of the international community,” he said in an interview on Monday.

But what lingers after the last champagne cork has been swept away at the end of the week could be the Sunday morning vote in the General Assembly. The countries supporting Russia were Belarus, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria—a tally closely mirroring that of the lopsided General Assembly votes following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Russia was largely isolated.

Moscow had since seemed to make diplomatic headway with global south countries through strategic talks and some clever grain diplomacy—but it was not so on Sunday. “Developing countries had been making it clear behind the scenes that they didn’t want Moscow to block the pact,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. “I think that the Russians were trying to look tough but in the end just looked a bit silly.”

Time will tell whether Russia has overplayed its hand—but at the very least, some observers felt the Sunday gambit was a bit of clumsy diplomacy.