With a partner in the White House, can Guterres deliver?

António Guterres’ first term as United Nations secretary-general was widely viewed as an exercise in managing difficult circumstances — namely, a U.S. presidential administration that held little regard for multilateralism and grew increasingly hostile toward several of the international organization’s branches and leaders.

By many accounts, Guterres passed that test — or at least weathered the storm. The secretary-general maintained a working relationship with former President Donald Trump, in large part by translating the White House’s zeal for cutting international budgets into productive internal U.N. reforms.

“I think Guterres deserves a lot of credit for developing a modus vivendi with the Trump administration that, especially in the early years of the administration, did actually mitigate the president's instinctive mistrust of multilateralism,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group.

Guterres officially announced his intention to seek a second term on Jan. 11 — just over a week before U.S. President Joe Biden’s inauguration. While the secretary-general’s spokesperson has downplayed speculation that the decision to run again was influenced by any particular election outcome, turnover at the White House has marked a juncture for Guterres’ agenda.

Suddenly, the secretary-general faces a different kind of test. In place of a former U.S. administration that wanted the U.N. to do much less, he is confronted with one that knows the institution inside and out — and expects it to do much more.

With Trump in office, Guterres kept the conversation going on big global challenges, even when the United Nations’ most powerful member state and largest donor wasn’t interested. In 2019, the secretary-general turned a large portion of the U.N. General Assembly session into a Climate Action Summit.

“Everyone admitted that the actual concrete results of that event were pretty slight. But people were okay with that because there was a feeling that you couldn't really have big steps forward while you had a U.S. administration that just was not going to play ball,” Gowan said.

In his — largely procedural — bid for a second term, the former Portuguese prime minister and U.N. high commissioner for refugees offered a wide-ranging vision that combines international cooperation on global crises, a focus on prevention, and continued internal reforms. Last month, he was unanimously appointed by the U.N. General Assembly after gaining the Security Council’s approval.

“Our biggest challenge — and at the same time our greatest opportunity — is to use this [COVID-19] crisis as a chance to turn things around, to pivot to a world that learns its lessons, recovers fairer, greener and more sustainably, and forges ahead with much more effective global cooperation to address global concerns,” he said after the vote.

“I think he was reelected because of his commitment to reform and change and his understanding that the U.N. needs to be at the forefront of tackling all of these problems without borders,” said Peter Yeo, president of the Better World Campaign.

“He’s well regarded at the highest levels in world capitals,” Yeo said.

Institutional knowledge

Members of Biden’s administration have engaged with the U.N. and its leader early and often.

John Kerry, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, celebrated the country’s reentry into the Paris climate agreement alongside Guterres in February. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has already participated in Security Council sessions on COVID-19 and multilateralism, and Biden hosted a virtual gathering of Security Council permanent representatives in March. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, since her confirmation as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in February, has led what Gowan called a “full-court press” for the continuation of U.N. cross-border aid to Syria.

The U.S. Agency for International Development is now led by a former ambassador to the U.N., Administrator Samantha Power, and Biden recently nominated Isobel Coleman, a former U.S. representative for U.N. management and reform, to be a deputy administrator at the agency.

“Expect close cooperation between the U.N. system and USAID,” Yeo said. “It's already there. But you now have somebody that has firsthand experience in how the U.N. is managed serving as deputy administrator, should she be confirmed. That's significant and real.”

The Biden administration’s mantra has been “America is back,” and many see that as a boon for the U.N. and its leader.

“The fact that the U.S. has reengaged with the U.N. at all levels makes it easier for the secretary-general to achieve his second-term agenda,” Yeo said.

It also changes the expectations for what that second-term agenda ought to accomplish.

With Trump in office, Guterres won plaudits for holding the line against existential threats to the United Nations’ budget, relevance, and credibility. With a more constructively engaged White House, he’s under greater pressure to show that the U.N. can go beyond talking about global crises to helping solve them.

“We had the term of playing defense, but now we need to go over to the offense, and actually the [secretary-general] needs to knuckle down on delivering some concrete results on all these areas where he's been saying the right thing but his options have been limited — that's very much the feeling around New York and in the secretariat and in diplomatic missions,” Gowan said.

Delivering results

The crisis in Ethiopia’s Tigray region is a current case in point. Thomas-Greenfield and other members of the Biden administration have pushed hard for an open Security Council meeting on the situation, and Power publicly rebutted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s claim that “there is no hunger in Tigray.”

Guterres has been more cautious, including in a statement from his spokesperson as recently as February that welcomed the “positive engagement of the Government of Ethiopia.”

“There has been a bit of a sense in [the U.S. Mission to the United Nations] that Guterres has not been helpful, that Guterres has actually at times seemed to be trying to defend the Ethiopian government from U.S. pressure,” Gowan said.

“I don't think the U.S. has been massively impressed by the secretary-general's quiet diplomacy approach to that crisis so far,” he added, noting that the situation has now changed dramatically and it remains to be seen how Guterres might “reposition” himself.

The second-term agenda that Guterres outlined includes a welcome focus on delivering results through better “performance measurement,” Yeo said.

That will likely be reinforced at September’s U.N. General Assembly session when Guterres releases “Our Common Agenda,” which aims to describe an updated vision for the role of the U.N.

Guterres, who turned 72 in April, wants to ensure U.N. agencies “actually measure whether they're having an impact and have a strategy for ensuring that money is being well spent and effectively coordinated,” Yeo said.

The question is whether Guterres and the White House will share the same view of what it means for the U.N. to deliver measurable results and cost-effectiveness after four years dominated by damage control.

“When you have a U.S. administration that is really focused on the details of things like Tigray, then that means you're being evaluated on delivery in a very different way,” Gowan said.