World leaders are in New York for the so-called high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly, but a big global showing won’t mask the fact that it’s been a difficult year for the international body. Bitter divides over conflicts in Europe and the Middle East have raised serious questions about the efficacy of the U.N.
The disunity is bad enough on its own. Yet it also means cooperation on climate change and a range of priorities listed in the Sustainable Development Goals lags far behind.
Can the U.N. turn things around? I spoke with Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group. Subscribers can watch the full FP Live discussion on the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: I called the United Nations divided. But to some extent it’s always been divided; nations try to form a consensus despite that. Is it fair to say that there seems to be a particularly downbeat mood right now?
Richard Gowan: It’s strange because right now, the world’s leaders are in U.N. headquarters and everyone is rushing around. That does bring a little bit of energy and excitement to the U.N.
But underlying that, there is a very profound sense of disquiet about the way the organization is headed. The period since Russia’s all-out aggression against Ukraine has been very tough in terms of U.N. diplomacy. But it was really the Oct. 7 events last year that sent everyone into shock. Arguments over the war between Israel and Hamas and the situation in Gaza have splintered the U.N. through much of the last year.
This is the first time that leaders are coming back to New York since the Gaza war began. And everyone is asking the question, “What can this organization achieve?” This is an organization that is primarily focused on peace and security. The world is getting more uncertain, more violent. Is the U.N. still relevant?
As someone who’s a bit of a historian of the organization, we should keep in mind that the U.N. has been through big shocks before. People talk about it being paralyzed today. But if you go back to the Cold War, there were periods when the Security Council genuinely was paralyzed. In 1959, it passed one resolution in an entire year. It didn’t meet for more than three months. Today, the Security Council is still meeting constantly. It is still overseeing peacekeeping operations in places like South Sudan. But that historical comparison can’t take away from the real sense of worry and gloom that is quite prevalent at the moment.
RA: That’s good context to have. But let’s talk about Israel and Gaza. Can you give us a sense of how divisions over this issue have surfaced at the United Nations?
RG: Arguments over how to respond to the Oct. 7 atrocities began immediately last year. And very quickly after Israel began military operations, you had the majority of U.N. members calling for an early end to hostilities. And through the last three months of 2023 and into early 2024, you basically had a nonstop battle in the Security Council and in the General Assembly, with a growing majority of states saying Israel should cease operations and the United States constantly pushing back. The United States used its veto to block any cease-fire calls in the Security Council. This was really tough, frankly, on Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and her team because they had spent the previous years trying to rebuild goodwill after the Trump era. And they saw that goodwill now going up in smoke.
This year, there’s been a slight change. In the early summer, the United States tabled its own cease-fire proposal, which the Security Council endorsed in June. And clearly that hasn’t been implemented. But I sense that since the Biden team started to change its own position, there has been a slight lowering of tensions. It was notable when President Joe Biden gave his farewell speech at the U.N. He did call firstly for a cease-fire in Gaza, the return of the hostages, and also he warned against a war in Lebanon. And other leaders were applauding those lines respectfully. So the situation is not as bad as it was at the start of the year. But this has done real, lasting harm both to the U.S. reputation at the U.N. but also people’s trust in the U.N. as a whole.
RA: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres had a speech at the Security Council on Oct. 24 of last year. He said that Hamas’s attack on Israel “did not happen in a vacuum.” Israel immediately called on him to resign. In the months since, the U.N. has been vulnerable on the ground in Gaza as well, with more than 200 U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees killed. Talk to us about attacks on the United Nations more generally, calls that it is anti-Israel or that statements from its officials are antisemitic. How is that being received?
RG: If it’s been a hard year for diplomats at the U.N., I think it’s just been a harrowing 12 months for U.N. officials. Guterres has had a personally very difficult year. He has been constantly calling for a cease-fire. He has been very critical of Israel. That has attracted a lot of negative attention to him. But I think he’s also frustrated because he doesn’t have any real political foothold in the war. Neither the Israelis nor, in reality, the Biden administration wants the U.N. to be a major actor in mediating the solution in Gaza. And so Guterres has been stuck in a sort of Cassandra role warning about threats to civilians, lamenting the state of the conflict, but not actually able to do very much about it. And there has been quite a lot of grumbling in the diplomatic community about how it feels as if the U.N. has been sidelined over the war.
As to the accusations of antisemitism against the U.N., I think it is worth saying that these are very long-standing accusations. The majority of U.N. member states have always sided with the Palestinians. So it’s not surprising that Israel is rejecting all the criticisms that are coming from U.N. officials and U.N. bodies. It’s sadly something that we’ve seen many times in previous outbreaks of violence.
RA: To understand the full extent of the dysfunction we’re describing at the U.N., I want to take us further back, to 2022, to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Several things happened then that have exacerbated where we are now. First, Russia leaned on its allies not to condemn it. Second, Russia started to play spoiler wherever it could, using its veto power in the Security Council like a cudgel. Third, countries in the global south saw the United States and Western countries take strong stances against Russia, often invoking international law, and they felt that the West didn’t take up other conflicts with the same sense of purpose and urgency. All of that has led to a perfect geopolitical storm when combined with the conflict in the Middle East, right?
RG: In the first months after Russia’s all-out aggression, there was actually a lot of sympathy and support for Ukraine from across the U.N. membership. The United States and the Europeans worked with the Ukrainians in the General Assembly to get a series of resolutions condemning Moscow, which were supported by up to three-quarters of all U.N. members, including a lot of states from Africa and Asia.
But as time went by, firstly, a lot of non-Western countries started to wonder if they were achieving very much through all these resolutions and all these debates. And they saw that they were not influencing Moscow, and there was a sense that maybe these debates were slightly pointless. Secondly, a lot of non-Western powers, such as Brazil, have taken quite a negative view to the way that NATO has been arming the Ukrainians, arguing that that is fueling the war. And thirdly, there’s been a lot of grumbling, with people saying, “We understand why Ukraine is important. We understand why Russia is a threat to the international system. But we should also be talking about other nations’ problems. We should be talking about the poor states struggling with unsustainable debt. We should be talking about the increase in extreme poverty in some parts of the world.” And for a lot of U.N. members, those topics are as important for the organization to deal with as the Ukrainian crisis. And so there were questions about how long the U.N. would keep focusing on Ukraine.
And then Gaza happened. And as soon as we had these very fierce debates over the Palestinian question, the Ukraine topic was pushed to one side. The Ukrainians themselves realized that they couldn’t be as loud in their demands for support when the organization was so divided over Gaza.
RA: The United States is one of the symbols of this divide. How has the Biden administration fared at the U.N. this year, in particular as it has grappled with the differences between the situations in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza?
RG: It’s worth saying that Thomas-Greenfield and the Biden administration did restore quite a lot of goodwill at the U.N., especially back in 2021, because other nations saw the United States rejoining U.N. frameworks such as the Paris climate agreement and the Human Rights Council, which Trump had rejected.
I think up until last October, most observers would have said that the U.S. record at the U.N. had been OK. Unfortunately, for the reasons we’ve already discussed, the Gaza war flipped that. There was a very strong sense in late 2023 that the president and his inner circle were deliberately blocking the U.N. from being more diplomatically in the war. And that did create quite a lot of consternation. All that said, if you were to get most U.N. diplomats in a room and ask, “Who would you like to win the November election?” they would still very much point to Vice President Kamala Harris because there is an understanding that relations with Washington may have been bumpy over the last year but they will become extremely turbulent if we have a second Trump administration.
RA: There’s another element to this: The broader animating foreign-policy principle of this administration is competition with China. How does that play out at the United Nations, where you have two Security Council members with veto power increasingly at odds over the last few years? And you add into that Russia, of course, where there’s a much more open enmity.
RG: I think there’s now a bipartisan consensus that China is a competitor and a rival at the U.N. This plays out in struggles over who should get top U.N. jobs. It plays out in struggles over whether the Chinese can insert Xi Jinping language into U.N. resolutions. It’s a constant feature of diplomacy at the U.N. now.
That said, there is an important contrast between the way the Russians behave at the U.N. and the way the Chinese behave at the U.N. The Russians are really aggressive. They don’t mind using their veto. They take every opportunity to embarrass the United States. The Russians are taking advantage of the situation in Gaza to try to put the Americans on the back foot. By contrast, the Chinese are more careful. They don’t like using that veto. They think there is reputational damage involved in blocking resolutions in the Security Council. Even on Ukraine, there have been back-channel discussions between the Chinese and U.S. officials about how to avoid China siding too openly with Russia in arguments over Ukraine. So diplomacy is still possible with the Chinese in a way that is becoming harder and harder with the Russians. But under the surface, a lot of U.S. officials are worried that Beijing is gaining more influence year by year in international institutions.
RA: Both of the big conflicts we’re describing—Russia and Ukraine and then Israel and Gaza—are areas that the Security Council members are deeply invested in. But I wonder how these divides play out when you have a conflict that the members of the Security Council are less directly invested in—so, for example, Sudan. And it strikes me that Thomas-Greenfield has tried to put a spotlight on it. How does that play out at the U.N., where you have less of a chance for great-power meddling or great-power competition?
RG: For as long as I’ve worked around the U.N., people have drawn the distinction between first-order conflicts, such as that between Russia and Ukraine, that inevitably split the Security Council and then second-order conflicts, very often in Africa, which people can still cooperate around. I think even that distinction is slightly breaking down at the moment. For example, last year, we saw Russia supporting Mali when the government of Mali announced that it wanted to push U.N. peacekeepers out. And, of course, the Russians were doing that because it would irritate the French. And also it was an opportunity for the Wagner Group to expand its operations in Mali. So we are seeing geopolitical issues infecting even discussions of Africa now.
But the case of Sudan is an important one because there is a real sense that because member states have been so focused on Gaza, they have been ignoring the situation in Sudan and that the Security Council has been insufficiently active on Sudan. The Biden administration has been coordinating quite closely with its allies and with the U.N. secretariat. And this week, the United States is really trying to prioritize getting a cease-fire in the Sudan. There is a modicum of hope that ending, or at least easing, the dire situation in Sudan is one thing that everyone could still agree on. This year, the Security Council actually passed two resolutions calling for cease-fires in Sudan. But this attempt to get the focus on Sudan could be completely derailed if we see a further escalation in Lebanon. This week, everyone is actually desperately talking about a further spiral of violence in the Middle East, and that would suck up all the attention once again.
RA: Let’s talk about Security Council reform. Most people can agree that the five permanent members reflect the world in 1945, not 2025. There are now a few reform ideas floating around. Give us a sense of what the main ones are and how you rate their chances of success.
RG: I’ve worked on Security Council reform on and off for more than 10 years, and I would quite like that bit of my life back because it’s a profoundly frustrating and wonky topic.
But since February 2022, there has been a growing tide of calls to accelerate Security Council reform. That was initially in response to Russia’s behavior in the council over Ukraine and then more recently in response to the U.S. vetoes over Gaza. At the General Assembly session last year, nearly half of the presidents and prime ministers who spoke said that it is time to reform the Security Council. Everyone agrees that the council needs reform. The problem is that it’s less clear what that reform exactly should look like. You have four powers—India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan—that have been campaigning together for two decades to get new permanent seats on the council. But China, for example, loathed the idea that Japan and India could join it at the top table as additional Asian permanent members. And there are similar regional dynamics relating to the other three.
What people have been able to agree on is that Africa should have a bigger voice in the Security Council. Thomas-Greenfield supported this in the run-up to the high-level week, saying that the United States now supports Africa getting two permanent seats in the council.
RA: But these are seats without veto power?
RG: That’s the U.S. proposal, yes. The United States says that as the veto is the problem, other states shouldn’t be given the veto. But, of course, the United States is not going to give up its own veto. So that is slightly sensitive.
RA: Given that we’ve spent all this time criticizing various organs of the U.N. and paralysis of the Security Council, what are some areas where it can feasibly regain credibility?
RG: The U.N. is an enormous array of entities and organizations. It includes a lot of technical agencies like the International Telecommunication Union, the Universal Postal Union, and other bodies that are not super political and work on the details of making an interdependent world. If you were to take away these U.N. technical agencies, you would suddenly discover that the nuts and bolts of everyday international cooperation would fall apart. Whatever the political differences in the Security Council, everyone wants those U.N. agencies to work.
Also, it’s crucial to say that the U.N. may not be very good at ending wars, but U.N. humanitarian agencies like the World Food Program or UNHCR, the Refugee Agency, play an essential role in mitigating the consequences of violence and of climate change around the world. There are no NGOs or other organizations with the humanitarian capacities that the U.N. can deploy. That really matters somewhere like Afghanistan. When the West pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, who was left behind? It was the U.N. agencies. It came with a lot of moral hazards, especially around the Taliban’s treatment of women. But the U.N. is playing an essential role there. So I do think that we should hold on to the importance of this humanitarian arm, even if the political arm does now look quite distressed.
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