It’s a sign of progress that all the leading candidates to succeed UN Secretary-General António Guterresare talking up the need for deep reform, but also telling that all of them come from the warm, careerist global-diplomacy blob — and so unlikely to actually fight hard enough to move the United Nations out of its suicidal spiral.
The permanent UN bureaucracy is more global parasite than world servant, glibly offering comforting blather to Western chattering classes while its top figures line their own pockets; deep reform is vital if the United Nations is to survive.
UN precedent is to make it look like change by cycling the top job from one region to another; it’s now Latin America’s “turn,” with the establishment dutifully coughing up Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Chile’s Rafael Grossi, each with an oh-so-“worthy” résumé of service internationally and at home.
Thing is, the crowd that sees a Grynspan as in any way edgy is also happy with a UN system where the likes of Francesca Albanese, the toxic UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, routinely cheers for terrorists.
It’s the system that elevated the grotesque Guterres to the top job for two five-year terms — the second one, after he’d utterly failed the challenge of COVID.
The White House and Republicans in Congress are united in insisting on better — and Washington has a veto, along with the other permanent Security Council members.
The recent rumor that Team Trump would push Hungarian ex-PM Viktor Orbán for the job looks to be a trial balloon by fringe MAGA freelancers, not anything President Donald Trump (nor Orbán himself!) is seriously considering — though it should serve as a warning that Trump will keep looking ever-further outside the box if the field remains nothing but business-as-usual “reformers.”
UN insiders probably need to be ready for a delay in anyone succeeding Guterres when he leaves office on Jan. 1: Months of straw polls among the 15 Security Council members have failed to produce anything like a consensus, and Russia reportedly won’t allow anyone to win this month, while Latvia serves as council president.
Anyone serious about what that means should ponder the speeches of Secretary of State Marco Rubio: Real UN leadership will stand up for the best of Western civilization and against the menace of left-wing terrorism.
Go-along-to-get-along no longer works; if the UN crowd won’t face that fact, it’ll have to get along with no secretary-general at all.
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