World leaders gather in New York for U.N. General Assembly

A New York City Police Department patrol car parks across the street from the United Nations Headquarters.

By Edith M. Lederer

Sept. 22, 2024 10:43 AM PT

UNITED NATIONS — Facing a swirl of conflicts and crises across a fragmented world, leaders attending this week’s annual U.N. gathering are being challenged: Work together — not only on front-burner issues but on modernizing the international institutions born after World War II so they can tackle the threats and problems of the future.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued the challenge a year ago after sounding a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the planet: Come to a “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to multilateralism — the foundation of the United Nations and many other global bodies — and start fixing the aging global architecture to meet the rapidly changing world.

The U.N. chief told reporters last week that the summit “was born out of a cold, hard fact: International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.” He pointed to “out-of-control geopolitical divisions” and “runaway” conflicts, climate change, inequalities, debt and new technologies such as artificial intelligence which have no guardrails.

The two-day summit started Sunday, two days before the high-level meeting of world leaders begins at the sprawling U.N. compound in New York City.

The General Assembly approved the summit’s main outcome document — a 42-page “Pact of the Future” — on Sunday morning with a bang of the gavel signifying consensus by Assembly President Philémon Yang, after the body voted 143-7 with 15 abstentions against considering Russian-proposed amendments to significantly water it down.

The pact is a blueprint to address global challenges from conflicts and climate change to artificial intelligence and reforming the U.N. and global institutions. Its impact will depend on its implementation by the assembly’s 193 member nations.

“Leaders must ask themselves whether this will be yet another meeting where they simply talk about greater cooperation and consensus, or whether they will show the imagination and conviction to actually forge it,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International. “If they miss this opportunity, I shudder to think of the consequences. Our collective future is at stake.”

This is the UN’s biggest week of the year

The summit is the prelude to this year’s high-level meeting, held every September. More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues from the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider Mideast war.

“There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation, and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.”

One notable moment at Tuesday’s opening assembly meeting: U.S. President Biden’s likely final major appearance on the world stage, a platform he has tread upon and reveled in for decades.

At the upcoming meetings, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters this week: “The most vulnerable around the world are counting on us to make progress, to make change, to bring about a sense of hope for them.”

To meet the many global challenges, she said, the U.S. focus at the U.N. meetings will be on ending “the scourge of war.” Roughly 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas, she said.

Last September, the war in Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took center stage at the U.N. global gathering. But as the first anniversary of Hamas’ deadly attack in southern Israel approaches on Oct. 7, the spotlight is certain to be on the war in Gaza and escalating violence across the Israeli-Lebanon border, which is now threatening to spread to the wider Middle East.

Iran supports both Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants. Its new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, will address world leaders on Tuesday afternoon. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to speak Thursday morning and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday afternoon.

Zelensky will get the spotlight twice. He will speak Tuesday at a high-level meeting of the U.N. Security Council — called by the United States, France, Japan, Malta, South Korea and Britain — and will address the General Assembly on Wednesday morning.

They’re trying to counter ‘a world of grim statistics’

Slovenia, which holds the council’s rotating presidency this month, chose the topic “Leadership for Peace” for its high-level meeting Wednesday, challenging its 15 member nations to address why the U.N. body charged with maintaining international peace and security is failing — and how it can do better.

“The event follows our observation that we live in a world of grim statistics, with the highest number of ongoing conflicts, with record high casualties among civilians, among humanitarians, among medical workers, among journalist,” Slovenian U.N. Ambassador Samuel Zbogar told reporters. He cited a record-high 100 million people driven from their homes by conflict.

“The world is becoming less stable, less peaceful, and with erosion of the respect for the rules, it is sliding into the state of disorder,” Zbogar said. “We have not seen this high need to rebuild trust to secure the future ever before.”

A key reason for the Security Council’s dysfunction is the deep division among its five veto-wielding permanent members. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, is a supporter of Ukraine alongside Britain and France. Russia invaded Ukraine and has a military and economic partnership with China, though Beijing reasserted its longstanding support for every country’s sovereignty without criticizing Russia in a recent briefing paper for the U.N. meetings.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, will be at the United Nations this week along with Biden. But Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping are sending their foreign ministers instead. Neither Putin nor Xi attended last year, either.

Guterres, who will preside over the whole affair this week, warned that the world is seeing “a multiplication of conflicts and the sense of impunity” — a landscape where, he said, “any country or any military entity, militias, whatever, feel that they can do whatever they want because nothing will happen to them.”

“And the fact that nobody takes even seriously the capacity of the powers to solve problems on the ground,” he said, “makes the level of impunity [on] an enormous level.”

Lederer writes for the Associated Press.