The UN at a crossroads, with Secretary-General António Guterres

This week on the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the sidelines of the General Assembly for the final time in his official capacity as UN chief. After a decade as the UN’s top diplomat, the former Portuguese Prime Minister is leaving his position at a moment of great global instability. Wars grind on in Ukraine and Iran with no end in sight. Humanitarian crises in Gaza and Sudan have exposed how little leverage the international system has when powerful states and their partners act with impunity. With faith in global institutions at an all-time low, does the world’s most ambitious experiment in multilateralism still have a place?

While Guterres will be the first to acknowledge that the UN is weakened, he says it is far from obsolete. The old superpowers are discovering their limits, while middle and rising powers are demanding more influence. Those countries need a place to negotiate rules, build coalitions, and keep competition from becoming confrontation. For all its failures, the United Nations is still the only table where all 193 member states still have a seat. Guterres and Bremmer discuss all of that, as well as the erosion of international law, limits of superpowers, and why he believes AI is the most urgent challenge facing humanity.