Slaying the Dragon

The Endless Audit

“Of the 139 targets with sufficient trend data, only 15 per cent are on track.”

If I’d had any sense, I’d have skated over these words from the 2026 SDG Report and got on with my life. Instead, I wanted to know more about the 21 targets that make up that 15%. What can we learn from the 2030 Agenda’s shining stars?

This has been an “ongoing investigation,” undertaken one target at a time in gaps between more pressing tasks. Also, to be honest, a slog through a series of messy tables, incomplete commentary, and methodologies beaten into the very thinnest of ice.

Yesterday, I finally made it to the 19th of the success stories: SDG 17.6. To get a green light (on track or target met) for “international cooperation on science and technology,” it seems you just need people to… upgrade their internet.

Yep, according to the latest UN assessment, this target is one of the 2030 Agenda’s winners because “fixed-broadband subscriptions continue to grow steadily, at an annual growth rate averaging 5.9% between 2015 and 2025.”

If that made you do a double take, then good. This is a proxy so empty you can hear it rattle. It’s the equivalent of declaring world peace “on track” because noise-canceling headphone sales are up 6%.

Sadly, this is not an isolated example. The pollution target (SDG 3.9) is assessed as on track despite 8.1 million deaths each year. Finance is supposedly flowing in satisfactory amounts to the countries that need it most (SDG10.b), even though aid flows have collapsed. It’s left me wondering whether the SDG measurement system itself is fundamentally broken.

But more on that when we’ve finished the audit and turned a mass of material into something readable. Which will be soon. I promise.

Today, though, I want to explore something else learned from slogging through these targets. The 2030 Agenda has never actually been a unified framework. Instead, it’s a web of weakly connected ecosystems, each with its own rules, life forms, and culture.

Which, as it turns out, is probably a good thing.

The Frankenstein Agenda

When the world’s leaders signed up to the 2030 Agenda in 2015 (and promised to work “tirelessly” to deliver it), they were so enamored by the idea that the framework is integrated and indivisible that they told us so 11 times.

Except it wasn’t true then, it isn’t true now, and it never will be. Stare at these 21 targets for long enough and you begin to see exactly how this Frankenstein agenda was stitched together. Take three examples from Goal 15:

• In SDG15.6, we have a push for systems that share the benefits of genetic material, compensating provider countries for supplying the world’s biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and agricultural industries with the raw materials they use to generate billions of dollars in profit.

• Then we have frameworks that aim to stem the proliferation of invasive alien species (SDG 15.8), which play a role in 60% of recorded global extinctions, inflict $423 billion in economic costs annually, and are projected to cause worsening damage between now and 2050.

• And finally, there’s a challenge to traditional systems for presenting national accounts (SDG 15.9), with the aim of going “beyond GDP” to allow governments to treat natural assets with the same rigor as physical capital and financial assets.

Each of these targets a world that stands largely on its own.

Grey Goo

These worlds operate on their own legal foundations, such as the Nagoya Protocol or the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. They have targets that were aligned with the SDGs back in 2015, but which in many cases have already been updated to supersede them.

They are supported by intergovernmental scientific or expert bodies, innovative delivery and financing mechanisms, and a policy “vernacular” that has been built up over a generation or more.

And they are building bespoke “operating systems” of instruments and infrastructure to deliver outcomes that are only possible through international cooperation.

This is real work. Take the recent bunfight over how to port genetic benefit-sharing into the Pandemic Agreement, where negotiators have had to “master the finer points of how laboratories, databases and product R&D work” before they could even figure out what they disagree about.

You can’t just feed all this complexity into a blender labelled “integrated delivery” and expect to get a nutritious shake that will bulk up implementation capacity. And if you insist on doing it, prepare to spend the next 15 years sipping on a grey goo.

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

In their recent op-ed for Devex, Susana Malcorra and Elizabeth Cousens called on the UN to “embrace the new cooperation ecosystem.”

Look closely at those 21 on-track targets, however, and you won’t find just one ecosystem, you’ll find a dozen or so. You’ve got Sendai on disaster risk reduction, the sustainable cities cluster around UN-Habitat, the 10-Year Framework on sustainable consumption, and the clean energy push led by the World Bank Group, the African Development Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and SEforALL.

Traditional ‘development’ is just one piece of this wider picture, even though it continues to dominate the debate about what should replace the 2030 Agenda.

This is a sector that entered the SDG era on a high, but — as we covered in our Future of Development primer — will be leaving it in a state of despair. The MDGs, drafted by a small group in a mood of “relative casualness,” managed to align the international system behind a common language for delivery, driving what Ban Ki-moon called “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history.”

But after a brief debate over whether the new goals should just focus on finishing the job, the SDGs were launched to do much more, much faster, in many more countries. That hasn’t gone so well, leaving us with a framework that the development sector has largely fallen out of love with.

Take the World Bank as an example. In 2015, its annual report led with ringing endorsements for the SDGs from the President and Executive Directors. The 2026 equivalent ignores the goals almost entirely, barring a pair of citations in internal taxonomy codes.

The passion is gone and many development actors have moved on. So what would it take to make development goals matter again? The answer might lie in reversing the course set by the 2030 Agenda: unbundling the agenda instead of stitching it together.

On Systems and Silos

I was thinking about this question when reading the first two reports from the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition, which is co-chaired by Yemi Osinbajo and Arancha González Laya (the third in the trilogy will set out their final recommendations).

The first report, published in May, audits national development strategies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to create a “balance sheet” of assets (expanding tax revenues, remittance inflows, growing pension funds, vast renewable energy potential) and liabilities (unsustainable debt servicing costs, biased sovereign credit ratings, and $835 billion in annual illicit financial flows).

The second report unbundles development into four buckets. Ending deprivation and protecting people in crisis. Accelerating economic transformation. Advancing the common good by tackling transnational threats. And making knowledge-sharing and innovation an end in their own right, rather than just a tool for delivering everything else.

The Coalition wants countries to set the direction and international actors to stick to what only they can do: rebalance the playing field for societies that have long had the odds stacked against them, while helping them optimize assets, manage liabilities, and grapple with the risks that are created by a big, bad world.

This is a manifesto for structural change. And it needs development actors that build systems rather than create silos, and that can finally make the shift from branded projects towards supporting the capabilities, institutions, and markets that the future needs.

But do we need global goals to do any of this?

Goal or No Goal

When you map the existing SDGs onto the Coalition’s four buckets, all the main points are already there.

Building a social floor for the vulnerable is the MDG legacy project, even if little has been done to honor the 2030 Agenda pledge to reach the furthest behind first. What kind of goal would drive a renewed effort to tackle development’s last-mile problem?

Economic transformation is covered by dozens of SDG targets on trade, technology transfer, and macroeconomic coherence (and is at the heart of the Financing for Development process). Aspirations are plentiful. The willingness of powerful economies to make structural concessions is scarce. How is that going to change?

When it comes to creating global public goods, specialized ecosystems are already doing the heavy lifting. Health security, climate mitigation, and biodiversity protection rely on binding conventions, capital allocation, and scientific infrastructure. If these worlds have their own targets, do they really need to be in the global goals?

Finally, knowledge-sharing and innovation are sprinkled across almost every SDG, but there is little evidence that this has accelerated the spread of cross-border scientific networks, technology-transfer pools, or public research ecosystems. Can you write a goal that forces the world to share knowledge rather than hoard it?

The Wet Tuesday Test

The problem with spending too much time digging into 21 targets is that you end up with more questions than answers. So rather than a firm conclusion, here are a few last things to think about.

First, you have to actually want a goal. Compare it to a puppy at Christmas. It is easy to love when you unwrap it at a diplomatic summit, but are you still going to be tending to it on a wet Tuesday three years later when a budget needs allocating?

Second, you have to want it for the right reasons. Problems may be complex, but delivery has to be simple or it doesn’t happen. That means thinking less about a target itself and more about the engine you’re going to build to implement it.

And finally, a global goal must actually be global. If you accept the Coalition’s point that countries should set their own priorities, we need goals only when they exert transnational leverage: creating regulatory parity, driving global standards, or triggering economies of scale.

The Coalition will publish its third and final set of recommendations soon. I’ll be waiting to see if global goals find a place in its vision for “cooperation that works.”

Read more:

• Asking the right question: The Accra Reset says we should stop asking “how much aid can be mobilised?” and instead ask “how can countries be equipped to act on their own terms?” [read here]

• The SDGs and UNGA81: UN Foundation’s Julie Garfieldt Kofoed on what needs to be done ahead of the last SDG Summit in September 2027. [read here]

• What next for the SDGs: The Starling Institute sketches out scenarios for the future of the Sustainable Development Agenda, along with their implications. [read here]

The SG Roundup

If there’s another straw poll as expected next Friday, it will be 78 days since the Security Council started voting. That means the Council will have spent more time voting than the incoming Secretary-General will have for their transition (even in the unlikely event that next week’s vote is definitive).

We don’t have much new to report after Tuesday’s newsletter, but with existing candidates refusing to drop out, at least one Security Council member is pushing back on growing calls for a latecomer to break the deadlock. Let’s see.

Partner Reads

Reading List

Where you stand depends on where you sit, as the cliché goes. So, over the past months, we have been working with our partners at CEPEI (a leading Colombian think-tank) to gather regional perspectives on what the next Secretary-General’s priorities should be.

Here’s a selection of voices and reporting from CEPEI and some of its partners:

• Dr. Julienne Mesumbe (On Policy Magazine) questions whether the UN is capable of adapting to today’s realities or is doomed to reflect a world that no longer exists. [read here]

• Giovanna Kuele (Estadão) of the Igarapé Institute warns that a divided Latin America and Caribbean must coordinate diplomacy and converge around clear demands on reform to successfully capture the SG seat. [read here, in Portuguese]

• Premium Times reports that Nigeria’s backing for the next SG will hinge on a candidate’s commitment to equity, stronger multilateralism, and increased African representation. [read here]

• The EastAfrican asks why the African Union has not consolidated behind a single candidate, with both Macky Sall and Olara Otunnu still actively in the running. [read here]

• CARICOM and the Nordics signal the Caribbean’s cross-regional reach by jointly welcoming the CARICOM-endorsed candidacy of Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett at UNGA81. [read here]

ICYMI

It gets worse. At least for the declared candidates for the next Secretary-General. Under the Greek presidency, the fifth straw poll saw the entire field going backwards.

Here is the damage report:

• Rebeca Grynspan lost the momentum she carried from the last round. She still leads, but lost an Encourage and saw her fence-sitters move to the Discourage camp.

• Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett lost more ground and now has a daunting nine Discourages, while Rafael Grossi lost two Encourages and his Discourages held at seven.

• The rest of the field (Macky Sall, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, Olara Otunnu, and Ivonne Baki) are deep in negative territory.

To win the race, a candidate has to secure nine votes and dodge a veto from any of the permanent members. Grynspan arguably still has her head just above water, but this poll is a boost for those who believe the winner is yet to enter the ring.

Quid Nunc?

Remember the [Re]Group scenarios?

Up until today, you could find informed people arguing that Grynspan was executing the first scenario with aplomb. Today’s results however strongly support those who see dark horses lurking around every corner. Surely someone is now being Anointed in the Shadows.

But who? Over at The Guardian, has compiled as good a list as any of potential late entrants. The catch? “None of the speculated candidates have given any public indication they wish to be drafted,” he concludes.

(If you want the complete picture, cross-reference Wintour’s list with the tracker over at 1 for 8 Billion or Stéphane Bussard’s roundup in Geneva Solutions.)

If there is a recurring name, it is Lana Nusseibeh from the United Arab Emirates. And that isn’t surprising, given the news reports that jumped the gun on her candidacy back in June.

All In the Timing

Why are new candidates waiting so long?

Probably to line up support before stepping into the light. The game plan for a dark horse is a swift campaign: a quick appearance in front of the General Assembly, a snap poll in the Security Council, and a formal endorsement before the opposition has time to organize.

The next straw poll is reportedly set for Oct. 16, and with it comes the threat of color-coded ballots that expose P5 vetoes (though these may be held back if a new entrant shakes up the field). Assume a dark horse wants to avoid bypassing the General Assembly completely and they need to declare in the next few days, or wait until the seventh round to make their move.

Plots of this kind make for great political theater. Whether they unfold like a well-oiled machine. Or whether they collapse in spectacular fashion. So don’t forget about our tail-end scenarios: The Botched Plot ( the backroom deal fails) or Into the Abyss (where the Security Council has no path to agreement).

In any case, all eyes are on the Greek Security Council presidency.

And on Khalilur Rahman, the new President of the General Assembly, who recently promised to fight for a “fair, inclusive and transparent” process (in other words, one in which more than 15 Security Council members play at least some kind of role in the race).

The End Zone

Reading List

It’s not just about the horse race or who ends up in the winner’s circle, it’s about what the UN looks like when the dust settles in 2027. To balance your diplomatic diet, here are a few pieces that caught our eye from across the Substack ecosystem:

• Mehmet Efe Kilic in : how climate diplomacy is shifting from negotiation to concrete implementation as the COP presidency passes from Brazil to Türkiye and Ethiopia. [read here]

• in : on why WHO’s cautious, administrative self-defense fails to make the bold political case for permanent global health cooperation. [read here] Also who wants more politics and less results from the next leader of WHO [read here]

• on how the UN80 efficiency drive and budget cuts are quietly freezing out young talent to protect a top-heavy bureaucracy and survey data from 34,000 staff on whether the UN is firing its future. [Part I] [Part II]

ICYMI

At a Glance

👤 Active Candidates (7): Ivonne A-Baki (Ecuador; nominated by Tonga), María Fernanda Espinosa (Ecuador; nominated by Antigua & Barbuda), Rafael Grossi (Argentina), Rebeca Grynspan (Costa Rica), Olara Otunnu (Uganda), Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett (Guyana), Macky Sall (Senegal; nominated by Burundi and Senegal)

🗳️ Next Milestone: Secret ballots in the UN Security Council to winnow down candidates and see if there is a front-runner; Interactive Dialogues with any other candidates who might emerge; continued public campaigning by candidates;

⚙️ Current Phase: Next UNSC straw poll expected on October 16. Many believe this could be the first using color-coded ballots. See the results from the first five straw polls below.

Jump to:

Milestones • The Field • Straw Polls and Vetoes • The Politics • Reading and Resources

📅 Milestones

• October 2026: Subsequent Straw Poll Rounds — Security Council holds subsequent rounds of straw polls under the presidency of Greece (October). Expect color-coded ballots (distinguishing P5 veto-holders from the E10) during the second round, expected October 16. Watch for any “dark horse” candidate entries.

• October 2026: Formal UNSC Recommendation — The Security Council aims to adopt a resolution recommending a single candidate to the General Assembly. However, this could be delayed until late in the year (Kofi Annan did not make it out of the Security Council until December 13, 1996).

• October-December 2026: Transition — The 193 Member States will vote in the General Assembly (historically by acclamation) to appoint the 10th Secretary-General, allowing for a planned three-month transition period.

• January 1, 2027: Term Begins — The new Secretary-General officially takes office.

👤 The Field

Legal basis:

UN Charter Article 97 — “Appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” Modalities: GA Resolution 79/327 (pp. 6–8, 2025) sets timelines, eligibility, withdrawal rules, and ethics for campaigning.

Key rules:

• Candidates can be nominated by any Member State, individually or jointly (no requirement to be nominated by their own country) at any point until the next Secretary-General is selected and appointed.

• Member States can withdraw nominations; only one candidate at a time.

• Requirements: CV, vision statement, campaign finance disclosure. Candidates holding UN roles should suspend them or consider doing so.

Active Candidates

Withdrawn Candidates

📊 Reading the Field

With the first Security Council straw poll having taken place on July 30 (leaked results here, and our analysis here), the second round on August 21 (leaked results here), the third round on September 18 (leaked results here), the fourth round on September 29 (leaked results here), and the fifth round on October 7 (leaked results here), both candidates and analysts now turn to making sense of each vote. Experienced watchers of the selection process suggest that zeroing in on "discourage" votes (the higher the number, the lesser the chances) is key. For those in the lead, figuring out where the “discourage” came from will be essential. As for what results mean for late entries, some analysts say that a strong late entry only works if the front-runner has genuinely stalled.

1. A Compact Field (For Now)

With seven candidates, the 2026 field is slim compared to the 2016 race, when 13 contenders were in the frame. However, because there is no official deadline for nominations, candidates can theoretically enter right up until the Security Council votes to recommend a single name.

2. Geography Matters (Until It Doesn’t)

By the informal regional rotation system, it is traditionally the turn of the Latin American and Caribbean countries, which account for four of the seven active candidates (with the remaining two coming from Africa). Notably absent is the Eastern European Group (EEG) — the only UN regional group that has never produced a Secretary-General (and was passed over in 2016). (See the official list of UN Regional Groups for background.)

3. The Pressure for a Female Secretary-General

All nine Secretaries-General have been men. General Assembly Resolution 79/327 urged Member States to “strongly consider” female candidates. With four women among the seven active candidates, the Security Council will face public scrutiny if it passes them over in favor of a 10th male Secretary-General.

4. The Nomination Game

Member States are ignoring the traditional convention that a country only nominates its own national. Burundi nominated former Senegalese President Macky Sall, who was later also endorsed by Senegal. Antigua and Barbuda (GRULAC) nominated Ecuador’s María Fernanda Espinosa. Tonga nominated Ecuadorian diplomat Ivonne A-Baki. Multiple nominations protect candidates from withdrawals, keeping Michelle Bachelet in the race when Chile withdrew its sponsorship on March 25 (she later withdrew her candidacy on September 19).

🎙️ The Public Campaign and Debates

Before the race moved behind the closed doors of the Security Council, candidates spent months on the public campaign trail. Between April and July, they presented vision statements at the General Assembly’s Interactive Dialogues, participated in independent hustings across London, Geneva, and Jeju, and faced off in a televised UN Town Hall in New York.

⚙️ How Straw Polls and Vetoes Work

While the General Assembly hosts public debates, the power to select the Secretary-General rests firmly with the 15 members of the UN Security Council. A P5 veto is decisive; broad support across the E10 and regional groups is critical.

To filter the field without triggering formal vetoes too early, the Council relies on a series of informal, secret votes known as straw polls.

1. The Early Rounds (Standard Ballots)

Starting in late July under the Presidency of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 15 Council members cast secret ballots for each candidate. Members can select one of three choices:

• Encourage

• Discourage

• No Opinion

While these ballots are strictly confidential in theory, the totals leak to the press within minutes, but mystery remains on how each country has voted. The initial rounds serve as a war of attrition to test candidate momentum and pressure underperforming “tailenders” to withdraw.

2. The Late Rounds (Color-Coded Ballots)

As the field narrows, the Council switches to color-coded ballots to reveal where the permanent members stand. The E10 vote on white paper, while the P5 vote on red paper.

A single “discourage” vote on a red ballot signals an insurmountable P5 veto. Usually, P5 countries push for colored ballots to be used as early as possible, while the E10 fight to keep the playing field level.

3. The Winning Threshold

To secure a formal recommendation from the Security Council to the General Assembly, a candidate must achieve two things:

1. Secure at least nine “Encourage” votes out of 15.

2. Receive zero red “Discourage” votes from the P5.

The Security Council’s recommendation is likely to specify a five-year term (”for a term of office from January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2031”), although some have argued for a single seven-year term.

At that point, it is over to the General Assembly to approve the candidate, by acclamation (usually) or by secret ballot (Rule 141).

4. The Transition

After the Secretary-General–designate is sworn in before the General Assembly, we will see the first senior hires (Deputy Secretary-General, Chef de Cabinet, key Under-Secretary-General posts). Expect them to reflect priorities, regional balance, and any horsetrading during the selection process.

The 10th Secretary-General’s first day in office is on January 1, 2027. Look out for their inaugural priorities speech later that month.

🏛️ The Politics

While we all focus on what candidates say in public, what matters most is what they say to the key players in the Security Council, and what the major powers are signaling to each other.

The race also does not happen in a vacuum, and global events could easily start to reshape the negotiations.

1. The Key Decision-Makers

• The P5 (The Veto Holders): China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States hold most leverage. Any one of them can sink a candidacy with a single red ballot.

• The E10 (The Elected Members): The ten elected members vote but cannot veto. However, their collective support is mathematically essential for a candidate to reach the nine-vote minimum threshold. The current E10 roster features Bahrain, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia.

2. The Power of the Presidency

The Security Council President is a monthly rotating chair who holds significant influence over the frequency, timing, and rules of the straw polls.

• July (Democratic Republic of the Congo): Oversaw the first standard ballot round.

• August (Denmark) & September (France): Under the presidency of Denmark, the second straw poll took place in late August, and the third round and fourth rounds were held ahead of and immediately following UNGA High-level Week in September. While history suggested that France will oversee the shift to color-coded ballots, it is now expected to change under the presidency of Greece.

• October (Greece): The preferred window for the Council to resolve the contest and finalize its recommendation to the General Assembly.

• November (Latvia) and December (Liberia): The deadlock zone. If the Council fails to resolve a veto standoff by October, all bets will be off in November and December.

• January (Portugal): Five new elected members join the Council in January, including Portugal, which takes the Presidency. Don’t discount the nightmare scenario where no new Secretary-General is in office as the new year starts (because insiders haven’t and they’re already creating contingency plans).

3. External Events to Watch

The late stages of this race collide with international events that could shift strategic priorities if the selection runs late into the year, or may shape the Secretary-General-elect’s transition plans:

• October 4 (and Oct. 25 runoff): Brazilian General Elections — A critical election for Latin America’s largest power.

• November 3: U.S. Midterm Elections — A domestic distraction for Washington if the race is not wrapped up in October as planned.

• November 9–20: COP 31 Climate Summit (Türkiye) — A major multilateral test for the UN system.

• November 18–19: APEC Summit (China) — Hosted in Shenzhen, this summit will demand diplomatic attention from the P5 right in the middle of the potential “deadlock zone.”

• December 14–15: G20 Summit (Miami) — The final major gathering of world leaders before the new Secretary-General’s term begins on January 1.

🔍 Reading and Resources

• UN Charter Articles 97-101 on the role of the Secretary-General and Secretariat

• GA Resolution 79/327 on the selection process, paragraphs 38–46

• Joint letter by the President of the General Assembly and President of the Security Council to Permanent Representatives on the process, inviting nominations

• Official UN Site on Secretary-General Selection Process

• Security Council Report’s report on the history of the selection process, December 2025

• 1 for 8 Billion Ultimate Guide and Candidate Policy Profiles

• Guide from Center on International Cooperation at NYU

• Proposals for process improvements from the Accountability, Coherence, and Transparency (ACT) Group (informal group of 27 Member States)

• Tracker of UN Member State support for a woman to be Secretary-General by 1 for 8 Billion, Global Network of Women Peacebuilders, and NYU Center for Global Affairs.

Abbreviations

• APG — Asia-Pacific Group

• E10 — Elected members of the Security Council

• EEG — Eastern European Group (has never had a Secretary-General)

• G77 and China — Group of originally 77 and now 134 developing countries

• GRULAC — Latin America & Caribbean (rotation turn)

• MS — Member State

• P5 — Permanent members of the Security Council

• PGA — President of the General Assembly

• PR — Permanent Representative

• PSC — President of the Security Council

• UNSG — UN Secretary-General

• UNGA — UN General Assembly

• UNSC — UN Security Council

• WEOG — Western European & Others Group

Late nights, early starts, behind on everything. That’s the feeling after UNGA High-level Week, so mainline the electrolytes, pour another cup of coffee, and settle down for the UNGA Hangover edition of the [Re]Group Weekly.

Inside today:

• Liner notes and bonus tracks from our World’s Toughest Job UNGA Live special, plus an interview with Liechtenstein’s Christian Wenaweser, in partnership with Global Dispatches.

• Our analysis of 190+ UNGA speeches, with AI doing the hard work of detecting what demand signals emerge when everyone gets their 15 minutes of diplomacy.

• A bumper ICYMI that catches you up on the [Re]Group content you might have missed in the New York rush.

And if you haven’t: read and ’s review of what was on-trend at UNGA and Tuesday’s [Re]Group Weekly Xtra with all the news on the latest Secretary-General straw poll.

World’s Toughest Job Live — From the Vault

On Tuesday, our live UNGA 81 bonus episode of World’s Toughest Job asked: Where should the next Secretary-General start on day one?

Foreign Policy’s referees a round of The Triage Game with Comfort Ero (International Crisis Group) and historian , asking them to choose what the new Secretary-General should OWN, DELEGATE, or DROP.

Which brings us to today’s bonus tracks:

• Blessed is the Peacemaker. Don’t Manage, Lead. Fewer Ops and Much Less Oversharing. And Yes, But What About? Four takeaways from the new episode.

• The Bridgetown Dubs: unreleased outtakes from Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s interview with Lord and her ideas for the next leader’s first 100 days.

And a new release: sits down with Christian Wenaweser, Liechtenstein’s UN Ambassador since 2002, in a joint Global Dispatches and [Re]Group Live broadcast.

Fifteen Minutes of Diplomacy

In the Intergovernmental Club

“The UN System is complicated.”

So says… the UN. Its densely packed org chart maps out 113 entities of various kinds, and that is only a partial picture (read Eugene Chen for more).1 Then there’s the broader “cooperation ecosystem,” which and Susana Malcorra explored recently for Devex.

But there is a sense in which the UN is actually very simple. It’s a club of 193 Member States (plus two observer states).

That’s only slightly above Dunbar’s number of 150 — defined as the maximum number of individuals with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, or “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”2

Once a year, the ambassadors take a back seat (literally) as “capitals” converge on New York for High-level Week. This is when the UN remembers its roots and settles down for what is essentially the annual general meeting of that 193-member club.

The agenda is simple. Each country’s leader takes to the podium for their 15 minutes of diplomacy (a limit most famously ignored by Fidel Castro). It’s a chance to explain their foreign policy to the world and set out what they want from the UN over the coming year.

Signal From the Noise

“I lost count of how many people told me last week that this was the #AI #UNGA,” wrote Claire Melamed in her LinkedIn review of the week. So it’s fitting we are all using AI to extract the signal from the noise, given that all those 15 minutes of diplomacy add up to 50-plus hours of speaking.

Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo fed 194 speeches3 (411,697 words in total) to a bootleg blend of Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Bot. His popup site has comprehensive coverage, an interactive graphic, and an interface for DIY analysis.

What did our AI overlords report back? That leaders had most to say about protecting their sovereignty (mentioned in 78% of speeches) and fixing the club (multilateralism, UN reform, and the Security Council all topped 71%). Palestine (50%), Israel (40%), and Ukraine (40%) were the conflict hotspots, while human rights were mentioned by 58%. Of the global issues, climate change (76%) and AI (60%) were top of mind.

worked with just 167 speeches and only one model (Claude Opus 5.5). But he makes up for it with a fascinating analysis that you should read in full. A few points jumped out at me:

• The UN’s fanbase is growing. Leaders representing 95% of the world’s population want to defend or reform the club. Those who want to bypass or defund represent few people, but have deep pockets (26% of global GDP).

• McNair’s single model reaches similar conclusions to Elizondo’s blend, finding leaders most concerned by peace (94%), international law (92%), and sovereignty (84%). But he casts a wider net on global issues, with climate and sea-level rise (76%), commodity shocks (71%), AI (62%), and the SDGs (57%) topping the list.

• Leaders from the Global South “mostly frame bad news as a problem to be solved together, while Northern leaders frame it as a threat to be deterred.” The former want the club to pool resources to tackle shared crises like climate, debt, and food security. For the latter, it’s primarily a place to manage security, contain risks, and deter threats.4

Detecting Demand

At [Re]Group, we asked a different question: How strong are the UN’s demand signals?

This has been a standing frustration throughout the UN80 reform process, with the Secretary-General’s team complaining that Member States rarely give clear direction on what they actually want the UN system to do.

So I asked Mariana: “Can we grade leaders’ speeches by whether they asked for anything concrete?” What came back was first an “ohh fun” and then (frighteningly fast for what was once a three-month research project) a spreadsheet: “UNGA81 General Debate Demand Signals.”

She let Claude Opus 5.5 loose on the UN’s automatic transcripts, pulling out 931 demand signals and sifting the actionable from the rhetorical. That left 377 concrete “instructions” that named an instrument, resolution, fund, seat, candidate, or deadline for a specific entity to act on.

• When it comes to concrete demands, leaders split into four camps: 23% made speeches that were primarily rhetorical, 25% made one actionable request, 18% made two, and a third (33%) made three or more. The data also shows who has skin in the game: over 75% of concrete demands came from the Global South, while smaller nations were most likely to use their 15 minutes to fire off targeted policy demands.

• Of the concrete demands, only 40% were directed at the UN or wider multilateral ecosystem. The rest were largely aimed at other countries, like asking major emitters to pay up for climate damage. Even when leaders gave the UN explicit instructions, the power to execute them often lies with states themselves (“reform begins with us,” as one put it). The most popular “ask” — reforming the Security Council (52 demands) — requires a Charter amendment to be ratified by two-thirds of countries, including all the P5.

• Leaders are most concrete when they can identify a lever or want a greater decision-making role. Conflicts trigger rhetorical condemnations of adversaries rather than plans for peace. On other issues, proposals become concrete when hooked to a specific resolution, fund, or multilateral treaty. Leaders are clear about who deserves a Security Council seat or a leadership role, but vague on how the UN should actually be run. Mariana’s analysis found few concrete proposals for how to take forward the UN80 reform proposals.

The Bridgetown Proposition

I once had a colleague who wanted everything to be “propositional.” It’s an ugly word for a useful concept: we can only take others on a journey when we can tell them where we want to go and convince them we have a plan to get there.

Probably I am reading too much into UNGA speeches that leaders deliver with one eye firmly on their domestic audience. But I reckon that being more propositional is by far the easiest way for most countries to get more bang for their multilateral buck.

As the guests [Re]Group featured this week made clear, two countries have turned being propositional into an art form. First, Barbados.

I reckon Prime Minister Mottley talks propositional in her sleep. Her UNGA speech was a masterclass of clear proposals: natural disaster pause clauses in sovereign debt contracts, reallocating unused Special Drawing Rights, and establishing global solidarity levies on shipping and fossil fuels to generate predictable climate funding.

She also came with a coalition. Just as African countries banded together to demand permanent Security Council seats, Mottley and her fellow leaders of small island developing states united behind a push for multilateral banks to use climate vulnerability to determine who gets access to concessional finance.

From Potatoes to Peace

Our second propositional masterclass comes from one of the world’s smallest states.

In her General Debate address, Liechtenstein’s Deputy Prime Minister Sabine Monauni pushed for tighter enforcement of the Security Council Veto Initiative (Resolution 76/262), demanded explicit veto bans during mass atrocity cases, and called for a legally binding treaty to regulate Lethal Autonomous Weapons. As Ambassador Wenaweser explains in his interview with Mark Goldberg, this is a classic small-state strategy: use what the international system can offer as a shield against great-power muscle.

Mark asks the Ambassador whether there has been a “vibe shift” as small and middle powers work out they only have agency if they band together. Wenaweser agrees this is one of the main takeaways from UNGA 81. States have “silenced” themselves over the past year or so, but are now developing “overlapping circles of states” prepared to push back against the “chaos” of a lawless world — one that threatens the supply chains and systems on which they depend for their peace and prosperity.

For Wenaweser, reform is about cutting distractions as much as cutting costs, like the International Day of the Potato that was recently proclaimed by the General Assembly.

“We think the UN is not focused sufficiently on what it should be doing and what people actually expect the UN to do,” he says. “We want to see a political UN. We want to see a UN that plays a role in the major conflicts of the world… and we want a Secretary-General who takes a leading role.”

ICYMI

It’s been a busy month on [Re]Group. Here are some greatest hits:

• Jeff Feltman proposes a five-point peace and security playbook for the next Secretary-General: Sudan, humanity in war, security in the Gulf, securing the AI revolution, and “get the envoys appointed.”

• Aarathi Krishnan, founder of , explores multilateralism in an age of transactional sovereignty and asks how the UN’s new leader can help protect the space countries need to make independent choices.

• Stéphanie Fillion examines why journalists only cover the UN when it fails, tracing the decline of the UN press corps and making the case for independent watchdog journalism over public relations.

• Mariana and I make sense of a wave of new public polling data for UNGA and break down the four tribes of global governance: True Believers, Fed-Up Pragmatists, Impatient Allies, and Holdouts.

• And don’t miss our scenarios for the Secretary-General race and our calculation of the “invisible ROI” of multilateralism.

The SG Roundup

Not much to report that you didn’t hear already from us on Tuesday. But for an alternative perspective on where things stand, check out Stéphane Bussard’s roundup in Geneva Solutions. He explores veto threats facing the two leading candidates, Rebeca Grynspan and Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, and gives some names to the dark horses that may be waiting in the wings.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we bring you a bonus episode from the 81st session of the UN General Assembly. Recorded before a live audience, we ask: What should the next Secretary-General tackle in their first 100 days?

We still don’t know who will become the 10th Secretary-General, but the winner will face an endless list of challenges, and take over a divided organization that has been battered by budget cuts.

As has argued, “They must prioritize visibility and results, demonstrating the UN is back on the front lines of global crisis management and prepared to be a clarion voice for international cooperation as the essential ‘operating system’ for a livable world.”

The goal? To deliver the early and visible wins that will “rebuild trust and generate the political support required for the longer and harder institutional battles to come.”

The episode opens with co-host ’s interview with Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. Not only does she have clear ideas for what a 100-day sprint should look like, she wants a Secretary-General with the instincts of a champion surfer: “nimble of thought and nimble of action,” and with the balance to ride the geopolitical waves.

Next, Foreign Policy’s takes the stage to play the Triage Game with the International Crisis Group’s Comfort Ero and historian . The game is pretty simple. Three rounds: what should the next Secretary-General OWN, what should they DELEGATE, and what should they DROP.

As always, the episode wraps with host Jasmin Bauomy joining Mark Malloch-Brown to unpack the panel’s choices and work out what it all means.

Listen to the episode first and then read on for my takeaways. And if you haven’t already, there are eight episodes from the first season to catch up on and our historical deep dives to read.

1. Blessed is the Peacemaker (OWN)

Everyone wants the next Secretary-General to own peace and security. The panel, the public, and Member States as well.

The Triage Game kicks off with Thant Myint-U arguing that a new leader needs to “own the historical moment that we’re in.” They need to judge which conflict would most benefit from the UN’s “universal impartial mediator role.” The goal should be to demonstrate utility “in the way that, say, Dag Hammarskjöld during the Suez Crisis in 1956 or U Thant [during the Cuban] Missile Crisis [in] 1962, surprised even the great powers.”

Comfort Ero agrees that a new Secretary-General should “reclaim the peacemaking role and be the peacemaker, the universal peacemaker in which the UN was born.” She nominates Sudan as the crisis to own, calling it a geopolitical catastrophe and the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, and advises the incoming leader to go directly to the Security Council with a fresh diagnosis and new ideas.

However, Mark Malloch-Brown warns against putting “all your money on one horse” by focusing exclusively on Sudan, saying the Secretary-General should also explore opportunities for peace in Haiti, Somalia, Tigray, and Yemen. Prime Minister Mottley also argues for flexibility: A new leader will need experienced mediation teams ready to deploy to conflict zones whenever a breakthrough seems possible.

2. Don’t Manage, Lead (DELEGATE)

Think of delegation as three concentric circles: the office of the Secretary-General, the broader UN system, and, beyond that, the “cooperation ecosystem” that Elizabeth Cousens and Susana Malcorra explored in a recent Devex op-ed. According to Ero: “Delegate doesn’t mean abdicate.”

The incoming leader should not be personally involved in everything the UN does, nor does the UN need to jostle to the forefront of every global initiative when others are better placed to play that role. As Ero puts it: “It’s not a beauty contest. It’s a division of labor. It’s about who has legitimacy, who can drive, who has leverage, who exerts pressure. And about recognizing that, for the United Nations, you don’t have to lead all the time.”

Myint-U underlines the “critical distinction between the importance of issues” such as development, climate, or AI, “and how much time the Secretary-General personally has to give to that issue.”

Ero applies this logic to peace and security, advising the UN to lean into a division of labor, allowing “networked middle powers” to lead mediation in conflicts that they have the power to help resolve. “A supporting role is not second fiddle,” she says. Instead, it means coordinating behind the scenes, providing infrastructure that allows others to play their role, and deploying the legitimacy of the Security Council and wider UN when that can make a difference.

The panel also strongly advises the new Secretary-General against getting dragged too far into internal reform or day-to-day operations. Ero urges the incoming leader to delegate the UN80 reform process (which she describes as a “liquidation agenda”). Rather than trying to act as the UN’s Chief Operating Officer, the Secretary-General needs to “let that go” by appointing a trusted COO or Chief of Staff to mind the shop.

3. Fewer Ops and Much Less Oversharing (DROP)

Stop trying to be the world’s project manager. Provide the platform for others to implement. And, above all, give up competing for a shrinking pool of donor money. As Myint-U puts it: “I think it’s so important that the UN no longer be a delivery mechanism for donor assistance, right?”

Ero describes this as partly a question of bandwidth, but also of capacity. Malloch-Brown, one of the few at home in both the UN and the multilateral development banks, agrees. “The resources for implementation now lie elsewhere,” he says.

But development matters to Member States, as Prime Minister Mottley makes clear: “What we can’t do is abandon the development agenda or the humanitarian agenda,” because it traps vulnerable countries in a vicious cycle of decline. Malloch-Brown splits the difference. The UN could drop the lion’s share of its operational activities, while offering expert advice and convening, and “championing the cause of development.”

UN legend Brian Urquhart believed the Secretary-General needed “a certain detachment, reticence, even mystery” to play their role in diplomacy, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping. “If you’re speaking all the time about every issue,” Myint-U argues, “I think that diminishes [that detachment] to some extent.”

In the week ahead of UNGA alone, the Secretary-General spoke out on everything from hate speech and AI’s impact on sustainable tourism to cluster munitions and safe seafaring. “I think the thing the Secretary-General has to drop is making statements on every single issue every day,” Myint-U says.

Malloch-Brown agrees: “A little more mystery and a reduction of the volume of communications, I think would be much appreciated by everybody.”

4. Yes, But What About? (PUSHBACK)

In a 40-minute recording, there isn’t much time for pushback from the floor, but Microsoft’s Erica Moret, UN Foundation Next Generation Fellow Ishaan Shah, and Marie L’Hostis, from the FORUS network of NGOs, seize their chance.

Moret argues for the importance of AI during an UNGA that was obsessed with it: “Should the next Secretary-General own this challenge of ensuring that AI becomes an accelerator of development and economic growth rather than yet another accelerator of global inequality?”

Shah, fresh from launching a report on young movements and the future of multilateralism, pitches the idea that every UN strategy and reform agenda should be assessed for its impact on future generations. He wants a senior official to hold that responsibility.

L’Hostis highlights just how far off track the Sustainable Development Goals now are. “Considering expectations from communities around the world, how can the incoming UN Secretary-General galvanize commitment for the agenda now and beyond 2030?”

The panel counters that little progress on these priorities is possible if the world is on fire. For Myint-U, only a Secretary-General who is successful as a peacemaker will have the credibility to push for action on AI, development, or any other issue.

Ero agrees: “I will simply say your future depends on reversing 65 conflicts. [Without that,] nothing else can be done.”

ICYMI

“I believe in being what I call a Jimmy Cliff girl,” Prime Minister Mia Mottley tells us in an interview for World’s Toughest Job, our podcast co-production with Foreign Policy. “You can get it if you really want, but you must try, and try, and try,” she advises the incoming Secretary-General. (Our UNGA special is live. Find it on a podcast platform near you.)

Talking with co-host Mark Malloch-Brown, the Prime Minister warns that the fear of failure drives paralysis. To survive today’s compounding crises, the international system needs a Secretary-General who is “nimble of thought and nimble of action,” she says.

The Prime Minister spoke ahead of a live debate, where Foreign Policy‘s Ravi Agrawal invited the International Crisis Group’s Comfort Ero and historian to play the triage game: “What should the next Secretary-General own, delegate, or drop?”

Mottley herself won’t be the world’s Chief Triage Officer. We didn’t ask her why she wasn’t running to be the world’s first woman Secretary-General, but the question surfaced at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “I have a country to run and a region to care for,” she replied.

But whoever emerges as a winner from a crowded field, the Prime Minister has clear ideas for their first 100-Day sprint:

• Get humanitarian assistance to places where “too many people are suffering hunger as a result of global conflict.” For Mottley, this isn’t just about active war zones, but about tackling the fallout from supply chain shocks and price spikes that have hit import-dependent nations.

• Have mediation teams ready to deploy to conflict zones, drawing capacity from within the UN but also beyond. Even if these envoys cannot fully or immediately resolve a conflict, they can get the right actors to the table to “minimize the extent to which it is causing harm.”

• Tackle the exponential growth of AI before it threatens the safety of the planet. Warning that unethical models could pose existential risks, she said the next Secretary-General must build “a global perspective from the human race as to how to protect the human race.”

• Address the “slow killer” of underdevelopment. Mottley warned that without access to affordable funding and technical skills, vulnerable countries will fall into a vicious cycle of instability and lost social cohesion.

• Recognize that the climate crisis will not wait for the international system to act. Urging the new Secretary-General to seek “small victories” when bigger breakthroughs aren’t on the table, Mottley cited a Caribbean proverb: “one-one blow does kill ole cow.”

The next Secretary-General will face turbulent waters from day one, as the world grapples with worsening supply chain disruptions, more expensive debt, and the impacts of a “super El Niño.” They will need to take office with a plan clear enough to inspire confidence and rally member states behind collective action, given that “many hands will make light work.”

But above all, a new leader needs the flexibility to adapt. Leading the international system today, she concludes, is like sitting on a surfboard: “You have to know how to move... because of how quickly things are changing.”

The Bridgetown Dubs

A podcast is a beautiful thing, but when you put two people as full of ideas as Mottley and MMB in front of a mic, you inevitably leave gold on the cutting room floor. Since she already channeled Jimmy Cliff, consider these our Bridgetown Dubs: an EP of outtakes that didn’t make the official release.

SIDE 1: Multilateral Existentialist

We start with the mandate for multilateralism. On World’s Toughest Job, when the Prime Minister is asked why the international system needs a “pause and reset,” she uses the question to make the case for why we still need a rules-based order. It has made possible 80 years of development gains, she argues, and holds existential importance for smaller states like Barbados.

Now, the priority is to renew that order — and the international institutions that support it — during a polycrisis that is bringing even large countries to their knees.

Mark Malloch-Brown: You have argued for a bigger voice for smaller countries, which may mean empowering the General Assembly further. Do the next Secretary-General and other member states need to be better listeners? Or are there other structural changes that need to be made?

Mia Amor Mottley: I suspect you’re going to need structural changes. I think no one can accuse the previous SGs in recent years of being insensitive to the needs of small states.

We continue to treat small island states and the relationship with financial institutions with almost disdain and contempt, and not recognize that economic imbalances are existential crises for us in the same way that other things like climate or AI are existential crises for the global community.

Where I think we run into difficulties is that there’s always a disconnect between the Permanent Representatives and their capitals. There’s always a disconnect between the governors of the World Bank and the IMF and their capitals. It’s the gatekeepers who make it impossible for you to make serious progress on matters that are meaningful. One, out of fear. Two, out of a desire to retain dominance.

Frederick Douglass told us that power concedes nothing. And unless there is a compelling reason for change to take place, it’s not going to take place.

What is that compelling reason? The world faces a polycrisis, and we have seen large countries on their knees purely because of how it has affected their fiscal situation. Wars and conflicts have impacted how countries relate to one another, and they are prioritizing public expenditure, as defense takes over from development spending.

At some point, countries are going to have to determine what their stake is. That’s why I keep talking about the global commons. We saw it with COVID and the pandemic. Whether you were rich or poor, individuals or countries, no one was excluded.

It showed us that the smallest thing can also decimate the world and that we really are interconnected. Until we can come to a broad realization that we all face common threats and we all want the possibilities that come from common prosperity, we’re not going to see structural change.

That is going to need global advocacy, but particularly in capitals. Because it is with capitals that those gatekeepers are blocking the conversation, and it is in capitals that people are not yet confronting the reality of decisions that are critical for the prosperity and stability of the global community.

SIDE 2: Veranda Diplomacy

Listen to the podcast and you can hear the Prime Minister and Malloch-Brown agree that the UN is in “a horrible financial hole,” but that there is fat to cut that is sometimes visible to “the naked eye.”

The Prime Minister argues that it will never be stable to depend on a handful of people to lead the international system, or a handful of countries to pay for it. You need “solidarity groups” with the political weight to deliver change on the scale that is now needed.

Mark Malloch-Brown: How would you deal with this issue of reform and resources? Do you have any thoughts for a new Secretary General on what their first reform agenda should be?

Mia Amor Mottley: After you finish cutting all the fat that you can, you cannot then be hostage just to a few countries. I give the example that just after we became an independent country, President Johnson offered our then Prime Minister to pay for our membership of the Organization of American States. The Prime Minister said, “Where I come from, if you can’t afford to pay the dues, you do not join the club.”

I believe that the rest of us globally have to be able to accept responsibility that it makes sense for us to increase by a little bit what we are paying, because what the UN then gives us back is what we cannot on our own afford to buy. Without bankrupting governments, we can see a greater proportion of the budgetary amounts being carried by a larger number of states.

Mark Malloch-Brown: As the US cut its donations, we have heard huge criticism of the US, but see very little evidence of countries stepping up to replace it. So I think that’s a very powerful call.

Mia Amor Mottley: I think, Mark, part of the problem is that nobody has really asked countries to step up. We’re talking on a parallel track, as if we’re standing on a veranda outside of where the action takes place.

We need to come up with a formula that says, “Let’s start with the G77 and see where the appetite lies for you to take an increase of 10% or 15%. It’s not going to break your bank, but it’s going to make the difference.” When that is combined with reforms we can make to institutions, then we will be able to do a lot more than we’re currently doing.

But what we can’t do is abandon the development agenda or the humanitarian agenda. You put countries in a vicious cycle that will not wait on time to be resolved. I believe you probably have over 40 countries that are in distress at the moment and dealing with the International Monetary Fund. They can’t wait a year or two for their matters to be resolved, because if they do, it will just get that much worse.

Her Excellency The Honourable Mia Amor Mottley’s conversation with Lord Mark Malloch-Brown has been edited for length and clarity.

Related reading

When Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres won their respective races for Secretary-General, the first straw polls with color-coded ballots took place in early October, allowing the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the U.S.) to signal which candidates they were prepared to veto.

Remember the game theory that lies behind this choice. The P5 pushes for color to show which votes really count. The ten elected members push back. They want to level the playing field for as long as possible.

As this was the last vote while France held the Security Council presidency, I had wondered about a move to colored ballots, but those who predicted the reverse have been proven right. It seems there is still too much uncertainty to move to the endgame.

This has been a good round for Rebeca Grynspan, as she gained an Encourage and shed a couple of Discourages, especially as Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett’s tally didn’t improve. A frontrunner in the last poll, along with Grynspan, she remains stuck with six Security Council members voting against her candidacy.

Grynspan does not yet have a decisive lead, and she may well have a P5 veto lurking among those three still discouraging her, but now looks like the candidate to beat.

This result might also dampen, but will not silence, speculation that a dark horse candidate will soon sweep the field. If the third round pushed the needle towards our Anointed in the Shadows scenario, it has now inched back towards Fortune Rewards the Patient, where a declared candidate from the current field prevails.

In any case, le quatrième straw poll is the last under the French presidency. Greece; it’s now your turn.

World’s Toughest Job: Live!

While a Security Council decision still seems a long way off, there are just 94 days until the 10th Secretary-General is due to start work.

In a special bonus episode of World’s Toughest Job — recorded live at UNGA 81 — we ask: Where should the next Secretary-General start on day one?

The episode is, as Brits like to say, a corker. It kicks off with our fabulous co-host interviewing Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley. The PM doesn’t say who she wants to win, but she does think the next Secretary-General needs to be a surfer. (Yes, really. Listen to the episode to hear why.)

Next: Foreign Policy’s referees the Triage Game. The rules are simple. Three rounds: What should the next Secretary-General OWN, what could they DELEGATE, and what must they DROP?

In the hot seat: International Crisis Group’s Comfort Ero and historian . Trying to change their minds: Microsoft’s Erica Moret (pushing artificial intelligence), Ishaan Shah (championing future generations for the UN Foundation), and Marie L’Hostis from FORUS (demanding action on the Sustainable Development Goals).

Finally, our equally fabulous host Jasmin Bauomy joins Mark to make sense of what we all just heard. His verdict? They were very good on OWN, quite good on DELEGATE, and weak on DROP. “There wasn’t yet enough real tough-mindedness about saying where the UN should focus,” he concludes.

👉 Listen to the UNGA special episode here.

“Please, sir, I want some more.” But of course: full takeaways from the panel and exclusive outtakes from the interview with Prime Minister Mottley will be published Friday, alongside our regular [Re]Group weekly (working title: The UNGA Hangover).

And if you haven’t already, you must catch up on the first season of World’s Toughest Job, which features a stellar cast exploring eight of the biggest challenges the new leader will find in their inbox.

Multilateralism in an Age of Transactional Sovereignty

Finally, we turn to one of our World’s Toughest Job alumni. Aarathi Krishnan is the founder and CEO of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, where she works at the intersection of tech, foresight, and global governance.

In episode 7, we asked what the UN can do when the next global shock shocks us all. Aarathi warned that states are retreating into “Transactional Sovereignty” and this makes it harder for them to come together in the face of a shared threat.

We asked her to explore this concept in more detail, and today we publish her analysis. Here are six quotes to make you want to read the whole thing:

1. On equal legal standing vs. economic reality: “Sovereignty has always been constrained, but what has changed since 1945 is the density and reach of the relationships shaping sovereignty.”

2. On how to work out who holds the cards: “To understand who holds the power, look at what alternatives each side had (if any). What autonomy was traded for access? What strings were attached? And what is the penalty for walking away?”

3. On coercion cloaked by process: “Long before it forces a visible reversal, pressure can reveal itself through procedure, like adjournments, abstentions, strategic absences, or sudden shifts in negotiating language.”

4. On private sector power: “Technology adds a new dimension, as geopolitical relationships flow not just through governments, but through private companies as well.”

5. On ad-hocism: “When states and private actors feel the UN is no longer equipped to lead, they are bypassing the multilateral system to build their own mechanisms.”

6. On why it’s all about the timing: “By the time a decision reaches the flags and the microphones, it is already too late. Votes are cast based on relationships that have often been in place for years.”

👉 Read Aarathi Krishnan’s full article here.

ICYMI

Catch up on and ’s UNGA 81 digest, Worn at the Seams, Built to Last, with the five trends defining the future of multilateralism and loads of links to the stuff you may have missed.

In 1945, the founders of the UN wrote sovereign equality into the organization’s Charter. It was a profoundly unequal world. The U.S. emerged from World War II with unmatched power. Britain and France still ruled empires. Much of Africa and Asia had no sovereign seat at all. And five states would hold a permanent veto over international peace and security.

The Charter did not dismantle these inequalities, but it did guarantee the equal legal standing of states. Decolonization gave that principle teeth. Newly independent nations could finally govern in their own name and stand on the international stage as political equals. The multilateral system gave these states the right to speak, negotiate, and influence international decisions, even if it could not overwrite the economic and security dependencies left behind by empires.

Sovereignty has always been constrained, but what has changed since 1945 is the density and reach of the relationships shaping sovereignty.

Capital moves through international financial networks. Governments borrow at prices shaped by global financial markets, and exporters are subject to tariff treatment they simply do not control. Public institutions rely heavily on foreign-owned cloud infrastructure. Supply chains for microchips and compute power are also highly concentrated.

For the UN, this matters because diplomatic positions are formed long before a state enters the negotiating room. A delegation’s vote might be contingent on a security guarantee, tech access, or a private investment requiring another capital’s approval. Governments may still make the final choice, but the price for that choice can now be much higher.

Sovereignty with Strings Attached

I developed the concept of Transactional Sovereignty to describe the point at which one state’s dependence becomes another’s leverage. When a state relies on resources it cannot easily replace, the supplier gains the power to shape its sovereign choices.

That resource could be money, security, energy, technology, infrastructure, or market access. These arrangements can often be mutually beneficial, but smart governments negotiate hard and build alternatives so that they are not held hostage later.

To understand who holds the power, look at what alternatives each side had (if any). What autonomy was traded for access? What strings were attached? And what is the penalty for walking away?

Influence rarely requires an explicit quid pro quo. Nor can you explain how a state behaves through the lens of a single relationship. Instead, look more broadly at what a government has at stake, and what it fears losing if it steps out of line.

What Lies Behind the Vote

In 1990, when Yemen was an elected member of the Security Council, its ambassador Abdalla Saleh Al-Ashtal voted against Resolution 678, which authorized force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. “That will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast,” a U.S. diplomat warned him.

Because Yemen depended heavily on Saudi and American support, retaliation followed swiftly. More than $70 million in American assistance was halted, while the U.S. blocked access to World Bank and International Monetary Fund financing. Saudi Arabia went further, expelling more than half a million Yemeni workers.

While Yemen still had freedom to choose, holding the same formal rights as any other state, it paid a higher price to make that choice.

Today, similar pressure can be applied through threats to cut off market access. In April 2025, 63 governments supported the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework. But before the formal adoption in October, the U.S. issued a warning: Any country backing the measure would face restricted port access, new fees, visa restrictions, commercial penalties, and other sanctions.

When Saudi Arabia called for an adjournment of the adoption for a year, the motion passed by a vote of 57-49, with 21 abstentions. We cannot be sure that every government that backed the postponement did so out of fear of American retaliation, but the underlying message was clear: The United States had made explicit the bilateral cost of a global vote.

Long before it forces a visible reversal, pressure can reveal itself through procedure, like adjournments, abstentions, strategic absences, or sudden shifts in negotiating language.

The Commercial Front

Technology adds a new dimension, as geopolitical relationships flow not just through governments, but through private companies as well.

In February 2026, the UN General Assembly appointed 40 members to the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI by a vote of 117-2. Only the U.S. and Paraguay opposed the measure. Just days before, Paraguay had signed a critical-minerals memorandum with the U.S., deepening a relationship that already included military agreements and growing American investments in AI data centers.

Paraguay may simply have shared the U.S. stance on UN scrutiny of AI, but its vote sheds light on the backdrop against which sovereign choices are now made.

The recent deal between Microsoft and the UAE’s flagship AI firm, G42, reveals a similar dynamic, but from another angle. To secure Washington’s approval for the partnership, G42 was forced to remove Chinese technology from its operations. The companies then adopted security protocols drafted alongside the U.S. and Emirati governments, elevating a corporate transaction into a broader bilateral technology partnership.

In this case, a commercial transaction gained new geopolitical weight, as technology, capital, and government approval became intertwined.

Building an Alternative

Transactional Sovereignty can encourage governments to bypass multilateral institutions entirely.

Deep seabed mining shows how this can happen. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, mineral resources beyond national jurisdiction are governed through the International Seabed Authority. But in April 2025, the U.S. circumvented this body when President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to accelerate domestic licensing for mineral extraction in international waters.

There was no UN vote. The U.S. built an alternative framework of national permits and corporate concessions and relied on other governments, financial markets, insurers, and buyers to legitimize it. Can it now secure sufficient international buy-in to make the parallel system viable? Or will the multilateral system fight back?

What the Secretary-General Can Do

The 10th Secretary-General will take office on Jan. 1, 2027. The new leader will not be able to prevent a government from imposing tariffs, force a technology company to provide compute, or unwind a commercial deal.

But they can use the core question of Transactional Sovereignty to explore choices made inside UN negotiating rooms. To ask: What would this state have had to risk to choose differently?

To answer that question, a new UN leader needs analysis of financing decisions, tariff exposure, technology access, security agreements, strategic investments, and private deals. They then need to see that analysis mapped against the decisions governments take, while remembering that a postponed vote, an abstention, deleted language, or a decision to bypass the multilateral system altogether can be just as revealing as a state’s final position.

None of this would give the UN new authority, but it would equip the Secretary-General to use their reporting, good offices, and public agenda to support governments while they have meaningful alternatives.

They can intervene at the point when financing can still be negotiated, tariffs revised, technical standards unsettled, and suppliers replaced, rather than after infrastructure is built, technology embedded, debt accumulated, and commercial ties locked in.

In 1945, sovereign equality gave radically unequal states a common political standing, but this principle is increasingly hard to sustain as economic realities drive up the cost of sovereign decisions, above all for states facing the highest risks.

The incoming Secretary-General cannot reverse the erosion of diplomatic independence, but they can make its reality impossible to ignore. By the time a decision reaches the flags and the microphones, it is already too late. Votes are cast based on relationships that have often been in place for years.

By understanding the undercurrents of Transactional Sovereignty from day one, the new Secretary-General will have much greater power to help governments defend the sovereign space they need to act.

Related Reading

But any Secretary-General’s most scarce resource is time. So in this special episode, recorded live at this year’s UN General Assembly, we wanted to do something a little different. We asked our panelists what progress the next Secretary-General needs to deliver personally in their first 100 days, what they should delegate to others, and what they should take off the world body’s plate entirely.

We hear from Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Motley; Comfort Ero, analyst, policymaker, and the president and CEO of the International Crisis Group; and Thant Myint-U, historian, author, and a senior fellow at the UN Foundation.

World’s Toughest Job is a co-production of Foreign Policy and the UN Foundation.

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World’s Toughest Job: Live Taping

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Catch Up on the Complete Series

“Life is a fashion show, the world is your runway,” said designer Marc Jacobs. After the editors, models, and celebrities head home from New York Fashion Week, the diplomatic world sets up its own show.

With motorcades instead of models and lanyards instead of Loewe, High-level Week kicked off on September 18, though the attendant (side) events, private huddles, invite-only discussions, and even a few glitzy receptions, were well under way the weekend before.

Between Climate Week and platforms for gender equality and global health, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) covers every issue. The look of the season might have been AI, but the next Secretary-General and the future of multilateralism were not far behind.

That’s our beat and we covered as many of those events as we could. So, we’re focusing on what we saw from that section of the front row: five trends that will define the UN’s next collection, and what to expect from its new season.

Five Trends from Our Beat

1. It’s all about the entourage

It was the last walk down the runway for Secretary-General António Guterres. After 10 years, he moves on, in his words, to “keep championing the conviction that peace is possible.”

While no-one knows who will replace the current Secretary-General, one message was clear: The next leader will only be as effective as the people around them. The UN’s problems are too big to solve alone, and its “culture of caution” won’t change unless the incoming leader can hand-pick a bold senior team.

But will the major labels cede creative control? At Tuesday’s 1 for 8 Billion event, speakers warned that P5 support is being traded for top jobs (a backroom exchange their research shows is practically tradition). At a different event, one former insider criticized the “jobs for rejects” approach some capitals take to unload “overstock” talent into senior roles (while admitting he benefited from a ring-fenced post himself).

2. The designer doesn’t sew every stitch

The consensus on First Avenue is shifting: the UN’s future lies in setting standards and conferring legitimacy, not delivering every program on the ground. As we read in Devex this week, in a world of multiplying coalitions, the UN should focus on what only it can do. And stop competing with the ecosystem of ateliers who possess the hands-on expertise the couture house lacks.

Member States are tailoring their strategies to this pattern, offering political leadership for reform, and lining up behind the causes that matter most to them. Brazil, the European Union, Kenya, and Canada launched Partners for Multilateralism to build flexible coalitions around the UN rather than bypass it, while a group of die-hard multilateralists backed a Finnish-Norwegian call for a UN-anchored AI verification body “to set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed.”

In each of these cases, the coalition did the heavy lifting, but the UN offered the platform.

3. Reform is this season’s must-have, (but comes in different fabrics)

Reform was as on-trend as an aggressively oversized blazer. The public wants it (87% in a 20-country UN Foundation poll), insiders agree (Devex says 62% want a serious overhaul), and the word itself flashed in neon above every UNGA stage.

But a blazer is shaped as much by its fabric as its design. This week, we saw reform cut from three different types of cloth. Washington is all about the bottom line, asking each SG candidate to slash prices and trim excess inventory.

Others want to “shrink the UN” so it can focus on a single line: peace and security. And they are not afraid to say that it is time to go “back to basics,” as they push for a Secretary-General who will end wars and stop “waiting for permission to act.”

In rooms led by Global South voices, reform isn’t about the cost or the clothes, it’s about brand ownership and renewal. Giving a real say to shut-out countries means shifting power, we heard one speaker say, which is why it’s so hard.

4. Peace and security is back in season, and Sudan could be the first fitting for the next SG

Conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran dominated the headlines. But, in quieter rooms, the spotlight was on Sudan and the role the UN can play in stopping the slaughter.

It is where the Council already has a mandate and the major powers are less polarized. The next Secretary-General, we heard, needs a “loud win,” and Sudan kept coming up as the place to find one, especially as the UN’s absence leaves a vacuum for competing mediators (a point made at the Alliance for Peacebuilding event).

Some said the next Secretary-General should bring options on Sudan to the Council and push for a vote. We published an essay last week that offered an original design for the new leader’s first 100 days, starting with an arms embargo, a Special Envoy with Council backing, and a political mission.

The advice to the UN? Be “caught trying.”

5. The audience likes the show more than the critics do

Read too much about UNGA and you might conclude that multilateralism, like fashion, is obsolete. One former Prime Minister worries we’re living through the devil’s decade, while a columnist believes the UN is “rotting from the head down.” We suspect more than one panelist is already working on a “Beyond Repair” collection to send down the runway sometime in 2027.

The public, it turns out, hasn’t read these reviews. Pick almost any poll and you land on roughly the same baseline for trust: 6 in 10 (UN Foundation, Rockefeller, Edelman, with Gallup a little more pessimistic). Only 6 in 10? As [Re]Group argued in The Four Tribes of Global Governance, you can’t declare the UN brand dead when it outperforms national governments, the media, and other legacy labels on the catwalk.

A few fashionistas have read the same tea leaves. At the Ford Foundation, one summed it up with a line: “citizens are ahead of their leaders” in championing multilateralism. But, she also added a warning that there are well-funded efforts to undermine their goodwill.

Designers learned long ago that a brand cannot survive if it loses touch with the streets. The UN needs the same “trickle-up” effect to bring unpolished energy into the building. Put that on your mood board for next season.

Fashion Forward

Reading List on the Future of Multilateralism

• Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, António Costa, William Ruto and Mark Carney (FT) dropped a heavyweight defense of multilateralism ahead of Monday’s launch of their new coalition.

• Mark Malloch-Brown (NPR) says Security Council gridlock creates space for a diplomatically creative Secretary-General and fleshes out his proposals for a 100-day sprint.

• Elizabeth Cousens (Envoy Magazine) pitches her proposals for the first 100 days, with early wins on forgotten conflicts, global public goods, and frontier domains like AI and space.

• Jeff Feltman ([Re]Group) proposes a five-points peace and security playbook: Sudan, humanity in war, security in the Gulf, securing the AI revolution, and “get the envoys appointed.”

• Comfort Ero (EL PAÍS) argues the UN’s decline is a choice, warning that the P5 might prefer a compliant “secretary” over an assertive “general.”

• Richard Gowan (Foreign Affairs) wants a slimmer UN focused strictly on mediation, humanitarian aid, and a minimalist set of goals.

• Elizabeth Cousens and Susana Malcorra (Devex) argue the UN needs to assert its unique role in the international cooperation ecosystem.

• David Miliband (Foreign Policy) calls for an update of the SDGs, citing IRC research that conflict has set global progress back 18 years.

• Philipp Schönrock (Project Syndicate) lays out a 100-day SG roadmap built around a senior team chosen for independence and courage.

• Eric Alter and Nickolay Mladenov (The National Interest) argue the UN should streamline by design rather than shrink by accident.

The Shows to Be Seen At

• Project Syndicate and Ford Foundation: Heather Gerken, Comfort Ero, Susana Malcorra, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Jayati Ghosh, and others remade the UN.

• Rockefeller Foundation: Gordon Brown and Rajiv Shah launched a Call to Action from 100 former leaders (Jacinda Ardern, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Helen Clark, Michelle Bachelet).

• Foreign Policy and UN Foundation: Live podcast taping of World’s Toughest Job with Comfort Ero, Thant Myint-U, Elizabeth Cousens, and Ravi Agrawal.

• Club de Madrid and International IDEA: Laura Chinchilla launching the Global Commission on Multilateralism and Democracy report.

• Open Society Foundations and International IDEA: María Fernanda Espinosa (the only candidate we saw on stage) with Pedro Abramovay, Kevin Casas-Zamora, and Robert Orr on democracy and human rights.

• GWL Voices: Flagship Madam Secretary-General event with Helen Clark, Susana Malcorra, Binaifer Nowrojee, and Ambassador María Alonso Giganto.

• Alliance for Peacebuilding et al.: Eva Khair, Roberto Dondisch, Laure Miller, and Ugo Solinas tackling crisis response and peacebuilding.

• Security Council Report: Comfort Ero, Jeff Feltman, Shamala Kandiah Thompson, and Natalie Samarasinghe dissecting the “for better or for worse” relationship between the Secretary-General and the Security Council.

• Sustainable Development Solutions Network and The Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI): Pepukaye Bardouille (Bridgetown Initiative) and Olav Kjørven (Article 109) joining former leaders to renew cooperation for climate, biodiversity, and sustainable development.

The SG Roundup

• Michelle Bachelet withdrew after the Sept. 18 straw poll gave her one “encourage” and 11 “discourages.” See our last Weekly for where the race stands.

• In the corridors, speculation centered on a dark horse candidate (our Anointed in the Shadows scenario) or a late decision (Into the Abyss). For the latter, read what 1 for 8 Billion thinks will happen if there’s no decision by the end of the year.

• Many think the merit-versus-gender debate is settled, with highly qualified women leading the race. Choosing a man would now be a deliberate decision and couldn’t be blamed on the talent pool.

• Expect the fourth straw poll on Monday (Sept. 28). But word on the street is the ballots will stay monochrome for one more round, so we’ll have to wait to see any P5 vetoes. It’s the last chance for the French presidency to add a splash of color, though.

And the biggest news of all: If you couldn’t make it for our live recording, our World’s Toughest Job bonus episode with Comfort Ero and Thant Myint-U will drop on podcast platforms on Tuesday (if nothing goes wrong). Hosts Jasmin Bauomy and Mark Malloch-Brown are also joined by a mystery guest from Barbados (not Rihanna).

ICYMI

Catch our latest episode with Mark Leon Goldberg on Global Dispatches.

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Trump at the UN — And the Biggest Moments From UNGA

President Trump delivered his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly, kicking off a week of speeches from presidents and prime ministers from over 100 countries. In this special edition of Global Dispatches, I am joined by Anjali Dayal, my…

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19 days ago · 10 likes · Mark Leon Goldberg, [Re]Group, and Anjali Dayal

An Anatomy of Dread

We are not a happy bunch.

Two polls out last week prove it. The UN Foundation and GeoPoll asked people in 20 countries how they feel about the future. The hopeful: 34%. The worried: 57%.

Rockefeller and Focaldata asked whether people think the world has gone downhill in the past year. Nearly 70% say yes, more than double the share who think things have grown worse in their own lives and those of their families.

So it’s not trouble at home that keeps people awake at night but the fear that there’s … something out there … lurking in the shadows. The farther the lens pulls back, the darker things seem to get. Many of us feel like extras in the first act of a B-movie, waiting to find out which monster of the week will emerge from offscreen.

So, what’s first through the door? War is our main fear. Both surveys agree our first priority is for the international system to prevent it.

Next comes anxiety over material and economic survival. Reducing poverty and inequality ranks second in the UN Foundation poll, while the global economy, food and water, and poverty round out the second tier for Rockefeller. Climate change is the third monster of the week in both polls, followed by the need to fight for human rights in an era in which they are increasingly violated.

Panic about artificial intelligence, which is both real and growing, is yet to breach the perimeter, with governance of frontline technologies at the bottom of both surveys. Is that because tech isn’t seen as enough of an immediate threat to survival? Or because most are skeptical that these risks will be tackled through international cooperation rather than decisions taken by a handful of governments?

A Failing Grade

In 2025, Reuters put a heavy spin on the Rockefeller data: “Poll shows huge support for global cooperation, but failing grades for UN, others.” Only 58% trust the United Nations, it complained. Only 58%?

This figure remains remarkably consistent across multiple surveys and years. Not just last year’s Rockefeller poll, but also this year’s from UN Foundation (58%) and six waves of the Edelman Trust Barometer (58% to 61%). The latest Rockefeller numbers show slightly higher levels of trust, at 62%.

Since neither of us went through the American school system, this “failing grade” left us scratching our heads.

Global diplomacy isn’t graded on a fixed scale. Graded on a curve, the picture looks very different: you can’t slap the UN with an “F” when it beats out national governments, non-governmental organizations, and — ironically — the media (Edelman 2026). In the Rockefeller survey, the UN ranks second only to WHO among international institutions (and WHO is, of course, part of the UN).

The reality is that the UN sits on a stable foundation of public trust. But goodwill and performance are different things. In 2023, FES/YouGov found the UN to be one of the most favorably viewed international institutions, even while the public was more divided on whether it “deals effectively with international problems.”

As we’ve argued before: trusting an institution and believing it can actually do its job are not the same. And that brings us to the real issue: delivery.

The Pragmatists and the Skeptics

The UN Foundation poll asked about trust in institutions like the UN to “make progress on the global challenges you identified earlier.” In other words: their ability to confront the monsters of the week we opened with.

When asked to pick two reasons why, the Trusting were motivated:

• First, by the belief that international institutions “uphold international law and protect human rights across the world” (57%).

• Then, by the belief that institutions have “delivered results” (41%) or that they are “the only realistic way to solve problems no single country can fix” (41%).

• And lastly, because “they give countries like mine a voice on the world stage” (33%).

The Distrustful, on the other hand, are:

• More likely to believe that international institutions lack teeth (60% complain they “cannot enforce international law or protect human rights when nations choose to violate them”) or that the system is “dominated by a few powerful countries” (45%).

• Less likely to care about bureaucracy. Only 32% say the UN is “too slow and bureaucratic to get things done,” and just 29% think it “interferes too much in the affairs of individual countries.”

Both groups, in other words, believe that principles matter. But pragmatism sustains the Trusting (“If it works: fine”), while inequality drives distrust far more than inefficiency (“Who cares if it works? It’s the unfairness that grinds my gears”).

Meet the cast

Trusting versus distrustful. Globalist versus country-first. Everyone loves a binary, but real people are messier. To explore what kind of relationship a new Secretary-General could build with these messy global constituencies, we turned to another storytelling trick: character archetypes.

We love a back-of-the-envelope calculation at [Re]Group, so to build these archetypes, we ran the numbers twice.

First, we fed the UN Foundation polling data to a machine learning algorithm to see where respondents naturally clustered. The results were fascinating, but it is somewhat unsettling when all the number-crunching is hidden in a black box.

So we then ran a more traditional cross-tabulation, filtering for belief in global cooperation and trust in the UN. Reassuringly, both methods came up with more or less the same four groups. Here is what the second cut looked like.

True Believers (19%)

This group skews young. It holds a torch for the UN and believes deeply in global cooperation. They read the UN Charter aloud over dinner and are disappointed only by the way it describes the Secretary-General as a “chief administrative officer.”

They aren’t looking for a manager. They want a leader who will use the global pulpit to champion universal values, human rights, and a radical response to planetary threats.

Fed-Up Pragmatists (39%)

This is the largest bloc. Sensible people with practical instincts, and a big blind spot: that contentious change would come swiftly if only everyone were a bit more reasonable.

They also believe in global cooperation, but their trust in the UN is hanging by a thread because they see the bloat, the endless committees, and the inefficiency. They want a Secretary-General who can end wars and deliver results on other pressing challenges.

Impatient Allies (25%)

Your classic swing voters, and perhaps the most fascinating group of all. They are sure that global problems are best solved when countries work together, but they are deeply distrustful of the capacity of the international system — the UN included — to make that happen. Why? Because the system lacks enforcement power.

They want a strong leader who can bang heads together, and enforce international law.

Holdouts (13%)

These are “country-first” skeptics with no time for globalists, or for the citizens of nowhere who trash sovereignty and disrespect borders. They tend to be older and live in wealthier countries.

Some of them wouldn’t mind if the UN did the decent thing and disappeared. But if it has to have a leader, they want one who stays in the shadows and doesn’t cross national red lines. Or one who cuts costs and reduces the ambition of what the system tries to achieve.

No Huge Mistakes

It will be tempting for a new Secretary-General to look at these four tribes and think the UN has a problem that better PR can fix. That the answer is just more speeches, slicker video clips, and social campaigns accelerated by AI. To quote Julia Roberts: “Big mistake. Big. Huge.”

Conventional communication preaches to the choir: the 19% of True Believers who already think the UN is doing a fine job. The other tribes mostly aren’t listening. Which is good. Because when they do pay attention, all they hear is more … words.

That incenses the Fed-Up Pragmatists and Impatient Allies in equal measure, because they want action above all. And if the Holdouts are listening (and they do so more often than you may think), what they hear is yet more globalist overreach.

The recipe to win over the Pragmatists and Allies isn’t better messaging; it is action plus visibility. This is a theme we have covered with former Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown (“get some early wins that will be seen and will have global impact, so people sit up and realize the UN is back in town”) and former Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeff Feltman (who urges the new leadership to push the UN from a “culture of caution” to one of “agency and action”).

It might be tempting to write off the fourth tribe: the Holdouts. But out in the field, the UN is used to engaging with adversaries who actively oppose it. Why should Headquarters only deal with its friends? As academics Allison Carnegie and Richard Clark pointed out in our recent interview, the international system is already having to learn a new language to talk with populists. At a time when many governments are struggling, a new Secretary-General will need to use it to explain how international action enhances national sovereignty, rather than undermines it.

A final thought: most people form their opinions of the UN indirectly, influenced by those who deal with the international system firsthand: politicians, diplomats, journalists, and others whose work spans borders. Yet while we routinely survey the general public, we have far less data on what these intermediaries and opinion-formers think. If we want to reimagine global governance, that is a deficit we need to correct.

Related Reading

With conflict at record levels, former Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman on what it will take to make the UN hard to ignore.

The morning of Dec. 29, 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a guest in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House, emerged naked from his bath to find the President in his room. He looked like a “pink cherub,” FDR recalled.

During a sleepless night trying to find a name for those fighting for a “better future of the world,” the American President had been struck by inspiration. “How about the United Nations?” he asked his naked guest. “Good,” Churchill replied.

What’s striking about this exchange isn’t just that two national leaders were moonlighting as brand consultants. It’s that, with war still raging, they carved out time to build consensus behind the principles upon which a postwar order would be constructed: freedom from fear and want, self-determination and economic cooperation, and, above all, a “wider and permanent system of general security” to stop conflict from engulfing the world again.

Since that morning in the White House, Member States have used the UN “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.” And to great effect. On [Re]Group, we have quantified the impact of its efforts to de-escalate great power conflict, restrain the spread of destructive weapons, and end wars (or prevent them from starting). As these calculations have shown, the net impact has not just been positive, it has been widely profitable for humanity.

In her playbook for the first year of the next Secretary-General (out now in the print edition of Envoy Magazine and online), argues that peace and security should be the new leader’s first priority. “Early, visible wins will force the world to sit up and realize the UN is back in business,” she writes, “providing the space for the harder slog of securing deeper change.”

To see what those early wins might look like, I asked former UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman what it would take for a new Secretary-General to rebuild that “wider and permanent system of security” for an increasingly dangerous age.

Jeff also wants the UN to “elevate and amplify” its work on peace and security. He came to the interview with a five-point plan for how that could happen. Not as a final blueprint, but to get people talking. “Maybe my ideas are terrible,” he warned, “but you’re provoked to think of good ideas because of my terrible ones.”

The ideas are far from terrible, of course. Jeff’s roadmap would put the UN back on the front lines of peace and security, drawing only on what is within a Secretary-General’s power to deliver. This isn’t about low-hanging fruit, because there isn’t any. It’s about taking risks to push the UN from a “culture of caution” to one of “agency and action.”

“I think that the Secretary-General does have room to navigate,” Jeff argues. “I go back to what [Re]Group wrote about forced proximity. How the UN can’t make adversaries agree, but it can force them to acknowledge each other, and stop each from pretending the other doesn’t exist.

“In the same way, the new Secretary-General can use this five-point agenda to make the UN hard to ignore. It wouldn’t overcome the Security Council’s paralysis, but it would keep diplomacy alive.”

1. Elevate Sudan: Demonstrating relevance when the stakes are high

In Sudan — the world’s worst humanitarian crisis — the UN already holds a Security Council mandate, yet it has no active peacekeeping or political mission.

As foreign actors continue to funnel weapons, drones, and finance to both warring parties, the humanitarian system is close to collapse. More than two-thirds of the population is now in need of lifesaving support. This is where the culture of caution costs lives. As UN humanitarian lead Tom Fletcher recently put it, “Sudan does not suffer from a lack of analysis. It suffers from a lack of action.”

The UN “has not responded with the urgency the crisis warrants,” Jeff argues. Instead, parts of the system have allowed the warring parties to impose restrictions on the movement of relief convoys, or confused Khartoum’s claims of sovereignty with legitimate governance across the entire country.

Jeff believes that visible leadership on Sudan is less likely to trigger great-power pushback than it would on Gaza, Ukraine, or Iran. That gives an incoming Secretary-General an opportunity to reclaim the initiative in their first 100 days by creating “room to navigate” through existing diplomatic coalitions.

• Convene and chair a meeting of the Quintet (UN, Africa Union, League of Arab States, Intergovernmental Authority on Development, European Union) in Geneva, meet with Permanent Representatives of the Quad and Quint in New York, and travel to Addis Ababa to align with the Chairperson of the AU Commission, the Expanded Mechanism on Sudan, and the AU High-Level Panel on Sudan. In this way the new Secretary-General can signal: “I am elevating this issue in as many fora as I can.”

• Push for a nationwide arms embargo, capitalizing on the momentum generated by recent U.S. proposals and support from the UAE, while transforming the Personal Envoy position into a Security Council-backed Special Envoy with a dedicated political mission.

• Enforce a “no-regrets policy” on aid delivery, directing agencies to route assistance through regional hubs like Nairobi on a notification-only basis, ensuring lifesaving support is “not hostage to permits and restrictions” from warring parties.

• Make clear to UN staff and major NGOs that if they are targeted or expelled for doing their job in territories not controlled by the Sudanese Armed Forces, you “will have their backs.” Tell them: “The priority is to save lives and not buckle under political pressure.”

• Accelerate civilian-led initiatives for transitional governance, acknowledging that “neither the SAF nor the RSF [Rapid Support Forces] have popular legitimacy.” The Secretary-General should support preparations for “a postwar scenario without that being held hostage to getting to the ceasefire first.”

“I’m not saying there’s going to be an immediate resolution,” Jeff concludes, “but the UN needs to be ‘caught trying’ something different. As Sudan doesn’t provoke absolutism among Member States, you can raise the profile of the UN on peace and security by showing you are willing to navigate around structural constraints.”

2. Humanity in War: Building a culture of compliance

The Sudan war is also the poster child for repeated violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), at a time of growing pressure on the rules that seek to limit the suffering caused by armed conflict. According to a recent assessment by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, “while the threat to IHL is not yet existential, it is at a critical breaking point.”

“This isn’t about opening up the Geneva Conventions, rewriting international humanitarian law, or expanding the obligations on Member States,” Jeff argues. “You aren’t looking to impose new rules but to make existing rules stick. We need a ‘culture of compliance’ campaign, rather than a legal reform project.”

Jeff believes the next Secretary-General can build on the Global Initiative to Galvanize Political Commitment to International Humanitarian Law, launched in 2024 by Brazil, China, France, Jordan, Kazakhstan and South Africa, with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This initiative, which has engaged over 150 states in an ongoing consultation process, aims to counter the erosion of the rules of war, elevate IHL as a political priority, and prevent unconstrained violence in modern conflicts. That creates momentum the incoming Secretary-General can harness to make the culture of compliance stronger:

• Capitalize on the High-Level Meeting on Humanity in War (hosted by Jordan on December 7, just weeks before the leadership transition) as it aims to increase political commitment, agree on actionable recommendations, and create a path for their implementation.

• Increase the visibility of IHL by endorsing the High-Level Meeting’s conclusions upon taking office, and by using them to raise the political costs of non-compliance and to create pressure around implementation, reporting, and best practices.

• Make Sudan the test case for this campaign, so it is harder for Member States to look away from the world’s most flagrant violations.

While an incoming Secretary-General “is not going to be able to stop war atrocities tomorrow,” they can use the UN’s platform to make the rules of war much harder to ignore.

3. Security in the Gulf: A Helsinki process for the Middle East

“Neither the United States nor Iran has looked to the UN to end the conflict in the Middle East, and that is unlikely to change,” Jeff argues, “but the UN can already start to play an important role in looking ahead to the post-conflict period.”

With the conflict both broadening and escalating, there is “an acute need for a new type of security understanding or organization for the Gulf and Middle East area.” Jeff agrees with those who think that the Helsinki Accords could provide a model.

“At the height of the Cold War,” Jeff points out, “you had an inclusive process across the Cold War lines.” The 1975 Helsinki Accords brought the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies to the same table to ease tensions. By establishing a shared baseline for security, the agreement laid the groundwork for what is now the OSCE, proving that a functional security architecture can be built even for sworn enemies.

The Middle East has no shortage of Track 1.5 and Track 2 initiatives (“I’m part of a few of them,” Jeff notes). But backchannels can only go so far. Participating states demand the exclusion of either Israel or Iran, argue about the role of the Palestinians, and ask, “Should the U.S. be there? Should Turkey? The principle of inclusivity that made Helsinki work is bypassed,” he concludes.

But the UN has “all of these states with equal status,” allowing the Secretary-General to offer a universal platform to lay the groundwork for a regional security architecture:

• Initiate a “staged exploration of regional security principles” to prepare for the day after, emphasizing that planning for a postwar scenario is prudent now, even while fighting continues.

• Anchor the initiative in the inclusivity principle of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, bringing all regional powers — including Israel and Iran — to the table, while ensuring the State of Palestine is represented as an observer.

• Manage expectations by making it clear that this is not an attempt to solve intractable bilateral conflicts, but a practical mechanism to “lower the diplomatic temperature.”

• Build trust and momentum by focusing early dialogues on shared interests, starting with “first-phase topics such as incident prevention and response, crisis communication, environmental protection, [and] maritime security.”

4. Secure the AI Revolution: The geopolitics of artificial intelligence

The current Secretary-General is credited with inserting the UN into the AI governance space. But conventional wisdom suggests that it will only ever play a supporting role.

I used to think this was true, but am now not so sure. Barely a day passes without a new warning that this technology is running out of control. And the most vocal Cassandras are those building new AI models, not those regulating them.

Polling shows public fears are growing. More than half of Americans say there is a real risk AI will destroy humanity (and an eye-watering 17% think that will almost certainly happen). At a recent meeting of governments, I was struck by a mood not of panic, but certainly of deep anxiety.

That creates demand for multilateral action. Claire Melamed wrote for [Re]Group: “As the risks of climate change or nuclear apocalypse became too big to ignore, and beyond any single government’s ability to handle alone, it brought governments to the table.” The UN is already building institutions to save AI from itself, she argued, although they may only get to play a full role once a crisis hits.

For Jeff, the Secretary-General is the only one who can bridge the gap between the multilateral and national security debates on AI. He identifies four intertwined risks: the technology itself, the scramble for critical resources to develop it, the race for AI supremacy, and the resulting transformation in the way wars are fought.

During the Cold War, governments invented foundational technologies (GPS, the internet) and spun them out to the civilian world. Today, the flow has reversed. The tech sector innovates, and the military spins it in. With risks outpacing regulation, Jeff’s advice to a new Secretary-General is to act quickly:

• Seize the opportunity presented by next year’s Global Dialogue on AI Governance (May 3–4, UN Headquarters) to establish the UN as the “custodian of the AI governance floor.” Coming just months into the new leader’s term, though, who comes is almost as important as what happens. Will AI’s revolutionary vanguard bother to turn up?

• Shape an agenda that tackles the geopolitics of AI head-on and confronts the risks that keep national security advisors up at night.

• Use the Dialogue as a launching pad to help the Security Council grapple with how AI is rewriting the rules of modern warfare, bridging its governance to the UN’s peace and security mandate. That could mean building on Guterres’s campaign to ban “killer robots” (lethal autonomous weapons), as part of a broader framework to create rules of engagement for the AI age.

5. Get Them Appointed: Restoring authority to UN Special Envoys

“The last one is easy,” Jeff says. “Get the envoys appointed.”

Right now, three of the UN’s most sensitive political posts are sitting vacant or operating with acting officials: the Special Envoy for Syria, the Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, and the Special Coordinator for Lebanon (where Jeff served as U.S. Ambassador).

The Secretary-General needs heavyweight mediators, Jeff argues. “Take Lebanon. It’s at a critical juncture. Jean Arnault is a very talented guy, but he is only acting in the role. You need an envoy who has been formally notified to and endorsed by the Security Council to carry out a mandate at a moment like this. This is a make-or-break moment for Lebanon to emerge from being controlled by a state-sponsored militia.”

The message that the “UN is back” on peace and security will only resonate if the new Secretary-General moves immediately to put the right people in the right places.

• Fill the Lebanon vacancy immediately, Jeff advises, as Beirut is unlikely to object to a high-profile, competent envoy, making this the easiest of the three appointments to land early in the term.

• Prepare for harder fights over the Syria and Middle East appointments, which Damascus and Jerusalem will intensely scrutinize, by identifying candidates during the transition so the incoming team is ready to move on day one.

• Break the grip of Member State patronage by refusing to confine these roles to diplomats promoted by their home capitals, drawing instead from the growing pool of private mediation actors to find envoys with on-the-ground conflict resolution experience.

“Fill these positions quickly with competent people that get people’s attention,” Jeff advises. The goal is to make the international community look at an appointment and realize they are dealing with people who have the mediation experience the job needs.

The Hard Slog of Deep Change

This 100-day playbook will not magically fix a paralyzed Security Council, but it will create political space for the new leader to operate and secure early wins in preparation for the harder work of securing deeper change.

“The new SG has to build up credibility,” Jeff advises, before hitting the pain points that could trigger a P5 backlash. That authority is what earns a leader the right to act as a firebreak when tensions risk spiraling out of control (as covered in our World’s Toughest Job episode on how U Thant defused the Cuban Missile Crisis).

Jeff warns against the trap of believing that peace is just one more rearrangement of the organogram away. “I don’t think the Secretary-General should spend their first 100 days rolling out great reform packages,” he argues. Structural reforms turn the system inward and burn political capital. Better to first restore confidence by embodying the normative ideals of the Charter through action, not more proposals for reform.

None of this matters if the culture of the Secretariat remains broken. Jeff describes a profound crisis of morale, where caution undermines creativity and turf wars displace delivery. Reversing this is less about structures, and more about behavior. A new Secretary-General can reboot the UN’s machinery by projecting trust, demanding internal respect, and, as Jeff notes, making the staff “feel that they’re useful again.”

When we interviewed Mark Malloch-Brown for the World’s Toughest Job wrap party, he called for the new Secretary-General to start with a 100-day sprint.

Each candidate will already be developing their own playbook, but with Jeff’s plan for peace and security — and Elizabeth’s parallel vision — [Re]Group will continue to publish ideas that will help shape that sprint.

A closing thought from me. When Roosevelt was busy naming the “United Nations,” he and Churchill knew they had to roll up their own sleeves if a “permanent system of general security” was to be built.

We need a Secretary-General who can sprint for 100 days, before settling into the marathon that will follow. But maybe we shouldn’t leave the new leader to run unaccompanied when it is “We the Peoples” and “our respective Governments” who have always held the lion’s share of the power.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Related Reading

The Security Council held its third straw poll in three months to test the viability of eight candidates for United Nations Secretary-General. The result: we have two clear frontrunners.

Rebeca Grynspan, a Costa Rican economist, former vice president of Costa Rica and head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, is leading the race. But she is followed very closely by Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s Ambassador to the United Nations. These two have pulled away from a crowded field.

Today’s straw poll asked each of the 15 members of the Security Council to indicate whether they “encourage,” “discourage,” or have “no opinion” on each candidate.

In today’s poll, Grynspan received nine “encourage” votes, five “discourage” votes and one “no opinion.” Rodrigues Birkett received eight “encourage” votes, six “discourage” votes and one “no opinion.” In a distant third was Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with five “encourage” votes, eight “discourage” votes and two “no opinion” votes.

This is the third straw poll in a row in which Grynspan and Rodrigues Birkett have held the top positions. For now, this is a two-woman race. (However, I would not totally rule out María Fernanda Espinosa. While she received only three “encourage” votes, she also received only six “discourage” votes, suggesting that opposition to her candidacy has not fully consolidated.)

Why These Two?

The candidacies of Grynspan and Rodrigues Birkett have a lot going for them. Grynspan entered the race early, and she is a full-time candidate. Following guidance from the General Assembly that candidates who lead UN agencies take a leave of absence during the campaign, Grynspan has temporarily stepped down as head of UNCTAD.

Grynspan is also well known both around the UN and in capitals. Her profile grew substantially in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when she helped broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which enabled the export of Ukrainian food during the height of the fighting. In doing so, she demonstrated that she could work with Moscow and Western powers in pursuit of a goal — food security — that was broadly shared.

For her part, Rodrigues Birkett very recently served on the Security Council alongside many of the diplomats now casting votes. Guyana was an elected member of the Security Council in 2024 and 2025, and Rodrigues Birkett is well regarded among her colleagues and around the UN more broadly.

On the flip side, one candidate who now looks like a long shot is Rafael Grossi. Though once a frontrunner, his candidacy has faced headwinds in recent weeks. Statements from the Russian Foreign Ministry suggest Moscow has made no secret of its opposition to his candidacy. Just last week, the ministry released a statement blasting Grossi for refusing to endorse Moscow’s account of attacks at a major nuclear site in Ukraine in a recent IAEA report. (Perhaps, he should have followed Grynspan’s lead and taken the recommended leave of absence as head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog.)

But these results come with one giant asterisk. This straw poll used undifferentiated ballots, so we don’t know how the veto-wielding members of the Council voted compared with the other members. It could be that the candidates at the top face staunch opposition from one of the P5, which would doom a candidacy. Similarly, we don’t know whether those at the bottom of the list received any of their “discourage” votes from a veto-wielding member. (The exception is Michelle Bachelet: with 11 “discourage” votes, at least one of them must have come from the P5.)

We do know, however, that the greater the number of “discourage” votes a candidate receives, the more likely it is that at least one of those votes came from a veto-wielding member. That is why any candidate with seven or more “discourage” votes is probably a long shot at this point.

I would expect some candidates to drop out of the race in the near future, particularly Michelle Bachelet. It is well known that the former president of Chile and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights faces opposition from the United States. Earlier this year, a group of Republican members of Congress wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging him to block her candidacy over issues related to her positions on reproductive rights.

The two African men in the race, Macky Sall and Olara Otunnu, also face significant opposition, in part due to a widely held view around the UN that the next secretary-general should come from Latin America — and be a woman.

What Comes Next?

The race for UN Secretary-General is still very much in flux.

The next straw poll is scheduled for the end of the month. This would be the first straw poll after UNGA. If past practice is any precedent, that means the Council will use differentiated ballots for the first time — those from the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France and China will use one color, while ballots from the other 10 members will use a different color. This vote should give us a clearer indication of which candidates are truly viable and who we might expect to bow out. And it will flow directly from bilateral meetings and conversations that happen behind closed-doors.

At that point, if any one candidate emerges with no discourage votes from a P5-colored ballot, she or he would be considered the presumptive winner of the race for Secretary-General. The Council would subsequently take a formal vote and then pass its recommendation on to the General Assembly for final approval.

On the other hand, if all candidates receive at least one discourage vote from a P5-colored ballot, the race remains wide open. There is even the possibility — I’d say likelihood — that new candidates will emerge. This dark horse scenario becomes all the more likely the closer we get to the end of the year, when Guterres’ term expires. Who that person is, we do not know.

Bottom line: Today’s straw poll results tell us where we stand right now. But the winnowing of the field is still to come.

is a veteran international affairs journalist and has covered the United Nations for 20 years. He writes the Global Dispatches Substack.

A UK election count has well-worn rituals. As results roll in from ill-lit sports halls across the country, a spokesperson for the losing party is cornered in the studio at 3:15 AM. Forced to abandon all media training, he reaches for that classic British euphemism: “There is no disguising the fact that it’s been a bad night for us.”

“I’m going to have to interrupt you there,” interjects the anchor. “We have a concession in Penistone and Stocksbridge.” The camera cuts to a Cabinet Minister delivering a career-ending (and occasionally tearful) speech while standing alongside someone called Count Binface or a candidate from the Monster Raving Loony Party.

That phrase popped into my head when the results of the third straw poll leaked to the usual outlets. It was a bad result for (almost) everyone hoping to be the next UN Secretary-General.

The first straw poll was a pretty classic affair. No outright frontrunner, but candidates received a mix of encouragement from their supporters and “no opinion” from the unconverted. Some candidates faced opposition, but more than half the field had two “discourages” or less. Those were sunnier days.

As we noted at the time, winter came for the SG race and it wasn’t ready. The Security Council’s mood was much gloomier for the second poll. And today it became even bleaker. Average “encourages” per candidate stood at 6.4 in the first round. They have now fallen to 4.5.

But it’s the “discourages” that stand out. They have more than doubled to an average of 7.8 per candidate, with a peak of 11 and a low of 5. There’s not a whole lotta love from the Security Council for the field in front of them. The misery of this “bad night” was widely distributed: every single candidate on the ballot collected more “discourages” than they did in August.

The candidate with some reason to be cheerful was Rebeca Grynspan. She was alone in gaining “encourages”, picking up two to lift her into first place with nine. She now narrowly leads Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, who sits one behind in encourages (eight) and one ahead in discourages (six).

Remember: A single “discourage” can be fatal if it comes from a P5 member. We’ll find out who is facing a veto threat soon enough if the next straw poll — expected September 28 — moves to color-coded ballots (as it’s likely to do).

You know what else had a bad night? The straw polls themselves. After the last contested election a decade ago, the Security Council was warned that the system was failing — by one of its own: Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho, who oversaw the first ballot as Council President in July 2016.

Will any of the current tailenders take the hint and drop out, given that all but two candidates now have a majority of the Security Council actively voting against them? Maybe. But don’t hold your breath.

A couple of weeks ago, we proposed four scenarios for what happens next. The first — a winner from the existing pack — now looks less likely (but not impossible). The odds increasingly favor a dark horse riding to the rescue, either to pull off a swift victory (scenario two) or to fall at the first fence (scenario three).

If no one has a plan? We’ll be with you all the way through our “Into the Abyss” scenario, as deadlock stretches late into the year. I doubt anyone at the UN who isn’t British has heard of Count Binface, but given the Security Council’s current mood, it may be soon time for him to take his campaign global.

Partnership with

For our coverage of this UNGA, we’re partnering with Mark Goldberg’s Global Dispatches, a veteran journalist on the UN beat.

We launched our collaboration yesterday on Substack Live, with Elizabeth Cousens, President and CEO of the UN Foundation. They chatted about the SG race and what to look out for during the UNGA High-level Week.

The audio of the conversation will be released on Mark’s podcast this Sunday. More of a reader? Here’s the transcript.

It’s All About the Numbers

Reading List

This week: dive into new polls on the United Nations and the race to be Secretary-General that have been released to catch the UNGA news cycle.

• What does the global public want from the next Secretary-General? A new 20-country poll (including all Security Council members) from the UN Foundation and GeoPoll reveals a race that has slid largely below the radar. But the public wants an outward-facing leader, not someone who will try to reform their way out of the UN’s decline. And 61% want a woman to get the top job.

• Is global pessimism driving countries apart? A new 34-country poll from Rockefeller and Focaldata says not. Most of us believe the world is going to hell in a handcart, but support for international cooperation has held firm. Trust in the UN and other multilateral bodies is rising, and conflict prevention tops the global wishlist (just as it does for UN Foundation/GeoPoll).

• Is the UN losing appeal? This one from Pew has been out for a few months. Across 37 countries, it finds that 55% view the UN favorably, but sentiment may be souring. Favorable views have dropped in 10 countries over the past few years, but younger generations are more likely to be fans of multilateralism than older adults.

• A roundup that caught our eye, Albert Trithart at the International Peace Institute distills a mountain of data to a single takeaway: the public hasn’t lost faith in the UN, but it is tired of waiting for it to deliver on peace and security.

If you haven’t yet marked your dance card for UNGA 81, here is what you need to tango.

ICYMI

We are incredibly proud of World’s Toughest Job, our podcast co-production with Foreign Policy. If you haven’t listened to the eight episodes yet, you can find them here (along with lots of bonus content).

Naturally, we are looking forward to the UNGA bonus episode, which will be streamed live from New York from 12:00–1:00 P.M. ET on September 22. The edited cut — featuring a mystery guest — will hit all podcast platforms a week later.

Register for the live event (or head to the same link for the livestream). On stage, the International Crisis Group’s Dr. Comfort Ero and historian Thant Myint-U will make the case for what the next Secretary-General should lead, delegate, or drop in 2027.

Register

Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal will referee, and the UN Foundation’s Elizabeth Cousens will kick things off. It’s going to be fast and possibly furious. And if you can be there in person, Foreign Policy will feed you afterwards.

Also, if you are still starved for SG content, four candidates — Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Grossi, Ivonne A-Baki, and María Fernanda Espinosa — will talk about democracy and human rights on September 23. International IDEA and Club de Madrid play host.

“Every galactic crisis needs an assembly” is the argument my colleague Mariana Samayoa Martinez makes in her latest piece looking at depictions of interplanetary cooperation in science fiction, and what they might mean for our universe.

Even when fiction sends the assembly into the galaxy, it turns out, earth-bound problems follow it there.

This summer I read a delightful collection of short stories by Kanishk Tharoor, an editor at Foreign Affairs and son of famed UN official and Kofi Annan confidant Shashi Tharoor. One piece imagines the United Nations relocating into an orbiting space hotel after Earth becomes ungovernable.

A vantage point from which diplomats lament, “Nothing revolves around us anymore.”

Bring it back to Earth, and the mood isn’t so different as the Secretary-General selection process rolls on and the 81st session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), which kicked-off on September 8 hits its stride.

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The SG Roundup

In the race to be Secretary-General, the doldrums continue as everyone awaits the next straw poll, expected on September 18. But the race won’t really pick up until straw poll #4 which may be on September 29, when color-coded ballots are expected to come into play.

To wake things up, we’ll be taping a live bonus episode of our podcast, World’s Toughest Job, on September 22, in partnership with Foreign Policy. More on that soon.

New Beginning(s)

September isn’t just back-to-school season for much of the world; it’s also when the UN General Assembly begins its new term. A new President takes the gavel and starts setting the agenda for the year ahead.

At the helm this time is Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman, who took office last Tuesday. He knows the job, having served as a personal aide to the last Bangladeshi President of the General Assembly, Humayun Rashid Choudhury, back in 1986. (NB: the role of the PGA rotates among regional groups on an annual basis).

The new PGA inherits the baton from Annalena Baerbock, former German Foreign Minister, who concluded her term on a note in defense of multilateralism after a particularly bruising year for the UN. Going forward, there is no shortage of challenges to address, processes to steward, and ideas to advance for the new PGA to leave his own mark.

The Sense Maker

Five Minutes with Thibault Camelli

I sat down with Thibault Camelli, Senior Program Officer at NYU’s Center on International Cooperation and co-author of a sharp report on the power and the limits of the PGA office.

Thibault is one of the most prolific researchers of the future of multilateralism, my personal UN-GPT for budget arcana or procedure, and (not incidentally) a devoted fan of the scifi mini-series Andor, which plays a starring role in Mariana’s article.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[Re]Group: Does the person holding the PGA office change the tone and substance of the session?

Thibault Camelli: Formally, not much. The office’s powers are fixed regardless of who sits in the chair.

But the how of getting there matters more than people assume. A PGA elected by a contested vote starts the session having to win over a membership that wasn’t unanimously behind them. In contrast, one who arrives by acclamation inherits a different kind of legitimacy and tends to govern accordingly.

Beyond that, there’s something less measurable: the office’s real influence has always outrun its institutional powers. How much of that ‘untapped potential’ gets used varies enormously from one presidency to the next, depending as much on personality, procedural fluency, and appetite for the job, as on the office itself.

[Re]Group: Where can this PGA make a difference over the course of the 81st session?

Thibault Camelli: I’d point to a few buckets. First: on AI. The PGA will make important co-facilitator appointments for the second global dialogue on AI governance which will take place in New York in May of 2027.

Second: the SDG Summit in September 2027, for which they will oversee most of the preparations and which is a final marquee moment as the deadline for the 2030 Agenda approaches.

Third: the biennial General Assembly revitalization process. This includes a rare standing invitation for the PGA to weigh in on strengthening the office itself.

Fourth: the Secretary-General selection process. Not the choice of Secretary-General, which sits with the UN Security Council (see the [Re]Group Cheat Sheet for 101 on the process), but building the coalition of Member States that will implement and support whoever emerges.

[Re]Group: And what about the limitations of the office?

Thibault Camelli: They are considerable, and mostly political rather than technical.

The rules define the PGA as the face of the General Assembly and its Member States, and not an independent actor with a mandate of their own. Member States remain divided on strengthening the office and have resisted even modest expansions, including a longer, two-year term.

In practice, no PGA can take up a genuinely sensitive issue without first consulting the membership. There’s also a structural undertow that gets less attention than it deserves: the influence of the department that runs the Assembly’s day-to-day machinery.

[Re]Group: Could you explain how the roles of the PGA and Secretary-General differ, and how they complement each other?

Thibault Camelli: The first PGA election, back in 1946, was contested between a Belgian candidate and a Norwegian one. The Belgian, Paul-Henri Spaak, won the presidency, the Norwegian who lost that race, Trygve Lie, went on to become the first Secretary-General.

Rather than a consolation prize, the PGA was the more prominent role. A kind of paper president of the world — first among the Member States — while the SG was seen as more of an executive administrator.

It was really the Cold War that hollowed the office of the PGA out, as the General Assembly relinquished much of its influence, and the SG’s role grew in its place.

The High-level Week

All eyes will now be on UNGA, with High-level Week running September 18–28 and the General Debate spanning September 22–26 and 28. At the Debate, world leaders will come to New York to make their big speeches (see provisional list of speakers).

Check out these resources for more on UNGA:

• Use the UN Foundation’s UNGA Hub to navigate High-level Week — it’s a chaotic time and only the prepared survive.

• Minderoo Foundation, the Australian philanthropy, has laid out five priorities for UNGA.

• The World Economic Forum has published its own explainer and expectations.

• And read Giuliano da Empoli’s The Hour of the Predator for his description of world leaders and their entourages at UNGA, crammed into elevators and barging past each other down corridors. “You wait or you run; there is no in-between. This is the rhythm of the General Assembly, and of politics in general.”

[Re]Group x Global Dispatches

Launching ahead of UNGA, we're teaming up with for a new series — featuring sharp analysis, live conversations, and special coverage. Stay tuned!

From the Archive

We at [Re]Group have discussed many of the topics on the UNGA 81 agenda. In preparation for High-level Week, you may be interested in revisiting some of those pieces.

In 1929, an Ohio pulp writer named Edmond Hamilton introduced sci-fi readers to the Council of Suns.

As a futurist, his atomic rays and doomed planets have dated badly. But as a political soothsayer, he hit the mark. In his story, Within the Nebula, delegates from “every peopled star” gather as equals to confront “the greatest and most terrible danger, in fact, that has ever threatened our universe!”

Almost a century later, the United Nations hasn’t reached the stars (as yet), but its General Assembly, which today started its 81st session, performs the same function: bringing everyone into the room to confront crises that threaten us all at once.

The power of the room

Hamilton was not the only science fiction writer to imagine a galactic assembly in his worldbuilding.

In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry gave us the Federation Council, where Earth is one voice among many. J. Michael Straczynski built Babylon 5 as a United Nations in space, neutral ground where rival powers can talk. And George Lucas created the Galactic Senate for a galaxy far, far away.

Each writer gives their institution different powers: votes, budgets, even fleets to enforce their mandate. But I find the fiction most interesting when the formal powers fail, and all that remains is “the room” and the people who gather in it.

Lucas’s Senate appears to exist mostly so we can watch a democracy applaud its own death. Andor, a TV spin-off that follows the early years of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, takes this scenario to its limit. Its second season is set inside an Imperial Senate that everyone, its own members included, knows is a veneer. The Empire has won, and the votes stopped counting long ago.

Still, Senator (and later rebel leader) Mon Mothma rises to deliver a rousing speech. The chamber has been stripped of all the enforcement powers it once held, but she takes the floor anyway. When a room can still hold people with clashing interests in the same place, the potential for political action is still there.

For witnessing, persuading, and dissenting. For recognizing each other's existence and interests, even if only to deny them. For building coalitions and, sometimes, for cooperating.

All states large and small

In 1945, the UN’s founders had the failure of the League of Nations in mind, but they still chose to build what grew to be a universal political forum.

When the League was finally dissolved in April 1946, French delegate Joseph Paul-Boncour drew the following lesson: “It was not the League which failed. It was not its principles which were found wanting. It was the nations which neglected it. It was the Governments which abandoned it.” This resonated so strongly that Churchill would lift the sentiment almost word-for-word a few months later.

Heeding these lessons, the UN’s “architects” did not simply rebuild the League. They made a bargain with political reality, designing an institution governments would be less likely to walk away from. The result had two halves: a Security Council where great powers got their vetoes, and a General Assembly where every state, large or small, got one seat and one vote.

For all that careful design, the Assembly is often still derided as a talking shop. It passes no binding law. It can’t end the wars on its agenda, and even when it does take them up, it risks stepping on the Security Council’s toes - and on a really bad day, it may even struggle to agree on what to call the thing everyone is arguing about.

So what is its value?

The shadow of the future

Part of the answer to this question lies in the room itself.

The General Assembly keeps a representative from every nation in the same space. It acts as what Hannah Arendt called the ordinary table, which “relates and separates” the people around it. In Andor, Mon Mothma understands that the Imperial Senate, however hollow, does the same thing. Its power is gone, but it still brings the powerful together, and its proceedings are transmitted across the galaxy.

This is why so many of the century’s defining speeches were delivered in the General Assembly rather than somewhere quieter. Because it allows every member to speak, it forces others to listen. And, crucially, it keeps happening.

The third week of every September, the Member States return to the same room for the annual General Debate, even when the faces behind the country placards may sometimes change. Understood this way, cooperation is about more than agreement. Its roots are in the repeated political interactions that make compromise or collective action possible.

Robert Axelrod gave this intuition a more formal shape in his 1984 classic, The Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod’s starting point is that when interests align, you don’t need to think very hard about cooperation. It is when they diverge, when there’s some grit in the relationship and cooperation is not the automatic path, that the question becomes interesting. Looking at the “live and let live” arrangements that emerged between German and Allied soldiers in the First World War, Axelrod observed that “friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started.” Under the right conditions, he argued, “cooperation can develop even between antagonists.”

His crucial insight was that repeated encounters change the calculation. Reciprocal cooperation depends on the expectation of meeting again. “The future must have a sufficiently large shadow,” he wrote. And that is something an Assembly can provide: the expectation that, however badly today’s meeting or news cycle goes, the Member States will still have a room in which to come back together.

In The Expanse, a sprawling space opera, we find a different scenario. The UN survives in a balkanized solar system, but only as Earth’s government, not a neutral convening body. It has become the type of great power that oversaw its creation, rather than a room that can bring Earth, Mars, and the Belt together to cooperate. It has its own interests to protect, and as a result, the solar system spends nine books sliding in and out of war.

Messy, but essential

In January 2027, a new leader will step into the world’s toughest job at a time when the world threatens to become as balkanized as The Expanse’s solar system. One thing is certain: real life will not follow fiction. The incoming Secretary–General will lead a body facing many threats with few powers.

They may find, though, that the General Assembly, and the room it creates for cooperation, is the most underrated resource that comes with the job. Its 193 members, and two observer states, are not an undifferentiated mass; they organize themselves into networks and coalitions around shared interests. At best, each cluster creates new possibilities, in line with Axelrod’s most hopeful claim that cooperation can be contagious.

Take the July 2025 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on states’ legal obligations to combat climate change. What began as a campaign by twenty-seven law students in Vanuatu grew into a Pacific coalition, then a rebel alliance of eighteen states, and ultimately a resolution agreed by consensus of the whole chamber.

A Secretary-General who understands what the General Assembly is and what it can do will see it as one of the few arenas in international politics deliberately engineered to keep cooperation alive. Mark Malloch-Brown, a former UN deputy secretary-general and co-host of our podcast World’s Toughest Job, believes this to be true. He closed the series predicting a slow “recalibration” from a Security Council-led organization toward one that is increasingly General Assembly-led.

For the next Secretary-General, that means managing the drift toward what calls “a new, more dispersed ownership.” It is a process he expects to be “messy and difficult, but essential if the UN is to survive.”

Do not expect an easy transition. Yet almost a century after Edmond Hamilton first imagined his Council of Suns, science fiction and political reality keep converging on a load-bearing idea. An assembly does not need overwhelming power to matter. Sometimes it is enough that it keeps a room open for cooperation.

The SG Roundup

“Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

Another week with nothing to report on the race to be Secretary-General. Read our update from the last straw poll a couple of weeks back and you’ll have the latest.

Except for the sense that maybe something is happening here, it’s just happening behind the scenes.

As we noted at the time, the second straw poll was a grumpy affair, with average “Encourages” dropping from 6.4 per candidate to 4.9, and “Discourages” jumping from 3.5 to 5.3. The three frontrunners have 3, 4, and 6 “Discourages” each, with just one enough to sink their candidacy if it is from a P5 country that is determined not to back down.

France holds the Presidency of the Security Council this month. Precedent suggests it will hold a straw poll before UNGA and then move to color-coded ballots afterwards, as the P5 take control of the contest. The Presidency then moves to Greece in October, either to wrap things up or to try and find a way out of deadlock.

Four scenarios for you:

1. Fortune Rewards the Patient. Give the system time to work and one of the eight candidates will rise to the top of the pile. Late entrants join the fray and take their chances.

2. Anointed in the Shadows. Behind closed doors, the P5 are cutting a deal for an undeclared candidate. Once announced, the dark horse quickly wins the race.

3. The Botched Plot: A failed version of the above, as a backroom deal unravels in the cold light of day. After all, plotters often overestimate their acumen (case study: Gianni Infantino).

4. Into the Abyss. There is no plan, plot, or route to consensus. The Mr. Joneses — fifteen of them — sit on the Security Council. Cue more deadlock speculation.

Away from the action, the policy wonk in each candidate team will be keeping an eye on the grind to wrap up the UN80 reform process, and wondering what will be left for 2027. Both positive reforms to build on and unresolved messes that will need to be cleared up.

This week saw some good news in the former camp, as the General Assembly approved the merger of the UN’s staff college into its training body to create the snappily-named United Nations Institute for Capability and Learning Innovation (UNICLI).

Earth-shaking? No. But at [Re]Group we endorse the current Secretary-General’s argument that knowledge, learning, and innovation must become strategic drivers if the UN is to deliver impact in an increasingly complex multilateral system.

Pause, though, to note an outbreak of a disease that is peculiar to the UN: IMBYism. The EU praised the merger for “rationalizing structures, reducing duplication and making the best possible use of available resources.” But in the same statement insisted on the “maintenance of the geographical footprint and institutional presence.”

Translated: We fully support your cost-cutting reform, just as long as you don’t close any offices in Geneva, Turin, Bonn, or Madrid.

A CERN for Multilateralism

You visit CERN on the French-Swiss border and take a guided tour.

You are shown around a subterranean shrine to particle physics and the place where the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web to share data with his international peers.

You probably already knew that. But what surprises you is that CERN is an intergovernmental organization (one of 350 or so in operation today). The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful machine, is the brainchild not just of physicists and engineers, but of diplomats and multilateralists.

At the end of the tour, you ask your guide if you can see a photograph of the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle whose discovery was announced on July 4, 2012. Your guide gently shakes her head. There are no photographs, for no one has ever “seen” one.

Physicists searched for this ripple in an energy field — without which nothing in the universe would have mass — for fifty years.

When they found it, it was not through direct observation. It was by detecting a signature in the data: a bump in the background noise that could not be explained by chance, as two detectors independently identified the statistical trace of an invisible event.

When the Escalator Breaks

I was thinking about CERN’s mission to “uncover what the universe is made of and how it works” when we published Stephanie Fillion’s essay on [Re]Group this week.

Stephanie, the editor of Envoy magazine, is part of the band of specialist reporters who keep the spotlight on the United Nations as traditional newsrooms gut their international desks. PassBlue and Devex also work this beat.

For editors, “if it bleeds, it leads,” Stephanie writes. When international institutions make headlines, it is because something is broken. “Another deadlock in the Security Council, another corruption scandal, another diplomatic confrontation or, during the General Assembly High-level week at the worst possible time, an escalator breaks.”

She worries about what happens when the world only hears about multilateralism failing, and neglects the achievements the UN highlights in its annual report: the tens of thousands of peacekeepers deployed, the hundred million people helped while fleeing catastrophe, and the billions raised for those in need.

But this is just the more visible side of the UN’s impact: more like the Jura Mountains that rise above CERN than the particles it searches for 100 metres underground. They are also symptoms of failure more than success. You don’t have to run when you have rights. Or flee in the second year of peace.

Largely hidden from view is an invisible return on investment. By triangulating diplomatic histories, quantitative counterfactuals, and the “magnetic pull” of international norms and laws, we can detect the signal of bad things that never happened because multilateralism performed as it was designed to.

It is from these hidden successes that much of the value of the international system derives.

Detecting the Invisible ROI

We've been collecting examples of this invisible ROI in the historical series that accompanied World’s Toughest Job, our podcast co-production with Foreign Policy. This work built on analysis that fed into Our Common Agenda, the Secretary-General’s vision for the future of multilateralism.

Gathering these examples together for a colleague recently, I started wondering whether we could create a typology of the hidden impact of the international system. So, here is a first attempt to do just that, using a model with four dimensions.

1. De-Escalation

The international system can’t make adversaries see eye to eye, but it can stop them pretending the other doesn’t exist. Forced proximity keeps channels of communication open, reducing the risk of miscalculation and providing opportunities for de-escalation.

The UN has delivered extraordinary value through its role as a firebreak. We found that if Secretary-General U Thant is assigned just 1.7% of the credit for mediating a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the averted economic destruction covers every dollar spent on the UN from 1945 up to 1962.

The international system can also find unexpected opportunities for adversaries to cooperate. In our forthcoming essay on global goals, we cover how the multilateral effort to eradicate smallpox in the 60s and 70s — a rare example of U.S.-Soviet cooperation — yielded a return of $159 for every single dollar spent.

Given today’s geopolitical tensions, these case studies emphasize why de-escalation should again become core business for the UN under new leadership.

2. Prevention

The world relies on a set of norms and institutions that run in the background, managing conflict before it triggers violence, reducing access to the weapons of war, and limiting damage from complex global shocks.

We quantified the value of this international architecture of restraint. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty prevented at least nine countries from becoming nuclear powers between 1970 and 2000, while UN peacekeeping operations stopped an estimated three to four major civil wars in the early years of this century, preserving up to $216 billion in economic value.

The international system also plays a mitigating role once a crisis hits, minimizing damage and accelerating recovery. For Our Common Agenda, our modeling showed that upgrades to the global health security systems completed since the turn of the century averted 8 to 15 million deaths in the first year of the COVID pandemic.

Even imperfect defenses deliver incredible value for money, we concluded.

3. Global Public Goods

As we argued in the last [Re]Group Weekly, global public goods might seem out of fashion in an era where powerful nations believe they can go it alone.

But this retreat is creating pent-up demand for the systems required to stabilize the climate, control the risks of frontier technologies, keep the global economy from falling over, and safeguard other interconnected systems.

We have strong evidence of what is delivered when we invest in global public goods. As we showed last week, forty years of international climate diplomacy are pushing us from a 4°C trajectory towards a 2°C world. Even though we are far from averting catastrophic climate change, the dividend from international cooperation is already substantial.

This builds on the foundation of the UN’s environmental governance of the 1980s, above all the Montreal Protocol, which phased out 99% of CFCs. This single agreement is projected to avert roughly 2.5°C of warming by 2100, saving trillions in economic destruction.

Translating pent-up demand into new global public goods requires a Secretary-General who can spot an opening early and rally the world behind a moonshot. Progress will be blocked, until it isn’t.

4. The Operating System

Perhaps the most hidden of all is the plumbing that allows global markets and systems to function, an operating system that runs in the background, creating the standards, rules, and interoperability without which the modern world cannot work.

This system is poorly mapped, but you find evidence of it whenever you dig below the surface. Take the Global Basic Observing Network, which generates an estimated $5 billion in annual economic gains simply by standardizing weather data across borders. It is not glamorous, but it is necessary. And it delivers.

There are flashier items in this space, such as the UN’s “Net Zero” target, which provided the organizing principle to redirect trillions of dollars into the low-carbon transition. As we wrote last week, no two words in human history have ever moved so much capital so quickly.

Everything from global trade to civil aviation, from shipping to telecommunications, and from food safety standards to the allocation of satellite orbits, depends on this infrastructure. It is the ultimate hidden investment: an operating system so effective that we only notice it when it begins to break.

What’s Load Bearing?

So where does this take us?

It forces us to have a proper conversation about what works, what matters, and what needs to be preserved. To explore what is “load-bearing“ in the multilateral ecosystem, and where these load-bearing struts are getting weaker, or risk crumbling outright.

These are questions we have been exploring in a piecemeal fashion on [Re]Group. But imagine what a more systematic effort could accomplish over a six-month period. A CERN for multilateralism, if you will.

To “uncover what contemporary multilateralism is made of and how it works.”

From the Archive

As anger grows about unchecked AI development, Nur Laiq has a new piece in the FT on the need for deliberative approaches to give citizens a stake in this technological revolution:

• If you missed it: our interview with Nur on [Re]Group.

• Listen to our World’s Toughest Job episode on AI.

• tackled the question: who will save AI from itself?

• Read our brief on the need for “a robust and representative deliberative mechanism” to give citizens a seat at the global governance table.

Nur’s FT piece is primarily about the United States, but it’s worth also checking out the citizens track on AI governance at a global level.

ICYMI

Crime sells.

For generations, editors have operated on some variation of this principle: conflict, scandal, and sensation attract attention. “If it bleeds, it leads” may be a cliché, but there is evidence behind it. Research across 17 countries found that people, on average, react more strongly to negative news than positive news, helping explain why news organizations competing for attention gravitate toward stories about things going wrong.

The UN is no exception.

When the organization makes headlines, it is often because something has failed: another deadlock in the Security Council, another corruption scandal, another diplomatic confrontation or, during the General Assembly High-level week at the worst possible time, an escalator breaks.

The quieter story is what happens every day. UN agencies feed millions of people, vaccinate children, assist refugees, monitor elections, negotiate humanitarian access and maintain peacekeeping operations around the world. Much of that work rarely becomes headline news.

That imbalance has serious consequences for the organization and perpetuates a belief that the UN is deeply flawed. But the answer is not to ask journalists to write more flattering stories about the UN.

It is to make sure there are enough journalists left to cover it properly, make it relevant to everyday people, and, more importantly, hold the organization accountable.

The disappearing UN correspondent

Over my years covering the UN, I have watched one news organization after another scale down or close its UN operation.

This is partly an industry story. Foreign bureaus are expensive, newsroom budgets have shrunk, and international institutions can be a difficult sell to audiences already overwhelmed by wars, elections and domestic politics.

But the UN presents an additional problem for reporters: Too many stories appear to end in the same place. A crisis comes before the Security Council. Diplomats negotiate. A resolution is drafted. Then one of the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, or the U.S.) blocks action or threatens to do so.

We have seen versions of this dynamic over Ukraine and Gaza. The same concentration of power is built into the selection of the UN Secretary-General, where the Security Council recommends a candidate to the General Assembly and, in practice, any permanent member can prevent a candidate from advancing.

After enough stories ending with some variation of the UN was unable to act, a broader conclusion can become entrenched into public consciousness: The UN itself is useless.

And that creates a vicious cycle: If audiences believe the UN does nothing, people don’t want to read about it, and editors have less incentive to devote reporters to covering it. With fewer reporters covering the institution every day, fewer stories explain what it actually does, how decisions are made and, crucially, who is responsible when it fails.

Eventually, “the UN failed” becomes the story rather than the beginning of the story.

Bad press is part of the UN’s immune system

There is another reason the UN often receives negative coverage: Journalists are doing their jobs.

The romantic image of the reporter as watchdog may be old-fashioned, but the principle behind it is not. Remember the Fourth Estate? Generations of aspiring journalists have grown up with some version of the Woodward-and-Bernstein ideal from All The President’s Men: Follow the trail, challenge powerful institutions and expose what they would rather keep hidden.

Journalism is not public relations. Reporters are supposed to look for what institutions would rather the public not see.

For the UN, that scrutiny is particularly important.

The organization operates across dozens of jurisdictions, manages enormous budgets and procurement systems, employs staff around the world and benefits from a complex web of privileges and immunities. Its work can take place far from the countries whose taxpayers ultimately finance it.

That creates opportunities not only for extraordinary public service but also for abuse, waste, and misconduct.

I have seen what happens when reporters begin digging beyond the daily cycle of Security Council meetings, diplomatic speeches, and press conferences. Staff members have stories to tell. Whistleblowers come forward. Internal disputes reveal larger institutional problems. Decisions that appear bureaucratic from the outside can involve significant sums of public money.

Sometimes, a Pandora’s box opens.

That reporting can be uncomfortable for the institution. It is also indispensable to it.

The UN cannot credibly advocate for transparency, freedom of expression, and accountable government around the world while expecting less scrutiny of itself. Investigative reporting should not be viewed as hostility toward the organization. In many cases, it is one of the mechanisms that can help protect its credibility. It is a public service, even.

The greater danger would be a UN that nobody bothers to investigate. This is a scary zone we risk entering in if the public discourse around the organization doesn’t change.

But watchdog journalism requires journalists

Here lies the paradox.

The negative coverage surrounding the UN can appear to demonstrate a media bias against the organization. Yet much of that reporting exists precisely because journalists believe powerful institutions should be scrutinized.

At the same time, the number of journalists with the time and institutional knowledge to perform that scrutiny is shrinking. Years after years, I’ve seen talented colleagues lose their jobs without even being replaced.

A correspondent consumed by wars, emergency Security Council meetings, diplomatic visits, and the General Assembly, can spend an entire day listening to speeches and still have barely scratched the surface of the institution.

What disappears first when resources shrink is often not breaking news. It is everything underneath it: procurement, management, internal justice, staffing, budgets, implementation and accountability.

Those stories are less visible than a Security Council veto. They may also tell us more about whether the UN is actually working.

The UN now tells its own story

There has been one major change in this information ecosystem: The UN no longer depends entirely on journalists to communicate with the public.

Social media has given international organizations something they never had in the era when newspaper correspondents acted as the primary gatekeepers between institutions and audiences: direct access to millions of people.

According to Melissa Fleming, the UN Under-Secretary-General for global communications, the organization’s core social media accounts collectively reach more than 70 million followers.

That gives the UN an enormous capacity to showcase work that traditional media may overlook: food deliveries, vaccinations, peacebuilding projects, refugee assistance, and humanitarian operations that rarely become breaking news.

That is valuable, but institutional communications cannot substitute for independent journalism.

The UN can tell the world what it is doing. It cannot be expected to independently investigate whether it is doing it well. I don’t think it does, either.

The answer is more coverage, not less

So why do journalists seem to cover the UN mostly when it fails?

Partly because failure is news. A Security Council unable to respond to a war is more newsworthy than an agency successfully completing the work it was created to do, or a successful mandate rollover.

Partly because journalists are watchdogs, and institutions entrusted with international authority and public money deserve scrutiny.

And partly because the journalists who once covered the UN every day are disappearing.

That last trend should worry both critics and defenders of the organization. That’s why I’ve decided to stick around and lead Envoy Magazine, a UN-focused media organization. According to the Reuters Institute, the rise of AI means that publishers that stand out from the overload of content will do so by quality, relevance, or connection. But Envoy is not alone, other specialized news outlets such as PassBlue, Geneva Solutions and The New Humanitarian have done this work long before we have. All of these examples and independent, non-profit outlets survive on public donations.

A strong UN press corps should expose corruption, investigate misconduct, and challenge officials, not just write about a veto in the security council, mingle with diplomats at a reception, and then go home.

But it should also have the institutional knowledge and resources to distinguish between a failure of the UN bureaucracy, a failure of its leadership, and a political decision imposed by its Member States.

When they are collapsed into the familiar headline that “the UN failed,” we understand neither the organization nor the governments that control it particularly well.

The UN does not need journalists to give it better press. It needs enough journalists around to give it better scrutiny.

As the UN implements much-needed reforms with a shrinking budget and a new Secretary-General takes over in a few months, watchdogs with the time and energy to pay it the attention it deserves will be needed more than ever.

About the author

Stéphanie Fillion an award-winning journalist and editor-in-chief of Envoy Magazine.

LinkedIn: Stéphanie Fillion
Instagram: @envoy.mag
X: @fillionsteph10 | @envoyUNEmag

“The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy.”

I woke up thinking about this quote after yesterday’s meeting of the International Climate Politics Hub.

The session started with a preview of a forthcoming report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) on the overshoot of the 1.5°C threshold, agreed to in Paris in 2015.

I am not breaking the report’s embargo if I reveal that the news is not good. UNEP has already shown that pathways to 1.5°C are out of reach. The challenge is “to make this overshoot temporary and minimal.” And then to work out how to bring temperatures back down (assuming that is even possible).

The group met as news spread about the scale of the climate disaster in Nepal, where a collapsing glacier triggered catastrophic floods. It has been a year of soaring temperatures and wildfires, and the worst of a record-breaking El Niño is yet to come.

As the UN’s climate chief recently warned: “The climate alarm is blaring, from every direction.”

Bereft of Life, It Rests in Peace!

I was the bearer of a different type of bad news. The alarm may be blaring, but in the race to be the next UN Secretary-General, no one seems to be listening.

Before my presentation, I sifted through our transcripts of the candidate debates and hustings, which run to hundreds of thousands of words.

I found just two mentions of 1.5°C (both in questions from the government of Palau on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States). Climate is not a top-tier issue in a race dominated by peace and security, UN reform and insolvency, and AI as the new kid on the block.

When climate does get a look in, finance predominates. Candidates win plaudits when they say that vulnerable countries shouldn’t have to pay for damage they haven’t caused. But they skate over who they expect to foot the bill, given that this is a race you win by avoiding controversy.

But look at what’s not there. Decarbonization. The end of fossil fuels. Net zero emissions. These themes have barely registered in the debate. Watch the UN’s leadership transition, and it would seem that the push to cut global emissions is as dead as Monty Python’s proverbial parrot.

What if it Worked?

2015 was a big year for the international system. In our series on development, we covered the rise and fall of the “supremely ambitious” Sustainable Development Goals. Yes, that’s a direct quote from the 2030 Agenda. The hubris!

The Paris Agreement was adopted less than 80 days later, but it was built on a sturdier foundation. The UN has a dominant position in environmental governance that dates back to the ozone diplomacy of the 1980s. It has used this authority to build a climate regime that acts as “an enabler and driver of ambition and action.”

During the build-up to Paris, I was not a big fan of the push for 1.5°C, primarily because I believed at the time that we’d be lucky to keep warming below the previous limit of 2 degrees. That now looks too pessimistic.

So where do things stand now?

Before Paris, we were charging toward a 4°C world by the end of the century. Early Paris commitments moved the needle to 3–3.5°C, while today’s policies put us on a 2.8°C trajectory.

But make the (heroic) assumption that everyone keeps their current net zero promises, and warming over the century would be limited to 1.9°C. And that is before we price in the next wave of clean energy breakthroughs or future tightening of policy.

In any case, the super tanker has started to turn. That’s an impressive return on forty years of international climate diplomacy.

Gone but Not Forgotten

If you’re old enough to remember when net zero was ubiquitous, you’ll have noticed that the cool kids have moved on with the same ruthlessness with which they packed away their Stanley Cups and Vinted their Supreme hoodies.

But I remain a net zero fan. Not for what it is now, but for what it was, where it came from, and what it achieved.

Its origins lie in 2013, when a group of women lawyers, financiers, diplomats, and activists gathered around a kitchen table at Glen House, a country estate in Scotland, in search of an “organizing principle” for the delivery of climate promises.

Net zero — the balance between greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere and those taken out — was controversial from the start. Many campaigners and scientists worried the “net” loophole allowed for a “burn now, pay later” approach. The American right later led a political backlash, successfully framing it as job-killing “woke capitalism.”

For a while, though, net zero reigned supreme, sweeping through countries, cities, and boardrooms, driving an estimated $2.3 trillion annually into the low-carbon transition.

No two words have ever moved so much capital so quickly. It is unlikely that any will ever again.

Wanted: A Big Idea

Net zero is dead. And that’s okay. It was an organizing principle with a limited shelf life. It did its job for a while and then fell victim to its own success.

What is not okay is that there is no big idea (or ideas) to replace it. Or if there are, they’re being cooked up in some kitchen somewhere, and we haven’t heard about them yet.

That is why the Secretary-General challengers are avoiding talking about climate if they can. This is an issue whose UNGA zenith was in 2019, when Greta Thunberg was escorted up the Hudson by a fleet of UN ships, each carrying a sail painted with one of the SDGs.

At the summit that followed, the Secretary-General declared that the “ticket to entry is not a beautiful speech, but concrete action,” demanding “more and more ambition, more and more pressure, and more and more good, old-fashioned truth-telling.”

Today’s candidates would be asking for a veto if they talked like that. And you’d have to be mad to think that the 10th Secretary-General will make climate a signature issue in the way their predecessors have.

The Contrarian Playbook

Well, I am mad. So here’s some unsolicited advice for the brave soul who wins the leadership contest. Everyone is telling you to do fewer things. Which is fair enough. But decarbonization has to be on your list of top priorities.

Three reasons. First, you can’t fight physics. On this issue, the atmosphere sets the pace, not the politicians.

Second, the gap between the demand for action and the supply of solutions is your opportunity, as Elizabeth Cousens argued in her essay on the multilateralist’s paradox.

And third, climate mitigation is the stealth geopolitical issue, as Bruce Jones and I explained in our 2014 book for Brookings. The regulation of carbon is changing the rules of global competition and rewiring the global order. Even if it fades from view for a while, it will always be an issue that governments will compete and fight over.

That is why I cannot get the maxim from legendary contrarian investor Sir John Templeton out of my mind: “Buy at the point of maximum pessimism.”

To do that, the next Secretary-General will need both quick wins on decarbonization in their 2027 playbook and a vision for what the next organizing principle for climate is going to be.

Expect that organizing principle to be a lot less Kumbaya than the net zero era, as these are less benign times. The new direction will pitch the climate transition into the brawl over energy, trade, and economic supremacy, but will be driven by contested oil markets and the relentless rise of renewables.

More on this soon on [Re]Group. And, as always, pitch us an idea for an interview or an article if you want to contribute to the debate.

The Geopolitics of Climate Change

Reading List

What to read on the intersection between climate politics and statecraft.

• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
  “India had paid the price. More people had died in this heat wave than in the entirety of the First World War, and all in a single week...” Recommending Robinson’s novel in climate circles has become a bit of a cliché. But it remains the best thing you can read on the geopolitics of climate change, capturing what happens as the pressure of a changing climate upends the global order.
  

• Climate Action in the Age of Great Power Rivalry by Scott Moore

  “The key point now is not what climate change will do for geopolitics, but what geopolitics does to climate change…” A primer from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy explores how zero-sum great power rivalry reshapes climate action.
  

• Can Renewables Industrialize Africa? by Mohamed Adow

  In Foreign Affairs, Adow argues that cascading energy shocks are driving a rush for renewables across the African continent. African nations want to be “electro-states” not “petro-states.” But while the U.S. pushes fossil fuel projects, China is building and financing clean energy ecosystems. “Africa is now at the center of the world’s clean energy push, no longer at its periphery.”

The SG Roundup

Not much news to add to the last Weekly. But it is still worth looking at our tracker to see just how much more negative Security Council members were in the second straw poll compared to the first.

There may be one more poll before UNGA, but the decisive phase of the race won’t begin until the leaders have left New York. There are the usual rumors about late-entry candidates, but nothing official to report yet.

Lots of good coverage though. Read the Financial Time’s exit interview with António Guterres. UN Foundation’s Peter Yeo on why this race is different from all the others (Washington Post). And why Africa has a “clear and coordinated strategy” for the race (via the Turkish state-owned TRT Afrika).

From the Archive

Dig into our archive and listen to our World’s Toughest Job episode with Arunabha Ghosh, Ana Toni, and Jacob Ellis. Plus some bonus articles.

ICYMI

Read our latest on the future of UN development.

In last week's primer, we mapped the crisis in the UN development system. Today, we turn to the choices facing the incoming UN Secretary-General. Think of it as a Rubik’s Cube: a puzzle with six faces, where twisting any single side inevitably shifts all the rest.

Four of them describe the UN’s “product portfolio”: (1) how it sets global goals and norms; (2) its systemic and catalytic role; (3) the platform it provides for multi-stakeholder partnerships; and (4) its operational role in the field.

The other two faces are enablers of delivery: (5) how the system is configured and (6) the political and financial direction it receives.

The current wave of UN80 reforms focus heavily on the enablers. But without a shared vision of what the UN should deliver, they have become bogged down in process, in the “how” rather than the “why” and the “what.”

To give you a sense of what’s at stake on these strategic questions, here’s my take on the state of the debate, starting with the first face of the cube: how the UN sets global goals and norms.

Face 1: Goals and Norms

Goal-setting is one of the UN’s primary levers for normative influence, with former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailing the Millennium Development Goals as triggering “the most successful poverty reduction movement in history,” and for having “reshaped decision-making in developed and developing countries alike.”

The 2030 Agenda has not replicated this success. None of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and just 25 of the targets are likely to be delivered by 2030. Even when a target is on track, we often lack robust evidence that it has bent the curve in a significant way.

Designing a replacement goal framework will be high on the new Secretary-General’s to-do list in 2027, as Heads of State convene in New York for the final SDG Summit in September. Four options are floating around for a successor to the 2030 Agenda:

1. More of the same. Roll over the existing goals. This is the path of least resistance, and in my view, the most likely outcome.

2. Update and expand. Add new goals to reflect emerging priorities like AI governance. It’s true that the world has changed since 2015, but do we really need more than 17 goals?

3. Less is more. Cut the list down to focus on critical priorities. This fits the need for focus, but intergovernmental negotiations rarely produce simpler outcomes.

4. A graceful exit. Accept that the Global Goals era is over (an outcome that could happen by default if intergovernmental negotiations deadlock).

When work started on the design of the 2030 Agenda, Ban Ki-moon played an active role by appointing a High-Level Panel to produce a first draft of the SDGs. The next Secretary-General must decide early whether to make similar efforts to shape the debate, or whether to leave the argument to Member States.

To ground this decision, the new leadership team needs historical analysis of where, how, and why Global Goals have added value to national policy making. Otherwise, we will continue to treat goals as if they were magic spells, hoping that if diplomats write a promise on paper, it will conjure change in the real world.

Face 2: A Systemic and Catalytic Role

Many countries no longer value standalone development projects. Instead, they want the UN to play a systemic and catalytic role. This can mean:

1. Rewriting the rules of the game. The UN uses its legitimacy and convening power to address gaps in the sovereign debt architecture, scrutinize credit rating agencies, reform international taxation, or give the Global South more power in global economic governance. The Sevilla Commitment from the Fourth Financing for Development Conference gives the UN a mandate to play this role.

2. Navigating existing rules. The UN acts as a strategic adviser to host governments, helping them strengthen institutions, mobilize domestic resources, and attract international capital. This positions the Resident Coordinator (RC) as a deal broker, aligning multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and private investors behind a country-led development plan.

3. Generating global public goods (GPGs). The UN helps safeguard the operating systems on which economies depend. It acts as a “single source of truth” for understanding systemic risk, establishes the standards and regulations that enable interoperability, and provides the framework for collective action in domains like climate, health security, and AI.

The UN has potential in each of these roles, but it also faces pushback. It has long had aspirations to rewrite the rules of global economic governance, but many Western countries resist moves into territory they believe belongs to the G20, OECD, and International Financial Institutions (IFIs). Its track record is therefore restricted to worthy, but modest, initiatives such as the new Borrowers’ Platform, which provides a forum for countries to share debt management strategies, but will not push for debt restructuring.

When it comes to navigating existing rules, the UN’s funding model undermines its ambitions, as UN agencies compete against one another for resources rather than collaborating on the bigger picture. RCs often lack the tools, budgets, and specialized teams to help governments design bankable SDG investment projects, tap private capital, rewrite tax frameworks, and restructure debt. And the UN’s six transitions (launched at the 2023 SDG Summit) are yet to meet their promise to deliver investment at the scale needed to drive SDG acceleration.

Demand for global public goods is high, but the UN’s ability to generate them is constrained by geopolitical gridlock. In health and climate, consensus-based treaty-making is largely stalled, while traditional, government-led regulatory models fall short when it comes to borderless frontiers like AI. A new Secretary-General will not get early wins by championing GPGs in the abstract. They will need to identify breakthrough opportunities and build the alliances needed to exploit them.

In their first year, a new Secretary-General will face a flashpoint as negotiations culminate on a proposed UN tax convention (with a zero draft revealing predictable divides about its ambition and scope). They are also scheduled to convene a second biennial summit for the UN, G20, and IFIs to coordinate global economic policy. Debt, capital flows, and IFI governance will be among the tricky issues on the agenda. And they will need to decide how much political capital to spend on proposals to put the RC system on a more sustainable financial footing.

Face 3: The Coalition Builder

With Western aid budgets falling, some believe the UN should slim down its operational role and become a platform for partnerships instead. This is consistent with the growing reliance on minilateral groups, regional clubs, and issue-based coalitions in an age when formal multilateral frameworks are often blocked.

It also fits with the refrain that the UN must pivot from making goals to enabling their delivery. But this is not new advice: we are in year seven of a so-called “decade of action and delivery” that was launched at the SDG Summit in 2019. When so many delivery promises have been made and then forgotten over the past decade, you would be wise to be skeptical when you hear a new one.

The SDGs have had a partnership goal from day 1, while the UN created a Partnership Accelerator to drive “systems shifts” on the 2030 Agenda. But although impressive SDG-era partnerships certainly exist, any audit would conclude that the UN has failed to persuade others to unleash the energy, capital, and innovation at a scale that matches its “supremely ambitious” development agenda.

At least in part, this is a problem of culture. Successful platforms create the shared connectivity and standards that allow “fluid alliances” to work together to solve complex problems. But that requires lowering organizational boundaries, something that the UN’s territorial development actors struggle to do. They have throttled as many partnerships as they have accelerated, and have often launched UN-branded initiatives instead of elevating collaborations that others are best placed to lead.

To make this pivot, the new leadership team needs an analysis of what a “multilateralism-as-platform” model would look like in practice. That means extracting lessons from global platform businesses and innovative public sector models, alongside a learn-from-the-winners review of the SDG partnerships that delivered the most impressive results.

For a new Secretary-General, next year’s SDG Summit offers a final opportunity to convene an “army of doers” for the 2030 Agenda’s home stretch and its post-2030 successor. But that would only be the prelude to a deeper overhaul of culture, incentives, and strategy that would turn the UN into a platform for coalition-building. Once again, not a simple task.

Face 4: Operational Delivery

The fourth face of the Rubik’s Cube is where the money is largely spent: operational delivery in-country.

Some argue that it is time to sunset the UN’s operational role, stepping back so that domestic ministries, private capital, multilateral development banks, and grassroots organizations can take the lead on implementation.

I have sympathy for this view. If the UN wants to create the rules, provide the stadium, and referee the game, it is inevitably going to face resistance when it invades the pitch and tramples over other players in the scramble for project funding.

If the UN is going to shrink its operational role, its footprint must follow. The UN80 reforms call this moving toward a “tailored” country presence. But a new Secretary-General will find that “tailoring” is a polite euphemism for the work of restructuring or closing country offices where the UN no longer needs a physical presence.

But a full withdrawal is not on the table. With roughly 70% of the UN’s development and humanitarian budgets already concentrated in fragile and crisis-affected settings, the gravitational pull on the UN’s field presence is strong. Expect an ongoing shift to places where:

• Poverty is increasingly concentrated, institutions are weakest, and population growth remains strong.

• Risks are highest and regional or global spillovers are most damaging.

• The UN has comparative advantage as a delivery mechanism of choice, given that multilateral development banks and private actors struggle to spend money unless the UN plays a de-risking role.

But this shift risks forcing the UN into a trap. By concentrating its footprint in the world’s most difficult environments, it could be reduced to a subcontractor of last resort, spending other people’s money, bound by their rules, and accountable for results in places where they are incredibly hard to deliver.

There are two ways out of this trap. First, a new leadership team will have to confront the decades-long failure to get the UN’s development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding arms to deliver as one. If its comparative advantage in operational delivery lies in preventing conflict, building resilience, and supporting development in the world’s most dangerous places, that only holds if it brings all relevant tools to bear.

Second, the new leadership team will have to resurrect the prevention agenda that the current Secretary-General championed in his early years, but then abandoned. In 2018, the UN and World Bank’s joint framework for prevention (which I helped create) drove home the need for sustained engagement in the institutional reforms and social cohesion that are a counterweight to short-term firefighting.

That message still resonates. After all, the point of development isn’t to respond to emergencies, but to support societies strong enough to withstand them.

Twisting the Cube

It is when we move from the what to the how of Face 5 (the UN’s institutional configuration) and Face 6 (its politics and funding) that the Rubik’s Cube bites back.

Depending on their priorities for Faces 1–4, a new Secretary-General will need a different configuration across the UN Development System’s untamed ecosystem of funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices.

To make global goals matter again (Face 1), you need political skill, diplomatic heft, and intergovernmental savvy. To catalyze systemic change (Face 2), you need to upgrade your strategic, research, and technical functions. To build a platform for partnerships (Face 3), you need champions who can turn the UN into a low-friction space for others to work in. And to support fragile states (Face 4), you need integrated strategies combined with world-class logistical capacity and field-level operational strength.

Twist the cube to align one face, and you scramble the others.

If the UN were a multinational corporation, a new CEO would throw some money at a big management consultancy to set out all the options, spend a few weeks getting the board to make a decision, and then start the restructuring on a Monday morning. For better or worse, it would be done — redundancies and all — by the weekend.

But the UN doesn’t have shareholders. It’s an intergovernmental club. That means no Secretary-General can simply choose what makes the most strategic sense. They have to figure out what the political and funding environment will allow. Dedicate time to strengthening their license to operate. And encourage like-minded coalitions to generate the demand signals to which they can respond.

But all of that requires Member States to know what they want, debate their differences, and set a clear direction. Which might be the hardest puzzle of all.

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