UN Future Summit seeks to unite a fractured world

Can’t we all just get along? That is the question world leaders will grapple with this weekend at the United Nations Summit of the Future, a high-level effort to reinvigorate global cooperation at a time of unprecedented pessimism about this generation’s ability to tackle a host of existential global threats — global warming, mass displacement, war, extreme poverty, and pandemics while addressing anxieties about the prospect of an AI-driven technological armageddon. The summit at U.N. headquarters in New York comes at a time of enormous stress on the global financial and security architecture that staved off world wars since the U.N.’s creation nearly 80 years ago, in the aftermath of World War II. In a sign of the big power divide, the U.N.’s five most influential veto-wielding powers — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — have ceased holding their traditional luncheon along the sidelines of the U.N.’s annual General Assembly debate. With negotiations entering their final lap, Russia is leading a coalition of autocratic governments, including Iran, Nicaragua, Syria, and Venezuela, in a last-ditch effort to scrap a series of contentious provisions from three declarations — the Pact for the Future, a Global Digital Compact, and a Declaration on Future Generations — which are to be endorsed on Sunday by world leaders. They include the standard menu of the autocrats’ targets: Protections for human rights, gender equality, and freedom of expression. They seek the removal of clauses that urge governments not to enact internet shutdowns, or impose economic sanctions, and the removal of language that erects legal guardrails to prevent the excessive use of electronic and digital surveillance of their citizens. The talks, said one U.N. insider, are expected to “go down to the wire.” For many, the high-level gathering provides another annual opportunity to mark the abject failure of governments to achieve the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals aimed at ending extreme poverty and inequality by the year 2030, undermining the very notion that history is bending on an arc toward progress and justice. Since 2015, when the SDGs were launched, key barometers of human well-being and progress have been sliding backward. Instead of achieving their aim of ending extreme poverty by 2030, governments are observing increasingly high levels of poverty. “We are at a time of profound global transformation,” according to the latest draft declaration on a Pact for the Future that is expected to be endorsed by world leaders at the conclusion of the summit on Sunday, Sept. 23. “We are confronted by a growing range of catastrophic and existential risks. If we do not change course, we risk tipping irreversibly into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.” “Our institutions cannot keep up because they are designed for another era, and another world,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres added glumly in an online preview on Sept. 12 alongside German President Olaf Scholz and Namibian President Nangolo Mbumba, whose governments are leading the negotiations on the future pact. “The Security Council is stuck in a time warp, international financial architecture is outdated and ineffective, and we are simply not equipped to take on a wide range of emerging issues.” The draft future pact underscores the need for greater global solidarity. It includes five overarching themes — including sustainable development, peace and security, global governance, future generation, and digital technology — and a 60-point action plan, urging countries to do everything from eradicating poverty and expanding the U.N. Security Council to devising a global governance framework for preventing war in outer space. But nearly a year of hard-fought negotiations has also exposed the cultural, religious, and geopolitical fault lines between the U.N.’s 193 member states who quarreled for months over abortion, nuclear disarmament, sanctions, financial and security council reform, and who controls the Internet. “The mood around the preparations for the Summit in NY this year has been pretty low,” Richard Gowan, the U.N. representative for the International Crisis Group, told Devex. “Most diplomats around New York are a little skeptical of what the summit can achieve. As a result, the summit will almost certainly exceed expectations because they were not set high.” “What’s good about [the future summit] is that there is a looking ahead, and an attempt to make the world today more responsive to the challenges that it’s going through. That at least is something,” Martin Kimani, the executive director of the Center for International Cooperation at New York University and the former Kenyan ambassador to the U.N., told Devex in a phone interview. “The disappointment is precisely the flip of that, which is that there is such modesty of vision, such fear of real, sweeping change.” However, some contend the reform effort is critical in laying out the case for the future of international cooperation at a time of dwindling trust among nations. “The summit of the future is in some ways a struggle to shape the future of multilateralism in the U.N. system,” a senior Asian diplomat told Devex in an interview. The diplomat spoke on condition of anonymity. “How can we really make the U.N. system better, more effective and adaptive.” The ultimate “litmus test,” for multilateralism, he said, is whether the international community can make progress on meeting the SDGs. “The SDGs are about global solidarity; they’re about creating a global safety net; they’re about reducing inequality, keeping in mind that inequality can generate strife,” he said. “You can’t on the one hand say we want a multilateral rules-based system and then do nothing about it.” Don’t expect peace to break out The roots of the future summit date back to 2020, when world leaders marked the 75th anniversary of the U.N.’s founding, issuing a declaration asking Guterres to outline his vision for a modern multilateralism to better “respond to current and future challenges.” The following year, Guterres issued Our Common Agenda, which maps out a course for the U.N. over the next 25 years. Many of Guterres’ original proposals — for instance, the creation of a Futures Lab to measure the impact of policies over the long haul and the reform of the trusteeship council established to manage decolonization to advocate on behalf of future generations — were scaled back or scrapped altogether. And there remains persistent skepticism that a decades-long push for the expansion of the U.N. Security Council — to include emerging powers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America that have emerged since World War II — will succeed this time around. The U.N. chief first proposed this summit at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis that underscored the limits of international cooperation, as poor countries struggled to gain access to vaccines available primarily in high-income countries. That challenge has been compounded by a steady procession of climate shocks, soaring indebtedness, and the realization that the global financial safety net — which relies on development banks dominated by donor nations — was incapable of delivering relief to low- and middle-income countries. The U.N.’s failure to contain wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan have contributed to the sense of pessimism. “It’s not realistic for people to expect world peace to break out overnight,” one senior Western diplomat said. But it provides an opportunity, the diplomat told Devex by email, “to have a statement of our collective commitment to multilateralism despite the difficult current geopolitical context.” “There is a sense of a lack of trust between the Global North and South right now — but that makes it all the more important to find areas of common ground,” the diplomat added. “To advance shared security and prosperity and demonstrate that multilateralism can work.” Headwinds and curveballs Michèle Griffin, director of the Summit of the Future team in the secretary-general’s office, has worked on U.N. reforms for decades. She acknowledged that the international system is on its heels, noting that the U.N. has encountered some “geopolitical curve balls” — including wars in Gaza and Ukraine — that have complicated the preparations for the future summit. “We couldn’t have faced stronger headwinds,” she said in a telephone interview. But she said the three draft declarations contain a series of “groundbreaking” achievements, including a commitment to enlarge the Security Council and redress the historical underrepresentation of Africa on the council. On Thursday, the U.S. announced its support for two permanent Security Council seats for African nations, and reiterated its backing for permanent seats for Germany, India, and Japan. It is also in favor of permanent representation for Latin America and the Caribbean, and a nonpermanent seat for small island developing states, reflecting the need to address climate change. But Washington made it clear it does not intend to give up its veto power or extend it to any new countries. “We don’t want to give up our veto power, and we do think if we expand that veto power across the board, it will make the [Security] Council more dysfunctional,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said recently in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations, noting that the other permanent members of the council are also determined to preserve their veto power. The outcome of the summit, Griffin added, preserves much of Guterres’ original vision, including the appointment of a special envoy for future generations, and a digital compact that constitutes “the first international universal framework governing new technologies, including AI.” “There are strong political signals on debt, representation of developing countries in the IFI [International Financial Institution] boards,” she added. It also addresses the underlying structural impediments that make borrowing and lending more costly in low- and middle-income countries, the fragility of financial safety nets, tax cooperation aimed at making the rich pay more, and new measurements of economic progress — beyond gross domestic product — that weigh contributions to the well-being of humanity. Griffin acknowledged the feelings of skepticism among some observers about the future pact, but said it is nevertheless worthwhile. “I think you have to in a sense judge the summit not against an ideal, but against the counterfactual, right: Are we going to be better off with this summit and the outcomes that it currently promises to deliver than not. I think the emphatic answer to that is ‘yes,’” she said. “Big picture, we still are facing a world where international cooperation shortcomings are very consequential and likely to be more consequential,” she said. “The fundamental diagnosis that the system built by our grandparents isn’t going to deliver for our grandchildren, I think, remains extremely valid.” Turning a page The U.N. summitry marks a changing of the guard, with President Joe Biden stepping down at the end of the year and Guterres hosting his final bid to consolidate his legacy at the helm of the U.N. before his term expires at the end of 2026. Biden will be delivering his farewell address to world leaders on Tuesday, at the opening high-level debate in the U.N. General Assembly. But the world’s attention has already shifted to the American election, where Vice President Kamala Harris is in a neck-and-neck race for leadership of the so-called free world with the former disruptor-in-chief, Donald Trump. It remains unclear whether Harris or Trump will attend the session to meet and greet world leaders. But the political standoff has left much of the world uncertain about the course of American diplomacy. “I appreciate the fact that it’s difficult for other countries to see the U.S. as back when we have the elections pending and until the elections are resolved, one way or the other. I think everybody’s going to put a pause on how to judge the U.S.,” Peter Yeo, president of the Better World Campaign, a U.N. advocacy outfit, told Devex in a telephone interview. “So I honestly don’t expect a massive embrace or sigh of relief or anything coming from other countries related to the U.S. because everybody's just waiting for the elections and then we’ll judge.” For some, doubts remain about the commitment of big powers, including traditional champions of the world body such as the United States, to a rules-based international order, anchored by the U.N. Charter. A Democratic victory would not be enough to allay those concerns, particularly in light of Washington’s military and diplomatic support for an Israeli military offensive that resulted in charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court prosecutor. Israel’s Defense Forces have killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in a military campaign that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7 killing of more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel. “You have the United States. Does it really care deeply about the U.N. and multilateral system?” the senior Western diplomat said in an interview. “Maybe the Biden administration pays greater attention, has the right rhetoric and statements, but does it really care deeply? For example, the Biden administration never had a [White House] meeting with [U.N.] Security Council members. The Trump administration did. Does it mean anything?” The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a weaker U.N. will fall heaviest on small countries that lack the wherewithal to protect themselves in a world governed by the rule of the strongest. “If the U.N. were to completely fail, the impact of such a scenario will be disproportionately felt on some countries,” the diplomat added. “There are large countries who can advance and defend and project their positions and interests without the U.N. being there, without the U.N. functioning optimally. But you have also, increasingly, some of the medium-sized countries, the G20 countries, etc., who may think that they can do things without the U.N.” “Multilateralism is not just a choice, it is a necessity, in particular for small and developing countries such as the Republic of Namibia,” Mbumba, the country’s president, said Thursday. “No single nation, no matter how powerful, can solve the complex cross-border issues that confront us. From pandemics to cybersecurity, from migration to the digital economy.” For Guterres, the high-level week marks the culmination of a years-long effort to define his own legacy, and to refocus the U.N.’s mission on a set of challenges that weren’t even on people’s radar at the U.N.’s founding: Climate change, digital communications, and the emergence of artificial intelligence. The U.N. membership is expected to appoint a successor in the summer of 2026. Potential aspirants will quietly begin their stealth campaigns. An informal list of potential candidates for the top U.N. job include Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a powerful orator who has championed reform of the global financial system; Rebeca Grynspan, a Costa Rican economist, politician, and executive director of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD; Amina Mohammed, the former Nigerian environment minister who serves as the U.N.’s deputy secretary-general; Rafael Grossi, the Argentine head of the International Atomic Energy Agency; and María Fernanda Espinosa, an Ecuadorian politician and diplomat who served as president of the U.N. General Assembly from September 2018 to September 2019. There is an expectation that the new U.N. chief will come from Latin America or the Caribbean, as it has been more than 30 years since a Latin American has led the organization. There is also mounting pressure to select a woman for the first time to the post. “I think this general assembly is where you will hear the muffled sound of the starting gun for the secretary-general race,” Gowan said. “It’s already happening.” Stagnation on multiple fronts Beyond the debate about the future, many diplomats have been dispirited by the U.N.’s retreat from its traditional conflict resolution role. Guterres told Reuters that he has not had a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the start of the Israel war with Hamas. The U.N. has largely been sidelined from mediating peace efforts in Sudan, and it has sought to limit its activism to promoting humanitarian access for victims in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine. The U.N. Security Council, meanwhile, has been largely paralyzed with the U.S. and Russia casting frequent vetoes to prevent action to reign in Israel or Russia in Ukraine. The three top conflicts on the U.N. agenda — Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine — will be lumped together in a high-level security session on Wednesday in the U.N. Security Council, hosted by Slovenia’s Prime Minister Robert Golob, who is serving as this month’s Security Council president. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with Biden and other Western leaders to see if he can secure a commitment to bolster Ukraine’s long-range arsenal, something Western powers have been reluctant to do, given concerns of being drawn into the war. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is also planning to host a meeting on Sudan for foreign ministers from key governments, with a view to pressing for a cease-fire. Blinken has also written to Guterres to urge him to play a more active role in trying to end the conflict in the sub-Saharan African nation. Meanwhile, the Arab League has called for a high-level meeting on Sept. 25 to press for a cease-fire in Gaza and rally international support for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides education, health, and other services to some 5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. But diplomats say there is little expectation of a breakthrough on any of those fronts. “Ukraine may try to stir up talks about the need for another peace summit. But I don’t think Ukraine will loom very large in speeches this time around,” said Gowan. On Gaza, most world leaders “will make reference to the need for a cease-fire. But none of the real diplomacy around ending the war in Gaza is happening within hundreds of miles of the U.N.” Update, Sept. 20, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that the election for next U.N. secretary-general is in 2026.