UN General Assembly Convenes Amid Global Challenges and Tensions

Column | World leaders gather at a U.N. desperate to save itself

Ongoing crises in Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine have underscored the inefficacy of the world's foremost decision-making body. Great power competition may be to blame. You're reading an excerpt from the WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The backdrop to this week's gathering of world leaders at the United Nations could hardly be more grim. Wars, increasing anxiety over the state of democracy and deep geopolitical divisions roil the global scene. At the dais of the U.N.'s General Assembly, dignitaries will once more appeal to the virtues of cooperation. But the august institution itself is grappling with its inability to reckon with a surging tide of challenges. The U.N. Security Council, dominated by the veto-wielding victors of World War II, has long been derided as an anachronism. But the ongoing wars in Ukraine and over Gaza have only underscored the inefficacy of what is the world's most significant decision-making body. Tough collective action to rein in Russia's invasion of its neighbor has proved impossible with the Kremlin on the Council, while the United States has for months shielded Israel from international pressure, stymying efforts to force a cease-fire between Israel and militant group Hamas as the death toll mounts. Officials in Turtle Bay looked on feebly over the weekend as Israel's fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon threatened to sprawl into a full-blown war. Indeed, the conflicts in the Middle East have strained the entire U.N. system. Court cases against Israel and Israeli officials are running through the International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s top court, and the U.N.-backed International Criminal Court. The investigations have proved polarizing, hailed by some governments as necessary enforcement of international law even as U.S. and Israeli officials cast them as spectacles loaded with bias. The U.N.'s main agency for Palestinians, known by the abbreviation UNRWA, is in Israel's crosshairs, saddled with allegations regarding a small fraction of its Gaza staff linked to Hamas activity. The controversy has led to funding cuts when UNRWA is the most crucial deliverer of humanitarian aid and other support to Palestinians. Beyond the headline-grabbing conflicts, the international community embodied in the United Nations has failed to stop the disastrous civil war in Sudan, which seems likely to bring about one of the worst famines in recent years, or the steady disintegration of Myanmar's state under its coup-plotting junta. (The international humanitarian advocacy group Oxfam has charted almost two dozen conflicts still raging, in part thanks to U.N. gridlock.) It has failed to adequately resolve spiraling post-pandemic debt crises plaguing countries in the developing world. It has presided over the displacement of a record number of people in communities torn apart by strife or collapsed by climate change. "The truth is that the Security Council has systematically failed in relation to the capacity to put an end to the most dramatic conflicts that we face today: Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine," U.N. Secretary General António Guterres lamented in a recent interview with Al Jazeera, adding that the Council, encumbered by the rekindled rivalries of great powers, represented a "severe handicap" to the work of the U.N.'s various agencies in the field. On Sunday, Guterres helped open the Summit of the Future, a two-day session parallel to other U.N. meetings. The summit will deliver a "pact" agreed by consensus by member states outlining new governance concepts for 21st century problems, aiming to address risks posed by artificial intelligence, the difficulties financing the global sustainable development goals set out in previous decades, and the need to reform the Security Council. "We don't need a crystal ball to see that 21st century challenges require problem-solving mechanisms that are more effective, networked and inclusive; that serious power imbalances in global institutions must be adjusted and updated; and that our institutions must draw on the expertise and representation of all of humanity," Guterres said in a statement. But the diplomatic wrangling regarding the language of the pact illustrated the inherent difficulties of the project, with no meaningful pathway for actual Security Council reform emerging and Russia thwarting attempts to put nuclear disarmament back on the international agenda. Analysts still saw silver linings. "Despite frustrations about the U.N.'s effectiveness, the attention and energy that member states have devoted to this exercise reveals the value that they continue to place on the body, as well as their willingness to invest in its future," wrote Stewart Patrick and Minh-Thu Pham of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They believe that the U.N. remains very much alive -- if unwell -- and that restoring its health and vitality matters." Great power competition is increasingly defining the ethos of the Security Council, where the United States, Russia and China seemingly take turns playing spoiler. Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group think tank, laid out in a paper earlier this year how what's happening in the chamber may echo its 20th century past. "Many U.N. officials and diplomats expect the Council to return to something closer to its Cold War self: a space for sporadic but useful cooperation among the great powers," Gowan explained. "The [permanent five members of the Security Council] -- and above all the U.S., China and Russia -- have a choice. They can use the Security Council solely as a stage for political theater, or preserve it as a safety valve that they can use, albeit intermittently, in a period of high tensions. We do not know which they will choose." President Joe Biden, in his final appearance as head of state at the General Assembly, will likely summon the language of the moment. He'll almost certainly speak to the central importance of strengthening multilateral institutions, upholding international norms and rules, and boosting partnerships with allies. But he'll face hardening skepticism from officials who see, especially in the U.S.'s conduct during Israel's campaign in Gaza, a country that doesn't always walk its talk. Politicians and advocates are clamoring for change. Last week, Finnish President Alexander Stubb called for an end to single veto powers -- where only one of the permanent members can block action. Ahead of the Summit of the Future, David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, floated the idea that veto powers in the Security Council get suspended when the body is reckoning with mass atrocity events. The summit itself looks set to accelerate conversations about expanding the Council to better reflect the world as it is today. Still, in a report released Monday, Oxfam argued that the focus on great power competition was a sideshow to the deeper problems facing much of humanity. "While some have blamed the deadlock solely on rising geopolitical tensions between powerful countries, such a focus is incomplete," the organization notes. Instead, the report suggests that the interests of a burgeoning "global oligarchy" had impeded international cooperation around climate change, pandemic response and punishing offshore tax havens. "A key reason for failures of international cooperation is extreme economic inequality."

World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- 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." 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." ___ Edith M. Lederer, chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years.

World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy

World leaders at the U.N. gathering are urged to collaborate on pressing issues and modernize post-WWII institutions. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres emphasizes the need for a new commitment to multilateralism amidst geopolitical divisions, conflicts, climate change, and technological advancements. The summit's success hinges on overcoming objections from nations like Russia.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 Agnes 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.

World leaders are gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- 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." 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. 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." Edith M. Lederer, chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years.

World leaders gathering in New York for UN General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy

UNITED NATIONS -- 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." 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. 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." ___ Edith M. Lederer, chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years.

World Leaders Are Gathering in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. the Outlook Is Gloomy

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- 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." ___ Edith M. Lederer, chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press, has covered foreign affairs for more than 50 years. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

World leaders are gathering for the UN General Assembly. The outlook is gloomy

World leaders at the U.N. gathering are urged to collaborate on pressing issues and modernize post-WWII institutions to address future threats. The summit, initiated by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, aims to tackle conflicts, climate change, inequalities, and new technologies. The event precedes the high-level meeting of world leaders in New York City.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 started Sunday, two days before the high-level meeting of world leaders begins at the sprawling U.N. compound in New York City. The General Assembly approved the summit's main outcome document - a 42-page "Pact of the Future" - on Sunday morning with a bang of the gavel by Assembly President Philemon Yang signifying consensus, after the body voted 143-7 with 15 abstentions against considering Russian-proposed amendments to significantly water it down. The pact is a blueprint to address global challenges from conflicts and climate change to artificial intelligence and reforming the U.N. and global institutions. Its impact will depend on its implementation by the assembly's 193 member nations. "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 Agnes 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 from 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."

U.N. Meets Amid a Backdrop of Growing Chaos and Violence

UNITED NATIONS -- When the United Nations General Assembly convenes Tuesday, attention will focus on the major wars raging in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and Sudan, amid a reckoning that neither the global body nor world powers have been able to end the violence. By all accounts, the world has descended deeper into chaos and turmoil since last year's annual gathering, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Sudan's civil war cast shadows. Now, those have been eclipsed by the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the war that followed in Gaza, with its catastrophic humanitarian toll on Palestinians. The United Nations itself has had a turbulent year. A record number of its staff, 220 in total, have been killed in the war in Gaza. Its humanitarian resources, a crucial backbone of the global relief effort, are overstretched and underfunded as needs multiply rapidly because of wars, climate change and natural disasters. At the same time, its leadership struggles to play a meaningful role in conflict mediation. "International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them," said Secretary-General António Guterres in a news conference last week. "We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts -- not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond." The Security Council, which typically holds one session on the sidelines of the General Assembly, is scheduled to meet three times this year, on Ukraine, Gaza and the broader question of leadership challenges in resolving conflicts. President Joe Biden will address the General Assembly for the last time as his presidency draws to a close. With the exception of the European allies, the majority of U.N. member states have been highly critical of Biden's staunch support of Israel and the United States' blocking multiple calls for a cease-fire during the first eight months of the war. Biden has in recent months led an effort, with Egypt and Qatar, to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of all the hostages held by Hamas. But the talks have stalled, and the electronic devices attack in Lebanon last week and an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed at least nine people, seem to be dimming prospects of any breakthrough. French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend this year after both France and Britain sat out last year's gathering. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will deliver three speeches in person, including at the Security Council meeting on Ukraine, where he is expected to present a new peace plan and renew his pleas to authorize Ukraine's use of Western missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia, diplomats said. "It feels like we say this every year, but this year's meeting could not come at a more critical and more challenging moment," said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, at a briefing with reporters. "The list of crises and conflicts that demand attention and action only seems to grow and grow." Thomas-Greenfield said the United States would pursue three policy priorities during the General Assembly: international cooperation on peace and stability, improving global humanitarian aid responses, and revamping the Security Council. Iran's new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, making his debut on the international stage, will be trying to present his government as moderate, pragmatic and open to diplomacy with the West, in contrast with his hard-line conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. That might not be an easy sell. Iran's support of a network of militias in Lebanon, in Yemen and in Gaza and the West Bank, and recent reports that it is supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for its war against Ukraine, pose obstacles to defusing tensions with the West that Pezeshkian will struggle to overcome. Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations with the International Crisis Group, said that the prospects for breakthroughs on Gaza or Ukraine at the assembly were bleak. But Sudan, Gowan said, could be an exception. "I actually think the General Assembly could do some good on Sudan, probably in a way that it cannot on Gaza and Ukraine," he said. "There is an emerging feeling among a lot of the U.N. membership that the U.N. failed unnecessarily on Sudan and that it's time to push for more diplomacy." Climate change and rising sea levels will join with restructuring of the Security Council and the World Bank as major topics for discussion. For years, countries in Africa, Asia and South America have complained that the Security Council's core group of five permanent, veto-wielding members -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China -- is outdated, overlooking economic powers like India, Brazil and Japan, as well as the entire continent of Africa. This month Thomas-Greenfield said that the United States supported adding two permanent African members to the Security Council and proposed starting preliminary negotiations on the matter. Washington also supports adding seats for Germany, India and Japan, but none of the new permanent members would have veto power. Any changes to the Security Council require altering the U.N. charter and the approval of all five current members, a tall task given the divisions among Russia, China and the United States. In an effort to spearhead the changes, Guterres will host a conference Sunday and Monday, before the General Assembly. The goal is for countries to approve three negotiated documents that are meant to serve as blueprints for addressing current and future challenges on climate, artificial intelligence, conflict and restructuring U.N. institutions. "So many of the challenges that we face today were not on the radar 80 years ago when our multilateral institutions were born," Guterres said. "Our founders understood that times would change."