What Happened at the 2026 UN General Assembly?

0:08 Thanks for joining us on the Just Security Podcast. I'm Viola Ginger, your host for today's episode. The United Nations General Assembly High Level Week just came to a close, gathering some 130 presidents and prime ministers for the annual session in New York at a time of major institutional and financial challenges for the UN.

0:29 Today we'll recap that week and look at what's ahead with two of the foremost UN watchers. We'll talk about the atmosphere at the UN during this year's gathering, how the UN is navigating global challenges and its own. And we'll hear about the latest developments in the race for the next UN Secretary General to succeed Antonio Guterres when he steps down at the end of this year after a decade in office.

0:55 Joining us today are Daniel Forti and Maria Sekajima of the International Crisis Group, both of whom have been following the latest developments at the General Assembly very closely. First Daniel and then Maria. Would you mind introducing yourselves to the audience?

1:15 Thanks for having me, Viola. I'm Daniel Forti, head of UN affairs at the International Crisis Group, with whom I've been working for the past three and a half years, and I've been covering the UN based out of New York for the past eight.

1:31 Maria?

1:31 I'm Maria Sakijima. I am the UN analyst at International Crisis Group. I've been working on and following the UN for about seven years, first as part of a member state delegation, and now with Crisis Group as research and advocacy hub.

1:47 Great. Thank you very much. Daniel, let's start with you and just dive right in. This is a particularly fraught time for the United Nations during this 81st UN General Assembly session. Think of that 81 years. What was the mood there?

2:04 It was quite striking that the mood was pretty gloomy, but not as existentially fraught as this time last year, which was inevitably the reference point for a lot of the leaders and diplomats who were in New York last week. It was still a time of crisis, and leaders who came to the UN were under no illusion about the organization's poor health, the political crises that beset it, the financial challenges that have been well documented and have really, you know, come into times, questioned the organization's solvency.

2:40 But there was a general sense that if last year was a major threat to the organization's viability on the world stage, this year was just merely bad. We got the sense that there were a lot of leaders who came to New York prepared to defend both the UN and multilateral cooperation more broadly. There was an even announcement by a few heads of state and the head of the European Union about a new partnership on multilateralism, P4M, which was a sign of a commitment to states coming together to solve their problems in a way that was less confrontational.

3:20 Many of the leaders' statements were quite clear in defending both the UN's role on the world stage and the need for collective action and international solidarity to deal with threats ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence. But there was no doubt that there is going to need to be a lot of work about the UN and reforming the organization, particularly with the new Secretary General coming in 2027.

3:49 And then lastly, I think the other and more damaging aspect that the UN's leaders faced last week was this split screen that happened in the middle of high-level week, where on the one hand, you had President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, meeting in Washington, D.C. at the same time that heads of state and government and ministers were in New York separately dealing with a range of international crises.

4:17 So there was a sense that if these two leaders don't invest as much time in multilateral cooperation through the UN, it does present a major problem for the organization's relevance on the world stage that governments and the new UN's leadership will need to deal with over the months to come.

4:38 Yeah, and the two of them being, of course, among the five veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. So that's pretty uh pretty major there. Thank you very much for that, Daniel. Maria, uh, what do you see as the priority issues for the leaders that were gathered there this year? I mean, the priority issues sometimes are on the formal agenda, or sometimes they're not.

5:05 Um, just a this split screen scenario that Daniel just described. But what was uppermost in the minds of the leaders at the UN?

5:15 So I think you can split it into sort of two categories, the geographic files and the thematic issues. Um, on the geographic side, you have the sort of big geopolitical crises of the day. So the wars in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine. Um, and on the thematic side, there was a big focus on AI. So starting with sort of the latter bits, um, the this big focus on AI is no doubt fueled by recent reporting talking about the potential existential threats that AI may pose.

5:47 So in the UN space, you had a high-level UN Security Council meeting with uh briefings by sort of big, three big tech CEOs. Um, and then you also had in the general debate leaders talking in their general debate speeches about uh AI as well.

6:07 Interesting. Okay, any movement on those issues?

6:11 Um, so if you take kind of the geographic issues one by one, um on the Iran side, what we saw was a lot of diplomacy on the sidelines. You had the US and Iran both meeting at working level. You also had Trump meeting with the various GCC leaders. Um at the end of the week, we saw Iran proposing a new seven-day deal that we understand has now been rejected by the US.

6:37 But it is good that what we're seeing is a bit more diplomacy and a return to that rather than a return to aggression, what we've seen in the past few months.

6:46 That's interesting. Okay. And so can we do it like just a quick lightning round on some of the other developments, if any, uh Tonga related to some of the other world's hotspots, like Gaza, Sudan, Putin, Myanmar. I mean, is anybody talking about that anymore?

7:08 Sure. Um, so I'll take Gaza first on the Israel-Palestine side. So last General Assembly week, we had a there was a big strong momentum around Gaza. You had the big two-state solution conference and a slew of member states deciding to recognize Palestine. Um, this year it's been slightly more muted. You had two kind of big side events, potentially competing side events.

7:32 You had the follow-up uh meeting of the Global Alliance of the Two-State Solution, as well as the US Board of Peace uh briefing the various member states. So there is what we're seeing a bit of tension between these two tracks. Um, but it's good to not allow the Board of Peace to necessarily uh control the multilateral space on the Israel-Palestine issue.

7:56 Um, elsewhere on Israel-Palestine, another big announcement from the UK, just ahead of Ungahai Level Week, was the announcement of sanctions against West Bank settlements. That was a major announcement. Um, it was no surprise that Benjamin Netanyahu's speech in the General Assembly was quite hard line, um, and it was more seen as a message to the domestic audience ahead of Israeli elections uh later this year.

8:24 Um, on the Ukraine side, um, you know, little little progress to show from that. Um, you had the what's now becoming a bit of an annual Security Council meeting uh on the situation in Ukraine. But the one meeting of significance that we were tracking was the um meeting between Germany and Russia, and that was the first bilateral talks that they've had since the start of the war in 2022.

8:48 So that was quite significant. Um, you also asked about sort of less or um you also asked about issues that have not been so much so in the limelight, including Myanmar, uh, Sudan, for example. Um, taking Sudan, one of the big stories here in New York was the refusal or the denial of the visa of Verhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces.

9:14 And that is something that we saw as a missed opportunity for diplomacy. We understand he was due to meet various member states and various UN officials, um, and his inability to be here in New York really stifled that. Uh, fortunately, however, there was a meeting between the Quad and the Quintet, and those are the two major diplomatic tracks that are trying to end the war in Sudan.

9:38 You have the Quad, which is made up of four member states: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the UAE. And you have the Quintet, which is made of five international and regional organizations, the African Union, the Intergovernmental Um Authority. Sorry, let me just double check that. Um, you have the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the uh League of Arab States, the European Union, and the UN.

10:08 So the fact that those two diplomatic tracks met during UNGA high level week was quite significant and a good step in that direction as well. Um, and then just finally on Myanmar, which is a uh situation that unfortunately does not get as much attention. Um, last high level week you had a big meeting on the situation on Rohingya.

10:30 There was no similar meeting this year, but one thing we are tracking is that the current president of the General Assembly is concurrently the Bangladeshi Foreign Minister. So there's a question about whether his role means that the UN will focus more on the situation. And so he's incoming. Uh he's the current General Assembly income.

10:53 Right. So so the idea is maybe for the rest of the General Assembly session, there may be a little bit more attention to that because Bangladesh, of course, is is um home to or temporary home to many refugees from Myanmar. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for that rundown. Really appreciate that.

11:12 Let's turn a little bit to the UN's internal issues that they're wrestling with. Daniel, can you give us a rundown of the UN's finances at the moment? The United States has withdrawn from dozens of UN organizations, but then has recently paid its dues to the UN. Are those now all paid up, or not quite?

11:33 And, you know, it's also funneling some humanitarian aid through the UN. Both of those were a pleasant surprise to the UN, I think. Um how are people reading those decisions? And what do you all think about that?

11:50 The UN's finances are in pretty poor shape, but not as bad as we would have assessed three, four months ago. A lot of the current financial shock is due to the Trump administration's refusal to either pay what it is obliged to give the UN as part of the annual assessed dues that all UN members pay, and also the significant portions of humanitarian aid that the US has either frozen or reduced since Trump came back to office last January.

12:30 So the UN has about $68 billion in revenue overall. 80% of that comes from voluntary funding, and 20% comes from the obligatory fees that all UN members pay. And there are two ways to break this down. So historically, the US has paid around 10 billion of the 80% on voluntary contributions to humanitarian aid.

12:57 That the US cut off completely in January 2025, and only at the end of December 2025 recognized that it needed to actually work through the UN to get some life-saving assistance to countries that are within U.S. foreign policy interests, ranging from Afghanistan to the DR Congo. So then over the past few months, the US has decided to give around $5 billion in overall spending, which is not insignificant, but is about half of what the US had traditionally and recently been paying on that voluntary side.

13:34 Now, all of that goes to either development assistance or humanitarian aid, which is only one part of the UN's functioning. So now if we zoom in on the 20% of the core funding that goes to the UN's administrative budget, the functioning of the organization, and separately to peacekeeping operations, this is a smaller pot overall, but is much more essential to the organization's day-to-day functioning.

14:03 And here, the Trump administration until recently had not paid nearly much of what it owed. As of a few months ago, Trump and the US government owed the UN about $4 billion in outstanding dues, about $2 billion to the UN's regular budget, which is the day-to-day core operations, and then $2 billion to the UN peacekeeping budget.

14:29 And each of those, you know, the US is the largest, the single largest funder on both of those pots. It pays around 22% of the total for the regular budget and around 26% total for the peacekeeping budget. The Trump administration, which had pushed significant budget cuts across the UN, argued that it wasn't, it, a, the UN needed to go on a starvation diet, and that it wasn't going to pay its money until it saw progress on those reforms.

14:57 And this has dominated a lot of the day-to-day discussion at the UN over the past two years. There have been a separate reform initiative called UN80 that the Secretary General launched in last April. And, you know, the idea of how the UN should be doing less with less has really percolated into all parts of the organization's work.

15:19 There have been budget cuts, there have been restructurings, there have been reprioritization. It is inevitable to talk about the UN's finances and when we're thinking about the organization's impact and relevance on the world stage. Fortunately, and an important sign of a somewhat improved relationship between the US and the world organization, a month ago, at the end of August, the Trump administration agreed to pay around 900 million of what it owes out of the 4 billion that it has not paid yet.

15:52 The majority of that will go to the regular budget, about $725 million, and then an additional $100 million to the peacekeeping budget. This is a good sign. It shows that the Trump administration has not cast off the UN from its foreign policy views. It understands it needs to work with organization, but it also doesn't come close to giving the UN the financial support that it needs to actually execute its responsibilities and its mandates.

16:25 So how do those gaps get filled? Or it it results in massive cuts even more than there already have been?

16:37 There is no easy way for others to fill that gap on the obligatory side. And this is why the UN has been in a cash crisis for much of the past 18 months. This cash crisis has forced the UN to withhold payments to some member states who contribute to UN peacekeeping. It has forced the UN to suspend hiring practices.

17:01 It has paused non-essential programming and activity. There was even a debate earlier in the summer about whether and how the UN would pay salaries and fund the high-level week proceedings. The cash crisis got that bad. There was even a debate earlier this year about a very arcane rule in the UN's regulatory processes where it had to pay back certain money from the budget that it couldn't spend, regardless of why it couldn't spend the money.

17:33 So in this case, the UN couldn't spend the money because it hadn't collected the money, because the US didn't pay it. But the UN actually had to return credits on the budget to member states because it couldn't spend that. And that led to a situation that Secretary General Guterres rightfully described as being straight out of a Kafka book.

17:55 So that was a slight change that member states agreed to ease up. And with the US payments in August, we've moved from a situation where there were serious concerns about the organization's ability to function in the immediate to now passing the buck basically on to 2027, where it looks like there will be enough financial wiggle room to get the organization through the end of the year, even if more broadly the overall financial outlook is in quite poor health until the US starts paying its budget uh fees in due in full and on time.

18:32 That's really helpful, Daniel. Really a good synopsis of the financial situation at this point. So let's just take another step back at this point about the UN General Assembly sessions of Arnold High-Level Weeks specifically. Were there any big surprises?

18:52 You know, I think we should not ignore the significance of the Security Council's meeting on artificial intelligence that happened in the middle of the week. This is a theme that Antonio Guterres has been trying to rally the UN around for a number of years. And Security Council members and the body have dabbled with the topic occasionally.

19:16 They have informal meetings every once in a while on how AI has impacted UN peacekeeping or the different intersections of it with mediation. But with the news that was coming out in late August from some of the major AI companies about the existential threats of AI to humanity, it was quite striking to see the Security Council meet with ministers and the heads of open AI and Anthropic and to have those technology leaders present about the serious risks on an international peace and security stage to world leaders at high-level week.

19:57 That is not something we would have imagined council members meeting on just a few months ago with such urgency and importance. Now, I think that transitions, you know, to a question of like what will come from that? And that isn't up for debate. Um, certainly I think it was quite helpful to hear so many world leaders talk about artificial intelligence, to urge for international cooperation for some common rules of the road.

20:27 Um, it was quite striking for me going between different events all throughout high-level week, how many discussions featured AI in one way or another, whether they were talking about the environment, whether they were talking about peace building, whether they were talking about critical minerals. It seemed to be a buzzword in both the best way, but also without any clear path forward about what the UN was going to do about it.

20:56 Right, right. Yeah, that that's always seems to be the the sticking point there. There's a a lot of discussion, which in itself can be helpful and getting it into that global forum, but then where do you go from there? So what about what what did you see as the biggest disappointments out of the session and and what does that mean going forward?

21:20 I'll point to two. First is the fact that we had two of the five leaders of permanent members having a bilateral session close to the UN, but not engaging thoroughly with the organization and multilateral cooperation. So, you know, of course, everyone paid close attention to President Donald Trump's speech on Tuesday of high level week.

21:44 It was, of course, very worrying to hear him threaten a member state in the context of the war in Iran and, you know, casually arguing to whether he or debating whether or not to annihilate an entire civilization. Um, that's something that is horrendous. Horrific and is not something that we want any member state to normalize.

22:04 Um, while at the same time talking about you know military conquests in Venezuela and threatening the Cuban people again. But apart from that, there was very little high-level political engagement from the US in that session, and all eyes were on Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping in Washington. So it was quite disappointing that you have that diplomacy where Xi Jinping, who he himself has not attended UN high-level week since 2015, be in the US during that time, but not necessarily see the UN as a really important venue for political level diplomacy at this moment and the world stage.

22:45 So that's one major disappointment. And the second one goes back to a point I just made a moment ago. There was tons of activity last week. And, you know, some people who have been watching the UN for decades noticed that this was a particularly high, busy high-level week in terms of activity, in terms of member state events, in terms of diplomatic side meetings.

23:06 But it wasn't clear what all of that activity amounted to. It didn't seem like there was any very clear or concerted diplomatic pushes by groups of member states to get tangible outcomes. On the one hand, that's understandable. It's always a bit difficult for a diplomatic summit as stagecrafted and manicured as UNGA week to produce really organic diplomatic outcomes.

23:34 But at the same time, with all of the challenges in the world that are affecting states from all regions, whether it is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz or Russia's ongoing aggression against Ukraine, or a war in Sudan that has ensnared not only the entire Horn of Africa, but increasingly states on the other side of the Red Sea, that we didn't see much directed energy towards getting diplomatic breakthroughs.

23:59 And that, you know, does reflect poorly on the UN's geopolitical relevance on the world stage right now.

24:07 Yeah, very good points. Really uh an important consideration for the UN writ large. Let's switch now to the uh Secretary General search. Maria, the UN, as we've noted, is set to get a new Secretary General starting in January 2027. First of all, how are world leaders and insiders and observers feeling about Antonio Guterres' tenure looking back on the last decade?

24:37 So I think the sum of where Antonio Guterres is is he was um given a quite difficult remit. Um when he began his his first term as Secretary General, the UN was dealing with the war in Syria, um, rising pressures on UN peacekeeping operations. He was, of course, Secretary General during President Trump's first term, um, and has been now trying to manage the UN's difficult relationship with the US for the first two years of the second term.

25:06 Um, and everything that that encompasses, the US's threats to leave the UN, the withdrawal of funding, which Daniel mentioned earlier, um, and the US's desire to roll back the climate and gender and development agendas. Um, at the same time, um, there's been a sharp increase in the various geopolitical crises that we talked about earlier.

25:30 Um, and these are crises where you have the permanent members either playing an active or a key role. So you have Ukraine, Gaza, Iran. These are cases where, because of the permanent members' involvement, the Security Council has been deadlocked in trying to resolve them. In some ways, um, that has then tied the Secretary General's hands, but I think some could argue that the Secretary General should have filled the space with personal diplomacy or shuttle diplomacy.

26:02 You had some really good examples of this during Kuter's term. You had the Black Sea Grain Initiative, uh, which was a UN brokerage agreement with Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey back in 2022 to allow grain through uh grain exports through. And that unfortunately hasn't been replicated since. Um, but at the same time, we shouldn't forget some of the successes of Guterres' uh terms, including his ability to keep the climate uh crisis on the agenda, as well as the fact that he was very quick on the ball to recognize that AI, um, the opportunities and risks of AI should be discussed on the multilateral stage.

26:46 And the fact that the members didn't follow through on some of that is kind of on them, right? Definitely. So Daniel, let's come back to you for a second. Can you give us a brief rundown on the selection process for the next UN Secretary General and what's happened so far? What's next? There were um nine candidates at one point, two of them dropped out, there have been a couple of straw polls.

27:12 So tell us uh just very briefly, you know, what's what's the state of play right now, and how did we get here?

27:19 Absolutely. This selection process has been unfolding for about 10 months now. The first two candidates entered the race in November 2025. And there have been a few important milestones in this process. And maybe just to give you a very quick outline of what that process entails. First is that any member state has to formally nominate a candidate who presents a vision and sort of a view of what they want the UN to do to the whole UN membership.

27:50 Once the candidates are formally declared, then they are eligible to be on the Security Council informal polls. These are essentially unrecorded private meetings where all 15 council members express their views of whether they encourage, discourage, or have no opinion on each candidate. The goal is for any candidate to have nine encouraged votes and no discourage from one of the five permanent members.

28:23 We have had four straw polls since the process began: one in July, one in August, one right before high-level week, and one yesterday on the 29th of September. And each of those have been done in a way where all 15 council members are anonymous. The process gets to a more decisive stage when the five permanent members agree to have what we call colored ballots, which is essentially when we will tell how one of the how the five permanent members feel about the candidates.

28:59 Those are still anonymous from each of the five permanent members, the US, China, Russia, the UK, and France, but it allows the entire council to see whether any of the candidates will get a discourage from the permanent members. That process has not happened yet, and I think that's the next major milestone in the debate.

29:22 The only deadline that is before the council is that Secretary General Guterres will step down on December 31st. So that is the major time pressure about when the whole UN membership would like to see a new appointment. And once the appointment is made, the General Assembly formally um adopts that and uh and basically uh puts these new candidates into office.

29:52 Right. So do we have a sense yet, or we don't have a sense quite yet, who or how many may be rising to the top candidates?

30:04 We we have a bit of a sense of where the pool of candidates sit right now. So as of today, there are two candidates in an upper tier. First is Rebecca Grinsman of Costa Rica, who, as until she entered the race, led the UN Conference on Trade and Development. She is a candidate who has consistently been in either first or second place in the informal straw polling since July, and in the most recent poll came out in first.

30:36 The second candidate who has been either in one of the top two positions has been Carolyn Rodriguez Burquet of Guyana, who is Guyana's permanent representative to the UN, and most recently was Guyana's representative on the Security Council when they served from 2024 to 2025, and someone who has a very large base of support among the wider UN membership.

31:03 These two candidates have consistently been at the top of the polls, um, with the other seven candidates still in the race with lesser degrees of support. Now, the the last major question is whether new candidates will enter the race at this time. That has been the subject of intense speculation around New York ever since the process really kicked into high gear over the summer.

31:32 Based on the most recent results, there is still an opening for one or more new candidates to throw their hat into the ring, but they will have an uphill battle to climb because they only have a few weeks really to make their case to the permanent members and to the wider UN membership. You know, I think one of the concerns that a lot of states outside of the Security Council have is that the permanent members will themselves reach a bargain and then try to push one or more of the candidates through the rest of the council to get to a recommendation.

32:10 We would want and hope that they come to agreement on a candidate who has gone through this extensive socialization and campaigning process, who have met with leaders from all over the world, who have visited capitals, who have made their vision and their priorities really well known. While, of course, we we don't want to get a situation where the Security Council reaches the end of the year without coming to an agreement, it will also be hard for the UN's next leader to be quite credible if the P5 reach a very narrow bargain behind closed doors and attempt to push a candidate through the process who doesn't have the credibility from either the rest of the council or the wider UN membership that

32:55 others who have spent the past few months traveling around the world have managed to at least socialize themselves.

33:02 Thank you so much for that. That really clarifies where we are in that situation right now. Thank you both. Is there anything else that we should touch on before we uh wrap up here? Just want to, you know, give open the floor, both of you, if there's anything, any loose sentence we should tie up.

33:21 Maybe, maybe just briefly looking ahead to what the next Secretary General, whoever she or he may be, um, is walking into. You know, and and I think there's, on the one hand, a real opportunity to for the next UN's leader to both re-reestablish the UN's visibility and credibility on a lot of issues around international cooperation.

33:47 For an organization like Crisis Group, that certainly is on peace and security. There is lots of areas where we can see the UN and through new leadership really getting into more of the weeds, um, focusing a lot more on political deals, on peacemaking, on diplomacy, at a time when there are more wars now than at any point since the end of the Cold War, and the humanitarian suffering is really at an alarming stage.

34:16 You know, it's also important that the UN continues to help member states focus on global threats, whether that is artificial intelligence, whether that is the impact of climate change, whether that is defending international law and key principles of the UN charter, whether it is, you know, the International Criminal Court, which has come under major threat in recent months, or human rights.

34:38 These are all areas where the next UN's leadership, both through signaling and through quiet diplomacy, can continue to reassert the organization's relevance at a time of international fragmentation. But I also want to emphasize that no individual, however talented they may be, can do this on their own.

34:59 And we would urge states and world leaders not to put all of their eggs and expectations on that individual if they're not prepared to provide she or he with political backing and support to actually make multilateralism more effective. So it's important to have states really throw their weight behind the next Secretary General, but to not assume that one person can change the fortunes of the international order overnight and that they have to do the hard work themselves to make the world a more safer and cooperative place.

35:35 Very, very important message there. Maria, anything uh anything else you see that we should uh cover?

35:43 No, I think Dan ended it on a very positive and useful note.

35:48 Thank you. And thank you both very much for joining us today. This episode was hosted by me, Viola Ginger. It was produced by Daniel Hajanaki and edited by Puja Shah. Special thanks to our guests, Daniel Forti and Marie Sekujima, for joining us today. You can read their recent piece for Just Security covering the UN General Assembly with their colleague Richard Gowan on our website and linked in today's show notes, where you'll also find other related Just Security articles on the UN.

36:18 If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the