Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.
Here’s what’s on tap for the day: What to expect at the United Nations General Assembly next week, exploding pagers in Lebanon, and U.S. President Joe Biden’s planned trip to Angola.
Diplomatic Speed Dating
Some 130 heads of state and government will descend on New York City over the coming week for the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week. Amy and Jack will be on the ground bringing you a special daily edition of SitRep with all the latest news from the summit.
Until then, here’s a look at how the agenda is shaping up.
Summit of the Future, Sept. 22-23. Conceived in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Summit of the Future was intended to reinvigorate the multilateral collaboration that floundered during the pandemic and subsequent crises.
All eyes are on the so-called “Pact for the Future,” a wide-ranging but legally nonbinding agreement set to come out of the meeting that will outline a path forward for global cooperation on topics as varied as artificial intelligence, climate change, reforming global institutions, and the peaceful exploration of space.
Wrangling over the text has been underway for months, facilitated by Germany and Namibia, and was still ongoing as of Tuesday, with Russia and Saudi Arabia raising last-minute objections. As is often the case with sprawling international agreements, negotiations will likely come down to the eleventh hour.
Sustainable Development Goals Moment, Sept. 24. The world is six years away from the 2030 deadline to meet the U.N.’s sustainable development goals (SDGs)—the ambitious road map of 17 targets intended to tackle poverty, inequality and foster sustainable growth—and member states are still woefully behind. This fourth “SDG moment” is intended to highlight inspiring examples of success in the hopes of delivering a shot in the arm to other members to try to close the gap over the remaining six years.
General Debate, Sept. 24-28. The theme of this year’s General Debate is “Leaving no one behind: acting together for the advancement of peace, sustainable development and human dignity for present and future generations,” although leaders are under no obligation to stick to that script when giving their speeches.
Over the years, the General Debate has delivered some of the more newsworthy moments from the high-level week—including Cuban President Fidel Castro’s almost four-and-a-half hour remarks to the assembly in 1960, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez using his time to call U.S. President George W. Bush “the devil” in 2006, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2017 threat from the podium to “totally destroy North Korea.”
Sea level rise, Sept. 25. Wednesday’s daylong plenary meeting will seek to address the threats posed by rapidly rising sea levels. The U.N. has described encroaching shorelines as an “existential threat,” with close to 1 billion people living in low-lying coastal zones that will be directly affected.
International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Sept. 26. Fears of nuclear war or another nuclear arms race breaking out are high right now, especially after Russia’s repeated nuclear saber-rattling in Ukraine—not to mention Iran’s accelerating nuclear program, North Korea’s weapons testing, and U.S. allegations that Moscow is developing an anti-satellite nuclear weapon to deploy in space.
The General Assembly’s official agenda plans to bring up the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and diplomats will also talk about slashing military budgets and creating a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Even so, it’s really the United States, Russia, and China that have the power to set the agenda on arms control—and right now, at least, the Kremlin and Beijing aren’t coming to the negotiating table. But the discussion shows that many smaller countries represented at the U.N. are worried about the bigger powers building up nuclear weapons again.
Antimicrobial resistance, Sept 26. If the prospect of nuclear war and rising sea levels aren’t enough to keep you up at night, leaders will also convene to discuss the threat of antimicrobial resistance—the proliferation of germs that have outwitted the antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals that serve as the cornerstone of modern medicine. Driven by the misuse and overprescription of the drugs, antimicrobial resistance was directly responsible for almost 1.3 million deaths in 2019, according to the World Health Organization.
Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan. World leaders will gather in New York as wars continue to rage in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, underscoring the U.N.’s impotence when it comes to preventing or stopping conflict. Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres criticized the Security Council—the body primarily tasked with maintaining international peace and security—over its failures in an interview with Al Jazeera.
“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,” he said, noting that the body “doesn’t correspond to the world of today.”
Watch the sidelines and bilateral meetings closely. Guterres has also said that the world still has “all the conditions to avoid” a World War III-like scenario, but he called for the superpowers to create new guardrails and norms to stop the current wars from flaring up into a larger global conflagration.
Security Council Reform. Two years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has effectively put a kibosh on any serious United Nations action to deal with the biggest war on European soil since World War II, while the United States has been accused of shielding Israel as it has waged an unsparing war in Gaza.
Gridlock at the Security Council is a near-universally recognized problem, but reaching consensus on how to fix it has remained elusive.
In remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations last week, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield outlined Washington’s vision for reforming the body, including the creation of two permanent seats on the council for African nations as well as efforts to rethink the procedure of regional representation and include a seat for small island nations. While such measures could boost representation at the table, they do little to address the veto-wielding elephants in the room.
Let’s Get Personnel
First, some sad news. Journalist Neil King died on Tuesday. The former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor walked 330 miles on foot from Washington, D.C., to New York in March 2021 and wrote a memoir about his experience, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal. Ramble in peace.
Thierry Breton has resigned as the European Union commissioner for internal market and services, accusing European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of pressuring France to pick another candidate over him.
Loren Voss is now the director for defense policy for weapons of mass destruction and arms control on the U.S. National Security Council. She was previously a visiting associate professor at the law school of George Washington University.
Devontae Freeland is now a special advisor in the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Front organization. When Hezbollah leaders began to buy thousands of pagers in the summer of 2022 to try to keep their communications safe from would-be Israeli and Western spies, they had no idea that they were actually buying the pagers from a front. The Hungary-based BAC Consulting, which produced thousands of pagers on behalf of the Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo, was actually part of an Israeli front, the New York Times reports. On Tuesday, Israel gave the order to detonate the explosives-laden pagers, killing at least 20 people and injuring more than 2,800. A second round of attacks on Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies was carried out on Wednesday.
Bigger and badder. Russia’s military is stronger than it was before the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a top U.S. general told reporters on Tuesday. “Russia is getting larger, and they’re getting better than they were before,” said Gen. James Hecker, the U.S. Air Force’s top commander in Europe and Africa, on the sidelines of the Air, Space & Cyber Conference held near Washington this week. “They are actually larger than they were when [the invasion] kicked off,” he added.
Meanwhile, Finland has picked two locations for its NATO headquarters: The city of Mikkeli—already the base of Finland’s Army Command—will be the command post for the Northern European land unit in the country, while a multinational forward land force will be based in Finnish Lapland.
Bless the rains. Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden is planning to travel to Angola in the coming weeks, Reuters reports, in what would be his first trip to the continent as president. It’s part of an ongoing U.S. effort to court Angolan President João Lourenço, who is a key player in the Lobito Corridor railway project that would see Luanda’s ports connect to Zambia and rare earth mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Snapshot
By The Numbers
$800 million—The amount of money that the FBI has saved victims of ransomware attacks worldwide over the past two years by providing them with decryption keys, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray at the Aspen Cyber Summit.
94—The percentage of Americans who are concerned that artificial intelligence-generated misinformation will impact November’s U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of more than 2,000 people conducted by the tech company (and Photoshop maker) Adobe. Almost half of those respondents also said they had been misled by election-related misinformation in the past three months.
118—The number of countries not represented across seven major governance initiatives on artificial intelligence—including ones discussed by the G-7, G-20, OECD, and the United Kingdom’s Bletchley Declaration on AI safety—according to a new report by the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Advisory Body on AI.
Put On Your Radar
Thursday, Sept. 19-Sunday, Sept. 22: A meeting of the economic ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations continues through Sunday.
Saturday, Sept. 21: Sri Lanka holds a presidential election.
Tuesday, September 24: General Debate opens at the United Nations General Assembly.
Friday, September 27: The Group of 77 foreign ministers’ meeting takes place in New York.
Quote of the Week
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres joked that he has “no power and no money” at a press conference on Wednesday. We know the feeling.
The tools that he does have? “One is my voice, and nobody will be able to shut it up. And second is the capacity to convene people of goodwill to address and solve problems,” he said.
This Week’s Most Read
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Honest Abe. You won’t believe who joined writer Abby Olcese at an airport bar to watch an MSNBC report on Sunday’s attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump. It was Abraham Lincoln. Well, sort of. Olcese sat down only to realize she was seated next to a Lincoln impersonator watching coverage of the news, nearly 160 years after the 16th U.S. president’s death at the hands of his own assassin. “This is easily the most surreal thing I’ve ever witnessed,” Olcese wrote.
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