Mayhem in the Middle East. Catastrophic disruption to world energy supplies. The risk of future food shortages as crucial fertiliser stocks are blocked behind the Strait of Hormuz. And in all this, the dog that didn’t bark – or not so you’d notice – has been the UN and its Secretary General, Antonio Guterres. It’s not that he hasn’t said anything – he has. And it’s not that nothing has happened at the UN. On March 11, the Security Council condemned Iran’s attacks on its neighbours, although it entirely omitted to mention the US-Israeli strikes that began this war.
But the bigger picture is this: I cannot remember a conflict during my lifetime when the UN has appeared to be so completely on the sidelines. Mr Guterres is either ignored, or little reported. There once was a time when a secretary general’s admonitions led the front page and the position itself was considered to have the stature of a “secular pope”. Are we really seeing the inexorable ebbing away of the UN as a crucial and powerful global institution?
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a candidate to be the next UN secretary general (Mr Guterres’s second term finishes at the end of this year), thinks so. “It’s moving into irrelevance,” he said in an interview in January. “By inaction, omission, impossibility, frustration, passivity, cynicism or simply the wrong agendas … today, the UN is nowhere to be seen.”
Some of this may be down to the desire of the administration of US President Donald Trump to downgrade the UN and disentangle itself from a body to which America has always been the biggest funder. Earlier this year Mr Trump ordered an American withdrawal from “31 UN entities that operate contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty”, as a White House release put it. He had already taken the US out of the World Health Organisation – a UN agency – and the UN Human Rights Council.
Then there has been the failure to implement the kind of bold reforms that for decades both critics and friends have called for, most notably to the Security Council, whose veto-wielding permanent members are still the five primary victors of the Second World War. Having both the UK and France among the P5 today is widely regarded as indefensible, with countries such as India, Nigeria and Indonesia arguably having far better claims. Everyone agrees that change is desirable and yet it remains eternally elusive.
Some suggest that a degree of responsibility for the problems the UN is currently facing must be borne by its leadership. The contrast is made with Kofi Annan, secretary general from 1997 to 2006, who seemed to embody moral leadership and authority. “The briefing room in Kofi’s day brimmed with journalists,” Mark Malloch-Brown, who served as Mr Annan’s deputy, has said. “Now it’s more mausoleum than press room.”
Other former UN staff echo the sentiment. Mark Seddon, who was a speech writer for secretary general Ban Ki-moon, calls Mr Guterres “the invisible man” for his lack of profile and effective action during the current war and Israel’s devastation of Gaza.
My colleague Salman Shaikh, chief executive of the peace-building organisation The Shaikh Group, worked closely with Mr Annan when he was a young UN official in the early 2000s. “Kofi Annan taught us that a secretary general could help shape the influential agenda,” he tells me. Mr Guterres, he says, “turned out to be incapable of the role”. Mr Shaikh, who criticises Mr Guterres’s “risk aversion” and “wrong priorities”, says the Secretary General’s legacy “will be that no one will remember him, and those who do will remember him as a complete disaster”.
To be fair to Mr Guterres, he did launch an initiative to try to make the organisation more “agile, integrated and equipped” during its 80th anniversary last year. But he remains slow to act, and at times oddly tone deaf. “The conflict in the Middle East has gone too far,” he posted on X last Thursday, prompting a swift response from TRT World’s Ghida Fakhry. “‘Too far,’ Secretary General? Only now? It was too far on day one, when this war of aggression was launched without a UN Security Council mandate,” she wrote. “Still no reference to international law. Far too little, far too late.”
There may be some who would be happy to see the UN gradually wither into insignificance. It is possible, as Mr Shaikh says, that “we're peeking into the new world of multipolarity where we will need recourse to ad hoc coalitions and alliances to try to reconcile different combative forces”. But he also says – and I would agree with him – that “international law is our North Star”. We cannot give up on it. The UN, imperfect though it is, is meant to be the great upholder of international law and norms. Its supporters must work to restore its strength, as Mr Trump’s Board of Peace cannot possibly fulfil the same functions. As it is, one member – Indonesia – has already put further discussions “on hold” over the war with Iran.
Middle powers would likely rally to the UN flag (if called), but perhaps their best hope is when a new secretary general takes over next year. It needs to be someone who could command attention, and if an incumbent head of state or government of stature – South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, say – were to campaign for the post, it would be a huge boost to the secretary general’s clout and standing. More likely, as by tradition it will be South America’s “turn” next year, the former Chilean president and UN official Michelle Bachelet, who is a candidate, may well be in a strong position.
If elected, could she bring the UN back to the position of moral authority it once had? Whether it is her or not, the new secretary general would do well to remember the words of Mr Grossi, for the world is in dire need of such a leader: “The general has to be on the battlefield and has to be the first.”
