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UN flags and logo.
Scandals and hope at the UN: Is it worth it?
What good is the United Nations in 2024?
With wars raging, AI disrupting, inequality growing, and climate change accelerating, UN Secretary-General António Guterres says that “a powder keg risks engulfing the world.”
That’s one reason why the GZERO team is paying close attention to a giant gabfest, where leaders like President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, policymakers, diplomats, and influencers from 193 countries have gathered this week to try to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.
It’s why you saw Ian Bremmer’sexclusive interview with Guterres on our PBS TV program GZERO World or, as we reported today in our morning newsletter, we have Iran’s Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif on the show denying that Iran was involved in the assassination attempts on former President Donald Trump, while admitting that US election hacking came from someone in his country. Watch the clip here and tune in next week for the full interview on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.
It’s also why we hosted and broadcast a series of key livestreams with world leaders covering everything from governing AI to the conflicts in Europe, Lebanon, Gaza, and Ukraine.
I have been incredibly proud of the work the team has done sorting through the global noise to get at the clear political signals while highlighting the issues in an insightful, nonpartisan way.
But the question remains: Why bother paying attention to the UN?
It’s easy to be cynical about the UN. As Brett Stephens once described it, “The U.N. is a never-ending scandal disguised as an everlasting hope. The hope is that dialogue can overcome distrust, and collective security can be made to work in the interests of humanity. Reality says otherwise.”
Scandals, failures, hypocrisies, and disappointments fly around the UN as prominently as the flags around its New York City headquarters, and Stephens waved many of them, from the failure to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre in Srebrenica, to corruption in the oil-for-food program in Iraq. That was back in 2018.
Today there are even more, from the outrage surrounding allegations that some UNRWA workers worked with Hamas during the Oct. 7 massacres, to the obstructive dysfunctions of the five permanent members that have veto powers, which has proven to be a tragic obstacle to real global action in key conflicts, like Sudan. It’s hard to take the UN seriously when Iran gets a turn chairing its Human Rights Council Social Forum.
Even reading through the main agenda of the 79th General Assembly session, it’s understandable why some critics experience high-speed eye-rolling that rivals the backspin on a Roger Federer backhand. For example, one goal says: “Achieving global nuclear disarmament is the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations.” How’s that going? Just yesterday, Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced that he was alerting his nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold needed to justify the use of nuclear weapons, a major escalation in the war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, less than 20% of the famed 17 Sustainable Development Goals are on track to be completed by 2030.
“The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” quipped John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN under former President George W. Bush. Many critics today still think he’s right.
But is he?
Only pointing out the UN’s failures to solve complex global problems is like describing Ted Williams as a guy who failed to get a hit 60% of the time, instead of noting that a baseball player hitting .400 is one of the greatest feats in sports. It’s like dismissing venture capital investors as losers because at least 80% of their investments go bust, instead of focusing on the ones that succeed and more than make up for the other losses. In very hard challenges, a low success rate can still be a major victory.
Back in 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problem” to describe political, environmental, or security challenges that are uniquely difficult to solve and may have no single right answer. That’s where the UN is needed most, to pull in global voices that often disagree or are at war with each other and make a genuine attempt to solve wicked problems. That takes time.
The fact is, there are many UN successes, notably the World Food Programme, which helps over 80 million people, delivering food, medicines, and vaccines to countries in crisis. There are peace treaties and accords establishing norms and conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its most famous document.
This past week, there was a major success in global governance on AI with the Global Digital Compact, which was signed by most major countries except Russia. They agreed to everything from global standards on accessibility, use, and design, to the establishment of an international scientific panel, which will — like the IPCC does for climate — create a measuring tool and a road map for how AI governance might unfold. There is literally no other place in the world where this could happen.
Is there a need for UN reform? Of course. That is why, for example, there is a strong push to create two permanent seats for Africa on the Security Council. In this video that I urge you to check out, Ian Bremmer argues that despite the challenges facing the world’s largest multilateral organization, the UN is more relevant than ever.
But the institution is only as good as the members make it through their financial contributions, attendance, and support. One of the key challenges is making all the work that is happening — and there is a lot — understandable and relevant to the wider public in order to overcome the massive trust deficit the UN faces.
Reestablishing trust takes radical transparency, and that’s why GZERO has made such an effort to pull back the curtain and give people a chance to see, hear, and debate the real policies and ideas that are being pitched. You should be able to judge for yourself if the UN is useful or not. We hope our coverage gives you the tools to do just that.
Graphic Truth: Biggest contributors to UN peacekeeping
UN Peacekeeping is all about helping countries navigate the often rocky transition out of violent conflict, with the hope of laying the groundwork for a lasting peace. For over 70 years, peacekeepers have been deployed around the world to help maintain security, protect civilians and human rights, and oversee peace processes. There are currently 11 active peacekeeping missions around the world.
Canada played a central role in the early development of UN Peacekeeping. In 1957, Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his vital role in establishing a UN Emergency Force that helped resolve the Suez Crisis of 1956 in Egypt.
UN Peacekeeping is financed by UN member states — and has a budget of roughly $6.4 billion — with countries like the US, China, and Japan among the top financial contributors. Meanwhile, the biggest contributors of personnel to UN Peacekeeping are Bangladesh, Nepal, and India. Do you think UN Peacekeeping is worth all that goes into it? We’d love to hear from you!
Can Zelensky's 'victory plan' bring peace to Ukraine?
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.
First question, is Zelensky's finalized 'victory plan' realistic to bring peace to Ukraine?
Well, the peace plan that he's talking about is a proposal that he's going to present to President Biden at the meeting in UN in the next few days. They are there for the UN General Assembly, and it consists essentially of beefing up Ukraine's military capabilities with the possibility to use more long-range weapons and other things in order to substantially increase the military difficulties that Russia already having. Thus, possibly, hopefully, making it certain, making it clear to the Kremlin that there's no way to victory and that they have to sit down and agree to something that is acceptable and that can be called peace of some sort. Will this work? Remains to be seen, to put it in the mildest possible way.
Second question, why is there backlash against EU's anti-deforestation law?
Well, it's not unique for that particular one. I mean, all of the legislation for the so-called Green Deal that was decided due to the last five years, a lot of it is fairly complicated and has significant burdens on industry in order to reporting requirements and all of those. That includes the deforestation law. So there is a push to say, "Well, well it's all good. But let's delay it somewhat so that business has the possibility of catching up with all of the requirements." You will see that debate about several aspects of the Green Deal. It doesn't endanger the deal itself, but it perhaps streamlines and perhaps delays it somewhat.
Hello Kitty on the screens at the UN General Assembly
How it feels to be “the future” at the UN’s Summit of the Future
“What kind of world would you like to live in?” asked Hello Kitty – yes, the cartoon cat – before a group of youth leaders gathered in the UN’s General Assembly hall on Friday.
They were there to represent countries and causes at the Summit for the Future, a high-level meeting that culminated in the “grown-up” world leaders endorsing a 60-point Pact for the Future on Sunday.
That pact, adopted by the UN’s 193 member states, includes everything from a compact on AI governance, to urging countries to supercharge their sustainability efforts, to pushing for Africa’s inclusion on the Security Council, to devising a global governance framework for preventing war in outer space.
But a key part of the Pact is a “Declaration on Future Generations,” which promises to create “meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.”
And that’s where the UN, it seems, has a problem.
During the summit’s opening ceremony, Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged that the underrepresentation of young people at the UN was an issue that the institution is keen to address.
As of 2022, only 3.7% of UN employees were under 30 years old. Guterres pledged to improve that, saying it is important to have young people “working [at the UN] daily, where the decisions are made, where ideas are born.”
The UN, he said, is putting mechanisms in place to “ensure that in the [UN] decision-making process, there are moments where there is an active intervention of young people, not just their consultation.”
But many young people felt that they should have been involved in the finalization of the Pact for the Future on Sunday, which they reported only involved UN stakeholders.
“Almost none of the youth delegates were really engaged in the process" of endorsing the pact, said Ukraine’s Youth Delegate to the UN, Yuri Lomikovskyi, age 22.“A declaration on youth participation was made without youth participation.”
He faulted the pact for repeating old initiatives and frameworks – like the Paris Agreement, the UN Charter, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights – without adding “mechanisms to actually make them happen, especially amidst modern challenges,” including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza wars, the climate emergency, and democratic backsliding around the world.
Josh Oxby, 26, the youth Global Focal Point for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal on energy, expressed a similar concern about accountability.
“It's all very well and good to commit to these ideas and to focus on meaningful engagement,” he said, “but the issue now is what can we do to hold it to account or challenge it in the future?”
These views represent a broader feeling among the youth delegates. In a live poll conducted during the event, only 3% of the 669 youth participants said they felt they had direct power in shaping the Pact’s agenda, with several accusing the UN of “youth-washing.”
The youth delegates said they felt valued, but only to a certain degree. “When there are young people in the room, we make the older generations think about their own families and kids, " says the UN’s youth development delegate Asma Rouabhia, 28, “but there is a feeling that because young people are not as experienced, we don’t really know what we are talking about.”
“I might not have all the technical knowledge, but I have the personal passion,” she added. Rouabhia became an energy advocate because insufficient energy access in her native Tunisia caused her mother to nearly freeze while giving birth to her.
The UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs, Felipe Paullier, says that while polls show that young people have outsized faith in multilateralism, the UN “risks losing them if it is not conscious about the changes it needs to make structurally, to increase youth participation.”
“Fifty percent of the world’s population is under 30 years old,” says Paullier, “if [the UN] doesn’t make these changes, we are screwed.”
FILE PHOTO: UN General Assembly votes at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, U.S. May 23, 2024.
Can the UN save our future?
Today marks the first major day of the UN General Assembly, a forum where the UN’s 193 member states gather to debate global problems and work toward solutions. The event kicks off with the Summit of the Future — a two-day event that UN Secretary-General António Guterres says is a “once-in-a-generation chance” to reinvigorate international cooperation and forge a new global consensus on shaping our collective future.
GZERO will be on the ground delivering exclusive content from UNGA, but before we get to the high-level meetings and major speeches next week, here’s what to expect from the Summit of the Future:
Day one kicks off with the kids. The first day focuses on youth participation at the UN, a fitting start for a summit aimed at creating a better future. On the agenda is gender equality, sustainability, peace building, and digital equity. Climate change will be a central focus of the day, as the event coincides with Climate Week beginning in New York City, and comes ahead of the review of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (spoiler alert: they are off track).
Studies show that people 18 to 29 years old are more favorable toward the UN than those ages 50 and older, but that optimism is rarely translated into tangible power when it comes to UN resolutions and actions. GZERO’s Riley Callanan will meet with Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs Felipe Paullier ahead of the summit to discuss why young people should care about the UN, and the role they can play in revitalizing the 78-year-old institution for a new generation.
Day two gets into the nitty-gritty with the aim of figuring out how the UN can harness international cooperation to actually create a better future. There are three key parts of the day: sustainability, peace building, and technology.
On technology, the UN is unveiling its“Governing AI for Humanity,” report, which lays out how the UN can create aframework for global AI governance. The aim: ensure AI development is humane, equitable, and harnessed to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
They are also expected to agree on the Global Digital Compact, which will task the UN with ensuring that AI is used safely and for global benefit, and with bridging the technological divide that exists between wealthy countries and the rest of the world. The difference: One is a framework, one is a global agreement. Both could be monumental in creating international governance over the technology that will likely shape the future.
Ian Bremmer, founder and president of both Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, served as a rapporteur for the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, and will be presenting the report and the Global Digital Compact alongside other experts at the event on Saturday.
We will be bringing you all of the highlights of UNGA in our newsletter, but if you want to really get a feel for what it's like to be on the ground, follow us onX,Instagram, andYouTube.
A permanent Security Council seat for Africa?
Guterres offered few specifics on how Africa should be represented. That appears to be a question for the African Union. For now, the 15-member Security Council consists of five permanent members with veto power – China, France, Russia, the US, and the UK – and 10 nonpermanent seats allocated regionally, including three seats for African states, two for Asia-Pacific, two for Latin America and the Caribbean, two for Western Europe and other states; and one for Eastern Europe.
UNSC permanent members have a veto over votes of the Council. Sierra Leone President Julius Maada Bio told the Council on Monday that Africa should have two permanent seats and added that “Africa wants theveto abolished. However, if UN member states wish to retain the veto, it must be extended to all new permanent members as a matter of justice.”
Guterres said in January that all five current permanent members favored greater African representation, though they will certainly haggle over the details of reform. But for now, the number of voices in favor, at least in principle, continues to grow.Does Palestine pass the state test?
Did Hamas score a big win at the United Nations, or was it actually a win for the much-maligned idea of the two-state solution?
Forgive yourself if you ignored the critical UN vote last week. Like the blaring horns on the streets of New York, many folks tune out the UN as meaningless background noise to the real action in global politics: sound and fury signifying bias. That is a mistake. The controversial May 9 vote on granting Palestine full membership to the UN bears real scrutiny. After all, in plain terms, the vote effectively means recognizing a Palestinian state.
The vote was supported by 143 of the 193 countries that make up the General Assembly – that’s more countries supporting this idea in 2024 than the last time something like this was voted on, back in 2012. Just seven months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, Palestine has won more support, not less. And Israel is more isolated, not less. Nine countries, including the US and Israel, voted no, but this next bit is telling: 25 countries, including Canada, abstained. This signals a major shift in Canadian policy, as it has historically voted “no” alongside the US.
What changed, and what exactly was the vote saying about who would represent the Palestine state if it was granted full status– the Palestinian Authority or Hamas? Can there be a Palestinian state with Hamas playing a role? Is the current Israeli government trying to kill the idea of a viable two-state solution?
To find out, I spoke with Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae.
Evan Solomon: Ambassador, 143 countries at the UN General Assembly just voted to grant Palestine full member status — essentially recognizing a Palestinian state. Canada was among the 25 countries that abstained, which is a change in policy from a hard “no.” Why the shift in policy?
Ambassador Bob Rae: Largely because we think the situation on the ground is changing so fast. We wanted to make it clear that we still favor a two-state solution, but that we also recognize that it’s going to take a lot of work for that to happen. There’s going to have to be significant changes, frankly, on both sides to get there. Most dramatically on the side of Hamas, which continues to wage war after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and is not, by any means, defeated. We have to be clear that there can’t be a terrorist group in charge of a state. Israel will never accept the notion of a terrorist state being granted a status in international law, and we would never do it. The only way we can proceed is if that changes.
The other thing that needs to change is the policies that are currently being pursued by the Israelis in political terms, which is refusing to countenance the idea of two states coexisting.
The argument that we’ve always made in the past with this kind of resolution is to say, “No, we can’t support that, but we want to ensure that the parties will get back to the table, and that’s where things will get resolved.” But it's clear that at the moment, the current Israeli government has no intention of negotiating anything approaching sovereignty for Palestinians. So we don’t see how we can simply vote “no” anymore. We also don’t see how we can simply say “yes” either. We don’t think we can responsibly do that either. So that’s why we’ve taken the position we’ve taken.
Solomon: Was this a position that was true before Oct. 7, or has it changed because of the attack and the aftermath?
Rae: The feeling was that you had more of a discussion going on within Israel about the possibilities of two states. However, we know that Mr. Netanyahu has never been enthusiastic and never really admitted to the possibility of a Palestinian state, and now it’d become even clearer that’s not on the table.
On the other side, I do think that there has been, in the last 20 years, a strong endorsement of the two-state position by the Palestinian Authority leadership on the political side in the West Bank, but that has not been matched by Hamas. So that’s why we changed the position from 2012.
Solomon: Back in 2012, only 138 countries voted for the resolution that upgraded the status of Palestine to a non-member observer state within the UN, but Canada voted against it. What does the increase of support tell you? Is this, essentially, a vote for the Hamas cause? Does this show that their horrifying terror attack was a strategic success?
Rae: I don’t think so. I think that this whole “reward theory” is wrongheaded. The support in the General Assembly for two states is overwhelming. If you actually read the speeches of the countries that voted no, and the countries that voted to abstain, and the countries that voted yes, the support for two states was unanimous going from the United States and Hungary and other countries that voted no to the countries that abstained like us.
Solomon: But you had countries voting yes, like Denmark, the Aussies, and New Zealanders. What does that say?
Rae: I think it is a question of asking if a Palestinian state is prepared for membership in the United Nations. Canada looked at that question and we decided it doesn’t meet the test of what it means to be a state. The state is a place that has control over a territory, and the Palestinian Authority doesn't. Now, the Palestinians say, “Yeah, we haven’t been able to exercise control over the territory because of Israel.” And that's partly true. But it's also true to say now that they don't have control over the territory because of Hamas terrorism, which they have not been able to deal with effectively or to the extent that you can say, “This is a state that's ready to go.” The point is that there's real work to be done in the creation of two states, and we've still got to get there.
Solomon: Did the vote at the UN signal that most countries are ready to recognize a Palestinian state, even if Hamas is part of the governing body?
Rae: No, I don’t think that’s the case. I really don’t. What has to be very clear is that there's no room for a Hamas state at the UN. That’s something where there’s a very strong consensus.
Solomon: But the vote doesn’t make that distinction.
Rae: That’s why I say the decision on who gets admitted to the UN is not based on high hopes. It is based on what are the realities on the ground. We have to get real about it. That's where I think Canada is not alone. Many other countries feel the same way. The real work starts now with saying: How do you get to a cease-fire? How do you get to where you want to go, which is a two-state solution?
Solomon: Is a two-state solution effectively dead?
Rae: The trouble with that argument, Evan, is that you’ve got to then say, ok, if the two-state solution is dead, then what? When you look at the other alternatives, they don’t work either. For example, if you take a “river to the sea” approach, whether it's from a terrorist position or an Israeli perspective, that doesn't work. So it's really important for people to come to grips with the fact that the most fact-based, realistic solution has got to be based on the notion of two sovereign states living side by side in security and in peace. And, one hopes, eventually in partnership. It takes a long time to get there. But if you drop the idea of any possibility of sovereignty to realize Palestinian aspirations, then you've really abandoned all hope.
Solomon: From the Netanyahu government point of view, the argument is that Hamas doesn’t even recognize Israel’s right to exist, and neither do many other countries in the region. So a two-state solution is, at best, a naive hope. At worst, a serious security risk.
Rae: All that is part of the solution. That’s all part of what needs to happen. These things can change. We've seen things can change. It's all about building the basis for change. To rule it out entirely is a mistake.
Solomon: Does Hamas, a listed terror group in Canada and the US, need to be destroyed, as Netanyahu argues, or can they evolve out of that status, and transition toward governance?
Rae: No terrorist entity can become part of a state. That’s not possible. Can terrorist groups change? History points to some examples of that. The IRA, the African National Union, which was listed in many countries as a terrorist organization. It transformed itself. It changed. But the problem with Hamas — and it is in their charter — is that it is based on the obliteration of the state of Israel. That's not something that anybody can accept. It isn't good enough to say if this and if that. We can't get into too many hypotheticals. Right now Hamas' official policy is to obliterate the state of Israel. Israel is a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations, so while Canada has strong disagreements with the current policies of the current government, that's very different from saying that we are going to pretend that Hamas is not Hamas. I mean, that would be wrong.
Solomon: Neither Joe Biden nor Justin Trudeau gets on well with Benjamin Netanyahu. How isolated is this Israeli government right now?
Rae: That’s a very important question. My own view is it’s not simply about Prime Minister Netanyahu or the state of Israel. Anybody with any degree of empathy would understand that the activities of Hamas – the sexual and gender atrocities, the atrocities on children and families, and the sheer brutality of the attacks on civilians – are unprecedented. It's been deeply traumatic for the Israeli people. So if you ask them, “How do you feel about two states?,” you can understand them saying, “For God's sake, don't talk to me about that until you've dealt with what we're dealing with.” You have to understand that the current disagreement that we have with Israel is not irreparable. It's not like we're stopping talking or engaging.
It’s important for everybody to be clearheaded about how we need to go forward and the work that’s involved. But any tactic or strategy that doesn't recognize the democratic rights of either the Israeli people or the Palestinian people is doomed to fail.
Women and children wait for food distribution from the United Nations World Food Programme in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, back in 2017.
South Sudan customs dispute taxes a long-suffering population
Even as three-quarters of South Sudan’s people face starvation, a squabble between the government and the UN over import taxes is leaving vital aid trucks stuck at the border.
The background: South Sudan’s trade ministry ordered this week that all goods trucks entering the East African country must pay a $300 tax. The measure was meant to ensure that the government got its share of revenue from imports that are often underbilled or misrepresented. There was supposed to be a carveout for UN aid vehicles, but if so, officials at the Ugandan border didn’t get the memo – at least not yet.
The bigger background: South Sudan is one of the world’s newest countries – and one of its poorest. After coming into existence in 2011 following years of war with the Sudanese government, it fell into its own civil war, which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The legacy of that conflict – along with frequent natural disasters – persists: Seven million of the country’s 12 million people are facing hunger in the coming months. The harrowing civil war in Sudan, which just entered its second year, has exacerbated things, driving an estimated 500,000 people across the border into South Sudan, straining the country’s resources further.