Will Zelenskyy's UN debut suck 'political oxygen' from SDG summit?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will make his debut appearance before world leaders next week at the United Nations General Assembly, seeking to rally diplomatic support for his military campaign to dislodge Russia from its territory. But many fret that his arrival at the world’s largest annual summit of presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers will detract from an event slated to focus on an issue that historically gets left on the back burner: development. For much of the global south, 2023 was to be the year that issues at the forefront of their interests — development, debt relief, climate reparations, reform of the international financial system — would move to the center of gravity in an institution that has devoted much of the post-Cold War era to managing conflicts from the Balkans to the Middle East, battling terrorism, and pushing back on Iran and North Korea’s nuclear programs. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has scheduled a summit during the assembly, known as UNGA, on Monday and Tuesday to take stock of the lack of progress in achieving the aspirations of the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, an unwieldy list of 17 hard-to-remember targets, including an end to poverty by the year 2030. Negotiations over a declaration for the development summit have been marred by backroom disputes over financing, and a small coalition of 11 countries — including Cuba, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela — continue to insist the final draft carries language urging states to refrain from the application of unilateral sanctions before they will support the declaration. But the key negotiators believe they have secured sufficient support for the text, including from the United States, and are confident the anti-sanctions coalition will back down. “The one big question about this General Assembly: Is it all about the SDGs or is it all about Zelenskyy,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the U.N. at the International Crisis Group, noting that Zelenskyy’s appearance is going “to suck ninety-eight percent of the political oxygen away from the SDGs and this UNGA will be all about Ukraine all over again.” A diplomatic source countered that Zelenskyy — who has already begun courting leaders in the global south — would take advantage of his visit to New York City to broaden his outreach to such countries, highlighting the negative impact that Russia’s decision to end cooperation with the Black Sea Grain deal would have on food prices in their countries. For the U.S. and other Western powers, there is much at stake. Washington and its allies are currently engaged in a battle for hearts and minds with Russia and China, which are seeking to reshape the global system in their own image. For Russia, that has resulted in the invasion of a U.N. member state and in military support, via the paramilitary private outfit Wagner Group, to governments throughout Africa. For China, it involves projecting its power in the disputed South China Sea and beyond and seeking to rewrite the rules of the multilateral system, from the centrality of human rights and the rule of law to the course of development. Beijing and Moscow scored something a diplomatic coup last month, expanding membership in their BRICS coalition of emerging economies founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to six new countries — Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — as part of a broader challenge to world order established and dominated by the U.S. after World War II. In an attempt to counter Russian and Chinese influence, Washington and its European partners are seeking to deepen diplomatic relations with countries that might be drawn into their orbit. European governments are planning an outreach blitz at next week’s high-level meeting to small countries, from Burundi to Micronesia, that rarely see visits from high-ranking European ministers, let alone heads of state, according to Western diplomatic sources. The move follows an appeal by 10 European countries, including Belgium and Slovenia, to the European Union High Representative Josep Borrell to coordinate a diplomatic campaign to woo overlooked countries, citing the need to do a better job of competing with China and Russia in the “battle of narratives.” The move — which envisions more high-level visits to long-ignored foreign capitals — reflects a growing anxiety that the West is losing ground in its effort to rally international opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter, since the general assembly voted overwhelmingly last year to condemn Moscow and demand it withdraw from Ukraine. But measures aimed at punishing Russia, including an April 22 resolution calling for its expulsion from the U.N. Human Rights Council, have fared worse. ‘You cannot ignore half the world’ Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tried to strike a balance. On Wednesday, she hosted a press conference with the family of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to highlight Russia’s practice of detaining American citizens to extract concessions from the U.S. And addressing reporters last month, she underscored the importance of drawing attention to Russia’s occupation of Ukraine. Zelenskyy, meanwhile, is planning to pay a visit to the White House and the U.S. Congress during his visit to the U.S. “I expect there will be intense pressure on Russia to pull their troops out of Ukraine and allow the Ukrainian people to have peace,” she said. But she also drove home the importance of promoting SDGs, recently telling reporters that the issue “will be front and center.” But the U.S. and its Western partners will have to offer more than rhetorical pledges of solidarity if they hope to rally support for the kinds of issues that are important to Washington, according to some outside observers. “There is this idea that this is the one time of the year America pretends it cares about the rest of the world,” said Natalie Samarasinghe, global director of advocacy at the Open Society Foundations. “It needs to do a little more than pretend.” “You cannot ignore half the world,” she said, noting that many leaders in the global south lack the resources and policy space to deliver on a range of political, environmental, and security fronts advocated by Washington and other European capitals. “What we’re now seeing is a growing movement, saying, ‘OK, but now it’s time to fundamentally change the power dynamics,’” she added. “Yeah, you want democratic governance, but we’re going to collapse if you don’t let us actually address people’s needs.” Economics are politics For decades, the U.S. and other industrialized powers have resisted a role for the U.N. General Assembly — where low-income and high-income countries alike have equal voting power — in overseeing international financial matters, preferring to manage global financial policies through the governing board of the major financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Group of 7 industrial powers, or the G20. The U.N. has seen financing issues rise to the center of its diplomatic agenda, following decades in which security matters, from counterterrorism to wars in the Middle East and the nuclear diplomacy around Iran and North Korea, have dominated discussion. U.N.’s chief, Guterres, has published a detailed policy brief on the reform of the international financial architecture, arguing that the financial system erected by the U.S. after World War II is “entirely unfit for purpose in a world characterized by unrelenting climate change, increasing systemic risks, extreme inequality, entrenched gender bias, highly integrated financial markets vulnerable to cross-border contagion, and dramatic demographic, technological, economic and geopolitical changes.” And key Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have sought to align their public stances with those of influential leaders from the global south, like Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has claimed a leadership role in promoting reform of the international financial system. In June, Macron and Mottley co-hosted the Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact, highlighting the need to reform the international financial system. The event featured announcements — including one by the World Bank to allow low- and middle-income nations impacted by climate disaster to suspend debt repayments — but stopped short of the “transformative” reform of the global financial system promoted by Mottley. Still, it underscored the need by Western industrial powers to show they are trying to address the concerns of the global south. "Right now, politics are economic and economics are political,” said Sarah Cliffe, executive director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. Cliffe believes it would ultimately serve U.S. interests to have that discussion at UNGA, saying it could “help mend political divisions” between the global north and south. The no shows The high-level debate of the assembly's 78 session begins on Tuesday with speeches by Guterres and the new General Assembly President Dennis Francis, a veteran diplomat from Trinidad and Tobago. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who opens the slate of world leaders addressing the assembly, will be the focus of intense scrutiny as he makes his first appearance since he defeated Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has tried to maintain cordial ties with U.S. President Joe Biden, whom he visited earlier this year at the White House, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, providing assurances that the Russian leader would not be arrested if he attended a meeting of the G20 in Brazil next year; he later came under pressure to backtrack. But four of the U.N.’s five permanent members — China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom — will not be represented by their leaders, reinforcing concerns by some that development is receiving short shrift from the U.N.’s big powers. France’s Macron, for instance, has chosen to stay at home to host visits by King Charles III and Pope Frances. Putin, facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, China’s President Xi Jinping, and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be no shows. The U.N., meanwhile, will be the site of hundreds of side meetings, government bilaterals, and civil society conferences on the sidelines of the summit. Devex will host a two-day conference on Wednesday and Thursday featuring Amy Pope, who will take on the role of director general of the International Organization for Migration in October, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union, and the U.N.’s tech envoy, Amandeep Singh Gill. The U.N. will also host more than half a dozen high-level side meetings promoting SDGs, financing for development, climate mitigation, pandemic preparedness, universal health care, and the fight against tuberculosis. There will also be a ministerial meeting to prepare for the U.N.’s 2024 Summit of the Future and a Security Council meeting on Ukraine, which may include an appearance by Zelenskyy and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The era of global boiling The mood at U.N. headquarters leading up to this year’s stocktaking has been gloomy. The most hopeful diplomatic development — the negotiation of the Black Sea Grain deal, which allowed Ukraine to export grains — is in tatters after Russia refused to guarantee the safety of commercial vessels. Guterres has taken to employing increasingly apocalyptic language in his speeches, declaring the “era of global boiling has arrived,” and that the efforts of the least developed countries to address a trifecta of existential challenges — from global warming to pandemics to rising inequality — has been confounded by soaring indebtedness and stratospheric costs of embracing renewable energy and other modernizing technologies. “Your countries are … trapped in vicious cycles that make development difficult,” Guterres told a gathering of leaders from least developed countries in March in Doha. “Indeed, our global financial system was designed by wealthy countries, largely to their benefit.” “Deprived of liquidity, many of you are locked out of capital markets by predatory interest rates,” he said. “Deprived of effective debt relief, you can be forced to spend an ever-growing share of government revenue on debt service costs.” The weeks leading up to the U.N. high-level week have been marked by sharp divisions in negotiations over the pace of development relief, international financial reform, and the future role of the U.N. In early August, the U.S., the U.K, and other key allies blocked adoption of a declaration on SDGs that calls for reform of the international financial system and the establishment of a multibillion-dollar development stimulus plan. The U.S. and other governments have since papered over their differences to avoid a breakdown before world leaders arrive in New York. The U.S. dropped its objections after the chief negotiators softened the language on the urgency of expanding special drawing rights from low- and middle-income countries, by making it clear that any contributions from high-income countries would be voluntary. They also added wording that reinforced the notion that reform of the international financial architecture could be addressed by multilateral development banks, though they also made it clear that the issue could be the subject of debate at the U.N. While several diplomats familiar with the negotiations told Devex they are confident the declaration will be adopted by world leaders on Monday, there is still a serious wrinkle in the talks. A coalition of 11 countries, including Belarus, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, have indicated they will not support the declaration unless the final text urges states not to impose unilateral sanctions. Similar language was agreed by U.N. member states in 2015. But the U.S. has fought to keep it out of the current declaration. Governments also remain deeply divided over the course of negotiations leading up to the 2024 Summit of the Future. Diplomats in New York struggled to reach an agreement on a draft declaration — to be adopted at a ministerial meeting next week — outlining the scope of future negotiations for the summit. The chief negotiators, Germany’s U.N. Ambassador Antje Leendertse and Namibia’s Ambassador Neville Melvin Gertze, said that governments raised objections on six separate items on the proposed draft declarations, forcing them to put down a streamlined version of the text to avoid a total breakdown. Iran, meanwhile, opposed language advocating a broader role for the U.N. in coordinating an international response to a range of “complex global shocks,” from financial crisis to pandemic and global warming. The initiative appeared to be based on the U.N. chief’s proposal to create an Emergency Platform to address such complex global crises. It has already faced criticism from conservative quarters, which see it as a power grab. The U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K. opposed a separate provision on international peace and security, which highlighted the need to pay “full respect of the sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of States.” The U.S. and its allies feared the language was being advanced by China and its allies to constrain the U.S. and its partners from deploying military forces overseas. “I share the co-facilitators conviction that a streamlined proposal on the scope of the Summit of the Future provides a firm basis for the upcoming negotiations leading to the Pact for the Future,” said Csaba Kőrösi, who stepped down as president of the U.N. General Assembly. The Open Society Foundations’ Samarasinghe said that Western capitals from Berlin to Washington have averted a total breakdown in talks by “kicking the can down the road” on a number of contentious issues. “There is probably some relief that the SDG summit won’t be generally billed as a disaster,” she said, noting that high-income countries will have to make good on their pledges to fund global south priorities if they want to win support on matters important to the U.S. and Europe, including the Russian war on Ukraine. “I do think there is a recognition that they can’t just talk about it. They actually have to deliver,” she told Devex. “If you don’t address these issues, you’re not going to get the support you might want on the security issues.” “This is going to be a really hard year,” she said.