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President of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas on pre-recorded video, addresses the UNGA 80 Plenary Meeting General Debate.
What We’re Watching: Gaza talks heat up at UN, Another coordinated drone move in Europe, Czechia’s Trump eyes comeback
Palestinian Authority president pushes statehood in remote address to UN
Denied a US visa, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the UN General Assembly remotely from Ramallah, accusing Israel of “war crimes” and “genocide” in Gaza while rejecting Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and calling for the terrorist group to disarm. He claimed that the Palestinian Authority was ready to govern Gaza without Hamas, and said they are committed to “conducting presidential and parliamentary elections within a year after the end of the war.” His speech came as 10 Western nations joined roughly 150 others in recognizing Palestinian statehood this week, and after the Trump administration presented a plan for ending the war in Gaza on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders are threatening West Bank annexation and deepening their offensive in Gaza City. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will respond tomorrow morning when he addresses the General Assembly.
“Professional” drone intrusion at four Danish airports
In what Danish ministers are calling a “professional” and “systematic” act, drones were spotted at four regional airports in the Scandinavian country. Two of these airports are used by military aircraft. The intrusion comes days after drones incurred into the airspace of Copenhagen airport, the country’s largest. It’s not yet clear who is behind the move, but Europeans are asking whether Moscow was involved, given that Russian drones recently entered the respective airspaces of Estonia, Poland, and Romania. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen didn’t rule out Russian involvement in this latest action, and ministers refused to connect it as yet. Russia denied that it was involved.
The EU is about to get Czeched
Former Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, a billionaire rightwing populist, is set for a triumphant return to power in Czechia’s upcoming general election. Babiš, who held power from 2017 to 2021, is ferociously anti-immigration, skeptical of support for Ukraine, and opposed to what he sees as EU encroachments on Czech sovereignty. With less than two weeks until election day, his ANO party leads the polls by more than 10 points over the current center-right governing coalition. His likely win will strengthen a Eurosceptic axis of former Eastern Bloc countries, complicating EU policy on immigration and Ukraine.
The world’s appetite for oil may be about to shrink
The UN General Assembly turns 80 this week, and the mood is grim. It’s not just the awful motorcade traffic in New York (do yourself a favor, walk or take the subway). Wars rage in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan. Autocrats flex their muscles with impunity. Democracies are fracturing at the seams. International cooperation is fraying as the G-Zero takes hold.
You'd think Climate Week – happening simultaneously in the Big Apple through September 28 – would add to the gloom given President Donald Trump’s skepticism of climate change (“the greatest con job ever perpetrated”) and outright hostility toward clean energy (a “scam”). But there's some genuinely good news for the planet buried in all this chaos: We may be at – or very near – peak oil demand.
This isn’t the old “peak oil” story that doomsayers have predicted for decades – the moment when the world runs out of accessible oil. Those theories have been proven wrong time and again – most recently when fracking and other extraction technologies turbocharged the industry’s productivity, unlocked new barrels, and turned the United States into the world’s top producer and exporter. What I’m talking about here is different. We're likely witnessing the moment when global appetite for oil finally starts to wane, driven not by scarcity but by changes in how the world consumes energy.
The most dramatic shift comes from China, whose appetite for fossil fuels kept global oil markets humming for thirty years. Between 2010 and 2020, Chinese oil imports doubled to 10 million barrels per day. That era looks to be over thanks to a demographic transition, a rapidly accelerating energy revolution, and slowing economic growth.
Start with demographics. China’s population peaked during Covid but has since shrunk by nearly 25 million people – roughly equivalent to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway combined – after growing by more than 155 million in the previous twenty years. Fewer people means less demand for gasoline and diesel – especially in a decelerating economy weaning itself off a housing and infrastructure construction binge.
Then there’s China’s energy revolution. In just five years, electric vehicles’ share of new car sales in China jumped from roughly 5% to over 50%. That alone took what used to be the world’s single largest growth market for gasoline off the table. But China’s technological transformation has gone far beyond cars. Beijing is also rapidly electrifying heating and heavy industry while deploying renewable power capacity (especially solar) at a historic scale. The country installed almost 270 gigawatts of new renewable energy in just the first half of 2025 – more than twice the new capacity installed by the entire rest of the world in the same period, six times what the US managed in all of 2024 at the heyday of Bidenomics, and more than India’s entire installed renewable capacity. The result: China’s oil demand has likely topped out and could enter structural decline as soon as this year, joining Europe and North America.
Not even a fast-growing India will be able to fill China’s shoes. Though still rising, Indian oil consumption growth has been uneven, slowed this year by infrastructure constraints. Unlike China’s, India’s economic expansion relies more on services than on oil-intensive sectors like construction and chemicals. The country is also now entering its own electrification phase. New Delhi wants EVs to reach a third of new auto sales by 2030, up from roughly 5% today. Even if that target slips, the direction of travel is unmistakable – especially as renewable technologies continue to get cheaper and better. India won’t fully replace China’s lost oil-demand growth.
Add it up and it’s increasingly plausible that global oil demand could shrink in 2025. Yes, consumption remains at record highs. But global demand growth has flatlined since the pandemic. Oil intensity across power, transport, and heating is plummeting everywhere. In the biggest consuming economies, oil use per capita has dropped by more than 15% over the past two decades. Europe’s green transition is uneven but persistent. America’s is slower than it could be but still ongoing, with renewables set to meet most incremental power demand because they’re cheaper to build and quicker to deploy at scale – the Trump administration’s “war” on them be damned.
Peak demand may not happen this year. Heck, it may not happen for another five or ten years. Prediction is hard, especially about the future. The debate on this question is as much political as it is analytical. That’s why the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from the International Energy Agency over its “politicized” forecast of peak demand by 2030 – never mind that oil companies like Equinor and BP project a similar inflection point. But even the skeptics – especially the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Exxon Mobil – now only quibble about the “when,” not the “if.”
So how are oil producers responding to the existential prospect of a shrinking market? Not by cutting supply and creating a deficit that lifts prices, as you’d expect, but by pumping more. In fact, after cutting for years, Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ allies are on track to raise output by more than 1 million barrels per day year-on-year despite stagnant demand growth. They're determined to regain market share from their non-OPEC competitors – particularly the US – by keeping the taps open and squeezing out the highest-cost producers, even if it means lower prices for themselves. Non-OPEC supply, however, is stubborn. US production hit a record this summer and will likely plateau rather than crash as industry consolidation, cost discipline, and efficiency gains keep shale output resilient. Brazil and Guyana will continue adding low-cost offshore barrels. And Norway can keep pumping into Europe almost regardless of global pricing.
The combination of weaker demand and increased supply will result in a world awash in relatively – and increasingly – cheap oil. This doesn't mean prices will crash to zero. The world will use lots of oil for a long time, and prices need to stay high enough to induce the necessary supply. OPEC can pivot to cutting if it wants to (though the cartel’s coordination and market-management powers are likely to weaken as the energy transition advances and structural demand for oil wanes). Output, investment, and prices will ebb and flow with business cycles, shocks, and geopolitical developments. But the overall environment points to lower demand and softer prices.
For consumers, this is a gift. Cheaper oil will be a boon to households and oil-importing economies across Northeast Asia, Western Europe, India, and parts of Southeast Asia and South America. For oil producers, not so much. Countries whose entire budgets are predicated on $80-$100 oil are about to face a reckoning.
The geopolitical implications are stark. China's strategic bet on post-carbon energy dominance looks to be paying off. The country that was arguably the most fossil fuel-dependent on Earth in 2010 is now the world's first "electrostate.” Not only is it the largest consumer of clean energy by orders of magnitude, but it has cornered the market on both the finished products and the key supply chains that drive the transition globally – batteries, EVs, solar panels, critical minerals. By contrast, the Trump administration’s decision to double down on America’s petrostate status while waging war on renewables has near-term political utility, but it’s a losing play in a world that will be increasingly powered by electrons, with implications for economic competitiveness, AI dominance, and national security. Beijing’s recent weaponization of its rare earths dominance was just a glimpse of what the US has risked by ceding leadership and leverage to the Chinese in the electrotech space.
A near-term peak in global oil demand is good news for the climate fight. The world’s biggest emitter is now seeing its first drop in emissions driven by the growth of renewables. Critically, China is also exporting massive amounts of cheap renewable tech to developing countries, helping them leapfrog the dirty growth phase every industrialized country has had to go through in the past.
That’s not to say climate is a solved problem. Aviation, shipping, petrochemicals – these sectors are hard to abate and will keep running on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Persistently low prices can also disincentivize change at the margins. Plus, mass electrification requires upfront capital spending – lots of it. Solar and wind have become the cheapest form of energy in most sectors across much of the world, but you still need to build grids, storage, and charging at scale. Governments facing weak economic growth, high interest rates, and tight budgets will struggle to fund the infrastructure investments they need to turn cheap kilowatt-hours into lower bills. That keeps the politics of the transition messy, particularly in the US and parts of Europe, where there are tons of potentially stranded assets and powerful vested interests.
Not to mention that a world in which Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party save the world from climate change will look quite different from one in which the United States and its democratic allies do. It won’t matter to the planet. But it’ll make a difference for the future of democracy and the balance of power.
Syria's President Ahmed al-Sharaa attends the 80th United Nations General Assembly, at the U.N. headquarters in New York City, U.S., September 23, 2025.
Syria’s regime makes its UN debut – and gets set for “elections”
Into the flurry of activity in New York this week stepped Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, on his first-ever trip to the United Nations - and it was quite the diplomatic coup.
Al-Sharaa’s address to the UN General Assembly is the first by a Syrian leader since 1967. But it is all the more remarkable because Al-Sharaa – then known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani - spent 2006–2011 in US custody, during the Iraq war led by Gen. David Petraeus. Washington subsequently designated his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2018, and only revoked that designation in July 2025. During much of the intervening time, there was a $10m bounty on al-Sharaa.
How things have changed since Al-Sharaa and his forces ousted former Syrian dictator President Bashar al-Assad last December. Assad’s fall was seen as a major blow to Iran, and despite Al-Sharaa’s history of extremism, the US administration cautiously began crafting a new relationship with Damascus.
The start of a beautiful friendship?
That relationship is now a full-on bromance. On his arrival in New York, Al-Sharaa sat down for a fireside chat with Petraeus, who told the audience, “His trajectory from insurgent leader to head of state has been one of the most dramatic political transformations in recent Middle Eastern history.” Al-Sharaa then met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who had tweeted the $10 million reward in 2017) to discuss "US priorities" in Syria, including counterterrorism efforts, efforts to locate missing Americans, and the importance of Israel-Syria relations in regional security.
It’s a remarkable evolution. When asked whether Syria would join the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE in 2020, however, Al-Sharaa demurred, saying “Syria is different, as those that are part of the Abraham Accords are not Israel’s neighbors. Syria has been subjected to more than 1,000 Israeli raids, strikes and incursions from the Golan Heights into Syria.”
Syria’s relations with the West have still evolved massively - and could go further. According to Ibrahim Al-Assil, Syria Project Lead at the Atlantic Council, “Syria’s movement toward joining the anti-ISIS coalition (a group of 89 nations formed in 2014 to destroy DAESH) would be a milestone, signaling Damascus’ shift from being seen as a disruptor under Assad to positioning itself as part of a constructive international coalition.”
Challenges for democracy at home
While Syria’s international posture is bringing it close to the West, the domestic story is more complex. Last weekend, Syrian authorities announced October 5 for the country’s first national elections since last year’s coup – sort of.
Instead of all citizens voting directly, Syria’s 210-seat People’s Assembly will be chosen by an electoral college and the President himself. In June, Al-Sharaa appointed a committee which in turn appointed subcommittees in 62 electoral districts. Each subcommittee selected 30-50 delegates, based on population size, for a total of roughly 7,000 “voters.”
Members seeking election have a week to campaign for one of 121 seats in the People's Assembly — but no parties are permitted, and campaigning is a private affair among the 7000 electoral college members only. The remainder of the 210 seats, nearly a majority, will be directly named by Al-Sharaa. He defends that move by claiming his appointees will “balance” existing representation and include more technocrats, though some feel it may turn the Assembly into a rubber-stamp body controlled by the executive.
Why this complex process, instead of direct democracy? According to a statement by the Syrian government at the end of June, "The reality in Syria does not permit the holding of traditional elections, given the presence of millions of internally and externally displaced persons, the absence of official documents [and] the fragility of the legal structure.”
Civil society groups disagree. A statement from 15 organizations warns that Al-Sharaa’s plan paves the way for "the executive authority to dominate an institution that should be independent of it and reflect the popular will."
Officials have floated a 30-month horizon for this temporary arrangement, but it remains to be seen whether Al-Sharaa will transition to true elections at that time.
There are also storm clouds in the Druze and Kurdish parts of the country. There, the pseudo-elections for nineteen local seats have been put “on hold”, ostensibly for security reasons. The government does not exercise local control there, and it’s not clear when local delegate selection might happen.
Tensions with Kurdish leadership in turn impact Damascus’ relationship with the Republic of Türkiye, where a large Kurdish refugee population lives and wishes to return to Syria. According to Ibrahim, avoiding military confrontation is key, as “Any bloodshed would deepen the rift and could irreversibly push the two sides apart.” We’ll see if Al-Sharaa can exercise as much diplomacy at home as he does abroad.
The UN at 80: Reform, cuts & the future of multilateralism
The United Nations is marking its 80th anniversary under intense pressure: shrinking resources, deep geopolitical divisions, and global challenges left unresolved.
“The question is not whether the UN’s mandate is good ... it’s whether we are equipped, and whether the world is ready, to pursue it.”
UN Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder joins GZERO Media’s Tony Maciulis from the sidelines of the 2025 UN General Assembly to discuss the UN80 initiative, which aims to streamline mandates, cut costs, and restore public trust.
This conversation is presented by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft, from the 2025 UN General Assembly. The Global Stage series convenes global leaders for critical conversations on the geopolitical and technological trends shaping our world.
Watch: Global Stage live from the 80th UN General Assembly
WATCH: On the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, our panel of global experts will discuss the future of global cooperation and governance in the age of AI. How can the UN and multilateralism keep pace with a technology transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics? And what will it take to ensure no country or society is left behind in the new AI economy?
Our livestream panel discussion, "Global Stage: Live from the 80th UN General Assembly" examines these key issues today at 11:30 AM ET, live from the sidelines of UN headquarters on the first day of high-level General Debate. Watch live at gzeromedia.com/globalstage.
The discussion will be moderated by Julia Chatterley, Emmy-nominated journalist and moderator, and will feature a distinguished panel including:
- Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media
- Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
- S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India
- Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, Microsoft
- Ambassador Philip Thigo, Special Envoy for Technology for the Republic of Kenya
This livestream is the latest in the award-winning Global Stage series, a partnership between GZERO and Microsoft that examines critical issues at the intersection of technology, politics, and society.
Join us on Tuesday, September 23, 2025 at 11:30 AM ET at gzeromedia.com/globalstage to watch the discussion live.
Global Stage: Live from the 80th UN General Assembly
How AI is tackling food security, disaster response and other global challenges
AI for Good is more than a buzzword—it's a powerful tool tackling global challenges like food security, disaster response, and water conservation. Microsoft’s Brad Smith highlights real-world examples, such as using AI to analyze water data in Kenya, offering actionable solutions for governments and communities. Through collaborations with universities and NGOs, AI is driving progress on the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, turning technology into a force for societal improvement.
Smith spoke during GZERO’s Global Stage livestream, “Live from the United Nations: Securing our Digital Future,” an event produced in partnership between the Complex Risk Analytics Fund, or CRAF’d, and GZERO Media’s Global Stage series, sponsored by Microsoft.
A representation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Pro-Palestinian protesters rally against Israel's strikes in Gaza and Lebanon during demonstrations in New York City, on Sept. 26, 2024.
Palestine and Lebanon’s leaders address UNGA ahead of Netanyahu’s arrival
Abbas then laid out a 12-point policy for what is needed “immediately and on day one after the war ends.” The plan included a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, an end to the “military aggression by settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” humanitarian aid, and the return of displaced peoples. He called for Palestine to be given full membership to the UN, and disparaged the US for being “the only member in the Security Council that voted against granting the state of Palestine full membership.”
Later that evening, Lebanon’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Abdallah Bouhabib called on Israel to adopt an immediate cease-fire and halt its strikes within Lebanese borders, noting that the cause of the current conflict was Israel's ongoing occupation. "The shortest path for the return [of displaced Israelis in the North]," he said, "is a comprehensive, immediate cease-fire as stipulated in the US-Franco declaration yesterday ... as part of a comprehensive framework accompanied by clear international guarantees, transparency, and a definitive end to land, sea, and air incursions and breaches of Lebanese sovereignty."
Both speeches came as the US, France, and several Arab nations tried to use the tail end of the UN General Assembly to broker a temporary Israel to agree to a cease-fire with Lebanon.
Meanwhile, protesters began marching outside the UN security perimeter on Thursday in anticipation of Friday's appearance at UNGA by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has instructed his military to keep fighting “with full force” in Lebanon. Netanyahu said on Thursday that "we will not stop until we achieve our goals, first and foremost returning the residents of the north safely to their homes."
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.