Embracing the Icarus Arc

Season one of World’s Toughest Job is a wrap. (Though we hope to be back for more.)

Has a podcast ever done more to live up to its title? Across eight episodes, we explored the crises awaiting the 10th UN Secretary-General. From the volatility of major power dynamics to AI and climate shocks, the series made you wonder why anyone would put themselves up for election.

But it was ever thus. Read on for more about that and for our interview with former UN Deputy Secretary-General and World’s Toughest Job co-host, Mark Malloch-Brown.

The Scapegoat

Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, called the job “a nightmare.” His successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, was mocked as a “useless lout.” U Thant viewed the UN as a “last-ditch, last-resort affair,” while Javier Pérez de Cuéllar complained about presiding over an institution on the verge of collapse.

But it was Boutros Boutros-Ghali who complained longest and loudest, in a memoir dedicated to settling scores.

Getting the job was an “agonizing and embittering experience.” Losing it — after a fierce battle to avoid a veto from his bitter foe, U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright — was worse.

The Clinton administration, he complained, “was doing more to get rid of me than to get rid of Radovan Karadžić, the Serb leader indicted as a war criminal.”

Messy Multipolarity

The UN is always deadlocked. Major powers are always at each other’s throats. The institution is perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy. And if there is unity, as Kofi Annan used to joke, it is when Member States are pretending that SG actually stands for “scapegoat.”

The 10th Secretary-General will inherit all of this, accelerated by a messy multipolarity. If they look at the careers of their predecessors, they will see that the SGs who succeed are the ones who don’t wait for permission. They’re drivers of change, not re-arrangers of deck chairs.

But as Mark Malloch-Brown said in our first episode, you have to burn political capital to get things done. Forcing change comes at a cost. His advice? Embrace the Icarus arc.

Mark Malloch-Brown

Five Minutes on the Transition

To find out more, we sat down with to talk through the Secretary-General’s transition playbook. His advice to the next SG? Skip the mega-reform packages. Build a “Marine Corps,” act fast, and force the system to follow your lead.

[Re]Group: If you were advising the candidates, how should they prepare for day one?

Mark Malloch-Brown: They need a 100-day sprint. As much as possible, you need a very strong team assembled before January 1. That team is tasked with a clearly identified set of early wins that cover the terrain — something on peace and security, on humanitarian response, on climate, probably on AI.

You bring open-ended peace processes to a conclusion and you launch new initiatives around problems like Sudan, which are probably much more open to dynamic mediation than people think.

First, 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. Only then should you get on with the inevitably murky, slow, and less visible process of sorting out the overlap and duplication of agencies.

[Re]Group: If we can’t rely on 193 Member States to agree, where does the support for change come from?

Mark Malloch-Brown: You want a dynamic minilateralism under the multilateralist umbrella, where groups of States work with the Secretary-General on challenges that are of consuming importance to them.

Take Kofi Annan and the HIV crisis. As the pandemic took hold, there were HIV units scattered all across the UN system, responding as much to funding opportunities as to human need.

Kofi realized the response had to be consolidated and driven by clear metrics: The price of antiretrovirals needed to be brought down, and their availability dramatically increased.

He found a way of deploying a combination of governments, international institutions, and the pharmaceutical industry (in part through threats to pharma). He brought in George W. Bush, who was hugely skeptical of the UN in a classic Republican way, but PEPFAR happened in response to Kofi’s leadership.

What the UN has lost in the years since is a leader who defines the problem, determines who needs to be at the table to solve it, mobilizes that group, and drives them towards a time-bound solution.

[Re]Group: You mentioned that getting bogged down in reform can be a trap. How does a new SG get the system to change?

Mark Malloch-Brown: You’ve got to get the UN out of lots of things it currently does, but the way to do that is not to take it head-on.

If a new Secretary-General makes that mistake, they just spend the next five years in trench warfare. I suppose the analogy is: fight with drones, not like the First World War generals.

When you innovate and deliver external success, that builds momentum, and reform follows effective delivery.

Decoding the Candidates

Reading List

To figure out what the candidates intend to do if they win, 1 for 8 Billion has launched a live database of Policy Profiles.

As campaign coordinator Aditi Gorur tells [Re]Group, the value of these profiles is often found in “the space between the notes.” What a candidate omits is as telling as what they emphasize. (For instance, the profiles reveal that across the board, candidates have so far offered little depth on either climate or humanitarian response.)

Fifteen leading NGOs produced the profiles: prevention (CHRIPS and Saferworld), peacekeeping and peacebuilding (CCCPA and International Peace Institute); humanitarian action (ODI Global); development and inequality (Center for Policy Dialogue and Southern Voice); human rights and gender equality (CEJIL and GQUAL Campaign); gender, youth, and civil society inclusion (CIVICUS and TAP Network); climate (Plataforma CIPÓ and SHE Changes Climate); and UN reform (Article 109).

Take the profile on UN reform. Rebeca Grynspan insists the job is “more than stewardship,” calling for “ambitious structural reform,” while Macky Sall wants to “move the agenda” on political reform. On the other side, Rafael Grossi favors “technical right-sizing” as an “administrator and implementer,” and María Fernanda Espinosa commits to “shrinking the UN responsibly.” Meanwhile, candidates like Michelle Bachelet and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett frame the challenge largely around “efficiency” and “questions of implementation.”

SG Roundup: Regional Priorities

• Six candidates are running for UN Secretary-General, with the Security Council set to weigh in via straw polls in late July.

• As New York’s diplomats scatter for summer, speculation continues on whether new candidates will enter the race. At this point, they almost certainly will.

• Read our cheat sheet to understand how the process works.

Ideas for the next Secretary-General’s inbox are not in short supply, but what’s missing are concrete proposals that have Member State buy-in.

A new series of convenings aims to fill that gap, starting in Africa. On July 9 and 10, SAIIA, the UN Foundation, NYU CICI, and CEPEI co-hosted a dialogue in Johannesburg, bringing together African scholars, policymakers, and former diplomats to discuss actions the region would ask SG to prioritize.

Ambassador Mathu Joyini, former South African Permanent Representative, previewed the stakes on eNCA’s morning show with host Masego Rahlaga, arguing that the leadership qualities we look for in the next SG have to be grounded in regional priorities, not abstract criteria.

Next up: Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

The Complete Podcast

From the Archive

We have just launched the official World's Toughest Job series page — a one-stop shop for the entire first season.

It includes all eight episodes — in audio on your favorite podcast platform and in video on YouTube. For each episode, you will also find our editorial deep-dives on how past Secretaries-General confronted key challenges and takeaways from the expert roundtables.

This project has been an education in how much work goes into creating a series of this scale.

A huge thank you to our brilliant hosts, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host Mark Malloch-Brown for anchoring the series. And an enormous note of gratitude to our lead producer Karen Given, and the Foreign Policy team of Dan Ephron, Rob Sachs, Maria Ximena Aragon, Sara Stewart, Susanna Maize, and Jesse Willis. We couldn’t have asked for better partners.

A quick favor before you go:

If you found value in the podcast series, please take a moment to like, subscribe, and rate on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

And if you have colleagues who you think might want to listen, please forward this newsletter to them.

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1. What Kind of Leader Does the UN Need Right Now?

Leadership and Moral Authority

Can the next Secretary-General find the moral authority and political courage to lead an institution facing global gridlock?

• Scene Setter: Insights into the selection of a new UN leader from Nudhara Yusuf and Richard Gowan.

• Guests: Susana Malcorra, , and .

🎧 Listen now

🥡 Takeaways: Why the next UN leader should ask for forgiveness, rather than waiting for permission. Read here…

🗣️ Interview: Mark Malloch-Brown on the Secretary-General’s transition playbook. Read here…

2. The Scourge of War

Peace and Security

Can the next Secretary-General rebuild the UN's postwar role as the guarantor of international peace and security?

• The History: U Thant, John F. Kennedy, and the backchannel diplomacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), narrated by .

• The Roundtable: Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Lynn Kuok, Ankit Panda.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How U Thant’s backdoor diplomacy in the Cuban Missile Crisis generated enough value to fund the UN for decades. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to navigate a world where a $2,000 drone can take out a multimillion-dollar missile, and tech billionaires act as sovereign powers. Read here…

3. Young People and Young Countries

Development and Shared Prosperity

How can the next Secretary-General deliver for young people and young countries?

• History: Dag Hammarskjöld and the “Year of Africa” (1960), narrated by Kal Raustiala.

• Roundtable: Joe Studwell, Saru Duckworth, .

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: Lessons in independence from Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to help young people and young countries navigate a world of unchecked geoeconomic competition. Read here…

4. Who Rules the Code?

AI and Frontier Technologies

Can the next Secretary-General invent a form of diplomacy that brings tech CEOs directly to the table?

• History: Trygve Lie, the Baruch Plan, and the failure to govern atomic energy, narrated by Kai Bird.

• Roundtable: Nur Laiq, Philip Thigo, Maxime Stauffer.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How to survive an arms race, from the atom to the algorithm. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the UN can mobilize the world to ensure that global governance isn’t captured by Silicon Valley lobbying or superpower rivalry. Read here…

5. Shelter from the Storm

The Global Economy

How can the next Secretary-General help forge a new economic consensus?

• History: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Agenda for Development, and the pushback against the IMF’s Washington Consensus, narrated by .

• Roundtable: Carlos Lopes, Homi Kharas, Attiya Waris.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: Boutros Boutros-Ghali versus the Washington Consensus. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How developing nations can build their own financial power. Read here…

6. Physical and Virtual Choke Points

Critical Global Infrastructure

As the world grows increasingly connected, how can the next Secretary-General protect the infrastructure we all depend on?

• History: Kofi Annan, the digital divide, and the story of the SEACOM cable, narrated by .

• Roundtable: Parag Khanna, Salvatore R. Mercogliano, Elisabeth Braw

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: How global networks create new vulnerabilities. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How to defend the networks on which global commerce and communication rely. Read here…

7. The UN as a Platform in Emergencies

Complex Crises

How can the next Secretary-General prepare the UN for the next complex global shock?

• History: Ban Ki-moon, David Nabarro, and the High-level Task Force on the global food security crisis, narrated by Ambassador Josette Sheeran.

• Roundtable: Sigrid Kaag, Aarathi Krishnan, Martin Griffiths.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: The octopus theory of how multilateral institutions evolve. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the UN can manage emergencies when 21st-century crises don’t respect sectoral boundaries. Read here…

8. Freeloading on the Future

Climate, Nature, and Global Public Goods

Can the next Secretary-General turn the UN from a place where the future gets talked about into a place where it gets protected?

• History: Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Mostafa Tolba, and the Montreal Protocol, narrated by Megumi Seki.

• Roundtable: Arunabha Ghosh, Ana Toni, Jacob Ellis.

🎧 Listen now

Dive deeper…

📖 Long Read: From a hole in the ozone layer to the end of the space age. Read here…

🥡 Takeaways: How the next UN Secretary-General can rebuild the multilateral operating system needed to protect global public goods. Read here…

This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: Can the next Secretary-General turn the UN from a place where the future gets talked about into a platform for its protection?

The future is the ultimate global public good. Yet with the world consumed by immediate crises and geopolitical conflict, the international system’s capacity to think, act, and plan for the long term is being deeply undermined.

From a stable climate and global health to the sustainability of our oceans and the governance of artificial intelligence, humanity is failing to steward our shared resources and is leaving a compounding bill for tomorrow’s generations to pay.

The episode begins with the unlikely triumph of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, signed after scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were tearing a hole in Earth’s ozone layer and threatening to trigger a global ecological collapse. That breakthrough marked the dawn of a new era of environmental diplomacy, establishing a template for collective action that paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Read about that history here.

Today, however, the political consensus needed to protect the global commons has frayed. The multilateral frameworks we rely on are buckling under the weight of their own complexity, caught between escalating geopolitical rivalries and rapid technological change.

In this episode, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host are joined by an expert panel to discuss how the next UN Secretary-General can rebuild the multilateral operating system needed to protect global public goods, and how they can build the farsighted political coalitions required to safeguard the global community tomorrow.

Here’s what Jacob Ellis, a Welsh policymaker and leader for the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales; Arunabha Ghosh, Founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water; and Ana Toni, National Secretary for Climate Change at Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, had to say.

1. We can’t solve planetary crises with a 1945 operating system.

A central debate was whether the UN’s institutional architecture is fundamentally flawed or simply ill-equipped to handle modern, interconnected crises.

Arunabha Ghosh argued that 20th-century treaties were built to address environmental issues in isolated buckets. But as climate change triggers domino effects across the globe, that siloed approach has become a liability.

“These are planetary scale crises,” Ghosh argued, describing the UN’s current structure as “a design failure. It’s not a lack of desire; it’s a lack of design.”

Ana Toni argued that the international system was suited for both the problems and the optimism of 1945. Today, however, the UN has too much on its plate. It has trouble separating truly existential global crises from problems that can be better solved nationally. Because the UN mixes almost every issue “at the same scale” in the same buckets, she said, the system ultimately struggles to “deliver to real people.”

Co-host Mark Malloch-Brown agreed. He believes the UN is still operating on a 1945 blueprint, with machinery “largely dysfunctional,” paralyzed by “so many pulls and pushes in different directions.”

But Jacob Ellis, drawing on the Welsh experience of offering legal protections to future generations, argued for a more farsighted multilateral model. As he pointed out, “It is still possible to make the right decisions by current generations, as well as keeping in mind the impact and the needs of the generations yet to be born.”

2. Progress requires ‘coalitions of the doing,’ not just universal agreement.

A recurring theme was the tension between the UN’s traditional reliance on consensus and the pragmatic need to move forward through targeted alliances.

Ghosh defended universality as a safeguard, designed “to make sure that the strong did not overpower the weak.” But with global trust eroding, he warned that progress on priority challenges was now too slow.

His proposed bridge: “coalitions of the doing” such as the International Solar Alliance, where countries unite over shared interests without stripping anyone of their right to a seat at the table.

Malloch-Brown agreed. While the universal Conference of the Parties (COP) mechanism is “admirable,” he said, it has stalled over contentious issues. Toni drew on her experience leading COP30 in 2025, saying she secured consensus when possible, but otherwise empowered coalitions of the willing to move ahead of the formal negotiations.

Ellis pointed to the “impact coalition for future generations” that he co-leads as an example of this decentralized approach. Global civil society, the private sector, and Member States are forming creative new alliances to bypass the gridlock, he said.

3. Trust is earned through implementation, new incentives, and broader ownership.

A running thread throughout the discussion was the erosion of trust in the multilateral system and how the next Secretary-General can rebuild it through accountability, redesigned incentives, and structural shifts.

Ghosh described trust in the UN as a stock that degrades when countries fail to demonstrate that trust through collective action. “The general who was supposed to lead from the front has fled the battlefield,” he said, pointing to the recent U.S. exit from its climate pledges. As a result, the burden falls heavily on the remaining nations to hold up a “shield of resilience” and keep pushing forward.

For Toni, restoring trust is dependent on delivery. “If we don’t implement what has been agreed by politicians and leaders,” she said, “we are not going to be able to gain the trust again that we need in multilateralism.” To drive implementation, Toni said that the UN must move away from its traditional “system of penalty.” Instead, she advocated for creating a framework that actively rewards countries that lead by example.

Malloch-Brown argued that rebuilding this trust also requires a fundamental recalibration of UN power. Citing the “complete ... corruption of the Security Council” by superpowers that have “betrayed the Charter,” he took note of a necessary and ongoing shift toward a more General Assembly–led organization.

The next Secretary-General’s most vital political task, Malloch-Brown said, will be navigating the UN away from its “original owners” — who dominate the Security Council — “to a new, more dispersed ownership” capable of standing up for universal values.

4. Protecting the future requires a new vocabulary and ‘anticipatory governance.’

An underlying challenge throughout the episode was how to force short-term political systems to incorporate long-term strategic planning at a time when, as Malloch-Brown highlighted, politicians are increasingly driven by chaotic and short-term news cycles.

To overcome this challenge, Ghosh called on the next Secretary-General to develop a new vocabulary. Rather than just talking about climate change, for example, they must speak a combined language of “ecology, economy, and equity” and frame the green transition as a multitrillion-dollar investment opportunity.

Malloch-Brown suggested going further by adding the “less comfortable language” of security to underline the importance of the environment to national interests.

Tying together long-term and more immediate threats makes this “anticipatory governance” approach an easier political sell, Ghosh said. Toni agreed, arguing that pitting “now problems” against “future problems” is a false dichotomy. Solving today’s resource issues responsibly, she noted, is the start of building for the future.

Ultimately, the next Secretary-General must be a champion capable of looking beyond a standard five-year mandate. Ellis urged the next leader to keep their eyes fixed on the “far horizon,” taking responsibility for injecting “systemic hope” into global systems when the world needs it most.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

Related Reading

To borrow from Hemingway, this is a disaster that unfolds “gradually and then suddenly.”

A decommissioned weather satellite drifts 800 kilometers above the Earth, launched decades ago to map sea ice. A ruptured pressure tank, a micrometeoroid impact, perhaps a missile strike. One instant the satellite is there, and the next it explodes.

A 1,000-kilogram cylinder of aluminum and dead solar panels is now an expanding cloud of shrapnel. For a time, nothing happens. But then another satellite is in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a fist-sized chunk of a fuel valve tears through its aluminum hull.

A couple of its fragments soon take out an Earth observation platform and a navigation beacon. And so it goes. Collisions breed more collisions, until the space around us is as inhospitable as an asteroid field in a Star Wars film.

The space age is over before it has really begun.

Art Imitates Life

If this sounds like science fiction, it is.

In Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity, the Russian government destroys one of its own satellites, creating a cloud of fragments that shreds nearby communications networks. Life gets complicated for astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, out on a routine spacewalk to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. Spoiler alert: Bullock survives. Clooney does not.

Or maybe you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s 2015 novel, Seveneves, where the moon splits into seven chunks, which collide and splinter into fragments at an exponential rate.

“The good news is that the Earth is one day going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn,” the U.S. President is told in a briefing. “The bad news is that it’s going to be messy.”

“Messy” means meteorites burning up in Earth’s atmosphere over thousands of years, boiling the oceans and sterilizing the surface of the planet.

Not ideal, in other words.

The Deadly Toolbag

The truth unfolds on a longer timeline — less Hollywood apocalypse and more a slow throttling of our orbital highways — but the underlying science is the same.

On Nov. 1, 2023, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli was on a spacewalk to perform maintenance on the International Space Station’s solar arrays. You can watch as she loses control of a tool bag, and it drifts slowly away into space.

Slowly, however, is relative to the velocity of the space station itself. In absolute terms, that lost bag of tools was traveling at around 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h) — fast enough to obliterate any spacecraft that crossed its path. That impact would create thousands of new pieces of deadly shrapnel. Which would, in turn … Well, you get the idea.

Moghbeli’s tool bag was tracked by U.S. Space Force, which cataloged it as debris object #58229, until it safely burned up upon atmospheric reentry the following year.

That five-digit tracking system is fast running out of numbers. At any one time, thousands of larger objects are being actively monitored, while 1.2 million are too small to be tracked at all but are still deemed potentially lethal.

And even the small stuff — 140 million or so tiny fragments — can do serious damage. In 2016, a sliver of metal or a paint flake left a gouge in the space station’s quadruple-glazed windows. The culprit was about the size of a single particle of smoke.

The Godfather

The godfather of space debris is Donald J. Kessler, a former NASA scientist, now in his 80s.

In 1978, Kessler and a colleague published a blockbuster paper challenging the NASA consensus that space was large enough to be self-cleaning. They called it: “Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt.”

Kessler hypothesized a tipping point. When there is not much space traffic, collisions are rare and debris decays before it becomes a problem. But at a certain point, random collisions create dangerous objects faster than the atmosphere can drag them down.

That leads to a chain reaction. Even then, Kessler warned that some orbits could be past the point of no return, even if no new debris was added. It was, he said, much like the formation of an asteroid belt, just on a much shorter timeline.

The aerospace community picked up on the theory. Soon, they were calling it Kessler Syndrome.

Hole in the Sky

I was thinking about Kessler Syndrome as we made the eighth and final episode of World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation. It also starts with an unfamiliar danger in the skies far above our heads.

In 1974, chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina warned that a class of “miracle” chemicals, used for everything from air conditioning to consumer aerosols, was releasing chlorine atoms that would strip out the Earth’s ozone layer. In 1995, this discovery won them a share of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Chlorofluorocarbons were soon the target of a grassroots boycott, while the U.S. government banned “non-essential” CFCs in an early application of what we now call the precautionary principle.

But the chemical industry and some governments remained skeptical, until British scientists published an observational study showing a massive depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer over the Antarctic.

For centuries, humanity had believed the atmosphere was too vast for us to alter. We dumped chemicals with impunity, assuming the sheer scale of the planet would dilute our impact. That illusion died in a 1985 paper entitled: “Large losses of total ozone in Antarctica reveal seasonal ClOx/NOx interaction.”

“There was literally a hole in the sky,” recalled Brian Mulroney, then prime minister of Canada. “It caught the public imagination in a way few discoveries do. The truth of the matter is that it scared the hell out of anybody with a brain in his head — and that applied to all governments.”

The Ray-Ban Plan

“All governments” is a bit of a stretch, but the danger spurred some unusual suspects into action.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan supported the control of ozone, based on his own experience of skin cancer. He faced down opposition from those in his own cabinet who thought Americans should instead wear hats and sunglasses. Campaigners mocked it as the “Ray-Ban plan.”

Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher approached the problem like the research chemist she had been before entering politics. She too supported global regulation and found herself battling European nations that were citing “scientific uncertainty” to protect national chemical lobbies.

In New York, the fifth UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, wanted the United Nations to do more on the environment, not a traditional multilateral priority. He was increasingly attentive to the views of the emerging “global citizen” and also saw an issue with potential to bridge Cold War divides.

Pérez de Cuéllar left the heavy lifting to Dr. Mostafa Tolba, the Egyptian microbiologist who ran the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) from its headquarters in Nairobi. Tolba denied he was an autocrat. He just wouldn’t let governments push him around, he said.

These and other leaders invented a playbook that the UN has brought to every subsequent environmental threat.

The Ozone Playbook

The playbook did the easy things first and the hard things later.

Step one was establishing a single source of truth. Tolba spent years forcing rival scientific groups toward consensus. “Only six months after the scientists spoke with one voice,” he recalled, “we managed to get a legally binding treaty.”

Step two was creating a framework to get governments talking. The 1985 Vienna Convention had no binding targets for replacing CFCs, but it built trust. Keep the same negotiators in the same room, Tolba believed, and eventually they will stop shouting and start listening.

Step three was making the negotiations “intergovernmental plus.” You couldn’t solve a chemical crisis without the chemical companies. The Americans, in particular, wanted to signal to the market that profits awaited whoever led the charge on CFC replacements.

Step four was setting binding targets that didn’t scare the horses. Tolba saw that a ban on CFCs would collapse the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which was bolted onto the Vienna framework. The compromise was a 50% cut but with a “ratchet mechanism” to tighten targets if the science worsened.

The final step was forming a North-South Grand Bargain. As an Egyptian public servant, Tolba had believed the environment was a luxury for poorer countries. Leading UNEP had changed his mind, but only if the polluter paid up. So three years after the Montreal Protocol was signed, an agreement was reached to create a fund to support the transition from CFCs.

After that the Montreal Protocol accelerated towards universal ratification (the only UN treaty to cross that benchmark). 99% of CFCs have now been phased out.

It Was Only Ozone

Ask a diplomat in New York about Montreal, and you’ll be told that the treaty was an important achievement. But it was “only ozone” — rather a niche threat compared with the complex crises we face today.

This reflects multilateralists’ tendency to obsess over failure and discount success, to the point where we have lost any collective understanding of what value the international system adds, and how.

In the case of ozone, that value was colossal. Almost unimaginable.

If CFCs were still in widespread use today, skin cancer would be the least of our problems. The world would be facing the collapse of terrestrial and marine ecosystems, with damage to food and fisheries alone far exceeding the global cost of a phaseout.

But the real kicker is the climate impact. The Montreal Protocol will prevent roughly 2.5°C of global warming over preindustrial levels by the end of this century. It’s a staggering number, given that recent macroeconomic research suggests that a temperature rise of that magnitude would cut global economic output in 2100 by a quarter to a half.

So that is an international treaty that cost tens of billions of dollars and will save trillions (probably even tens of trillions) across the rest of this century. Few investments deliver that sort of bang for the buck.

But it was “only ozone,” wasn’t it?

The Final Frontier

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher told the UN General Assembly it should use the ozone playbook to start tackling climate change. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol agreed binding targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

During the long struggle to get enough ratifications to bring the Kyoto Protocol into force, I was part of an effort to set up the world’s first network of environmental diplomats.

Naively, I assumed that foreign policy was basically about preventing war and creating global public goods, until I realized that many old-school ambassadors considered environmental diplomacy a bit of a passing fad.

Now a New Space Age — driven not just by superpower governments, but by private corporations launching commercial megaconstellations — is permanently altering another planetary domain.

Once it took time and patience to spot a satellite, even though they can be seen with the naked eye. Now it is child’s play.

A thousand satellites orbited the Earth in 2010. We passed the 10,000 threshold in 2024, and more than 5,000 more have launched since then. By 2030, there could be 100,000 or more satellites orbiting above our heads.

As space becomes dangerously crowded, many diplomats remain unsure whether this is a premier league issue or not. But they may need to update their priorities — or they will be forced to when the collisions begin.

Kessler in SloMo

Space debris is already more than a theoretical threat. It is projected to cost upward of $40 billion over the next 10 years.

Just four incidents have created 8,000 large pieces of debris in less than 20 years. Three of them were Chinese, Russian, and Indian missile strikes on their own satellites. The fourth was an accidental collision between an American communications satellite and a Russian military satellite.

Each year, the risk of another collision is around 10%, with some orbits having already breached the threshold for Kessler Syndrome. It’s a slow-motion disaster that will play out over decades or centuries, mitigated as satellites get better at dodging danger.

Unless something highly unlikely happens — something as improbable as an eruption of an Icelandic volcano closing European airspace or a novel coronavirus locking down the world.

Space, you see, is now what’s known as an actively safe environment. You don’t launch a satellite and forget about it; you need software algorithms executing thousands of collision-avoidance maneuvers every day.

And if those algorithms fail, things go wrong. In a “gradually, then suddenly” sort of way.

It Won’t Happen

Here are three ways that could push SloMo Kessler onto fast forward.

Scenario one: An extreme solar storm throws satellites onto unpredictable trajectories, while severing radio communications with them. Chances: somewhere between 1% and 10% in a decade. Predicted time to the first collision: a couple of days.

Scenario two: A cyberattack on the U.S. Space Surveillance Network leaves satellites flying blind. Or a bad firmware update strips a privately-owned megaconstellation like Starlink of the systems it uses for collision avoidance. Put this one in a basket labeled “it won’t happen … until it does.”

Scenario three: An anti-satellite missile strike, or the use of “soft-kill” weapons that blind satellites to the dangers approaching them, occurs. This is comfortably within the capabilities of scores of states and, possibly, some non-state actors, too. Fortunately, though, we live in peaceful times.

These “improbable” scenarios would destroy trillions of dollars in hardware, collapse the space insurance market, and degrade GPS, global weather forecasting, and other terrestrial necessities.

Even without a sudden catastrophe, launch windows for deep-space missions to the moon or Mars may narrow. And, at its worst, humanity could find itself effectively shut out of space.

In other words, it would be safe enough to launch a rocket, too risky to put a human in it.

Rules in Space

In 1959, the Antarctic Treaty was signed by 12 nations, banning military bases and territorial claims over the continent. By dedicating Antarctica to science, it paved the way for the discovery of the ozone hole.

Space also got a Cold War treaty. It was agreed through the UN in 1967, as the superpowers — shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis — decided the last thing they needed was an arms race above their heads.

Some believe this treaty is moribund, elbowed aside by a teeming ecosystem of unilateral rulemaking and minilateral cooperation.

To control space debris, major spacefaring nations are dictating de facto global standards, such as mandates to deorbit satellites within five years of the end of their useful life. Informal coalitions are also on the rise, as decentralized networks pool research, agree on mitigation guidelines, and champion zero debris pledges.

But this scattered innovation needs a center of gravity, and geopolitical adversaries need a baseline for cooperation. Will the UN provide it? That may depend on whether it seizes the opportunity posed by the space summit, UNISPACE IV, which is proposed for July 2027 (Member States are still arguing about whether to let it happen).

Space debris would not be the only issue on the summit’s agenda, but it may be the most tractable. Major powers seem closer to a confrontation over space than at any time since the Outer Space Treaty was agreed sixty years ago. Meanwhile, the private sector is as assertive, and as lightly regulated, as chemical companies were in the 1970s.

But cleaning up space offers common ground. To seize it, the multilateral system won’t need to start from scratch. It just needs to update the ozone playbook, translating a messy patchwork into a governance architecture without crowding out efforts that private companies, national space agencies, and scientific networks are already making.

And if it works, tomorrow’s diplomats will be able to gaze up into safe skies, shake their heads, and say, “It was only space debris, wasn’t it?”

Related Reading

But the Montreal Protocol had to deal with one set of chemicals. A handful of companies. A replacement that was already sitting on the shelf. And what the next secretary-general inherits is nothing like that. In this last episode of World’s Toughest Job, we’re asking: Can the next Secretary-General turn the UN from a place where the future gets talked about into a place where it gets protected?

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Ana Toni, COP30 CEO and National Secretary for Climate Change, Brazil; Arunabha Ghosh, founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water and COP30 Special Envoy for South Asia; and Jacob Ellis, who’s a policymaker, civil society leader, and champion for intergenerational fairness. He works at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales in support of the implementation of Wales’ world-leading Well-being of Future Generations Act. 

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

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This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: Can the UN act as the emergency platform the world needs?

The UN was built to manage emergencies that happen in one place or one sector — health, food, refugees, peacekeeping. But the crises of the 21st century do not respect those boundaries. A conflict sparks an energy shock, which triggers a debt crisis, which leads to hunger, which creates conditions for further conflict. As the world faces this era of fast-moving global shocks, the UN’s traditional machinery is often too slow and fragmented to respond effectively.

The episode begins with the 2008 global food crisis. Josette Sheeran, then head of the World Food Programme, watched as spiking oil prices, biofuel subsidies, and financial panic created a “silent tsunami” that suddenly priced millions of people out of the market for basic sustenance.

To manage the fallout, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon bypassed standard protocols, pulling together a fractured international system into a unified task force to tackle the emergency on multiple fronts simultaneously. The task force recognized that throwing emergency aid at a country is not enough; the structural factors that caused the food to become unaffordable in the first place needed to be addressed. Read about that history here.

Today, complex, cascading crises — where a shock in one sector rapidly spreads to others — have become the new normal. On past trends, the next Secretary-General will face at least one while in office.

In this episode, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host are joined by an expert panel to discuss whether the next Secretary-General should try to build a standardized “operating system” for global emergencies, or whether, as in 2008, the UN is better off building makeshift coalitions when an emergency occurs.

Here’s what Martin Griffiths, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; Sigrid Kaag, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of the Netherlands and former UN Under-Secretary-General for missions in Syria and Lebanon; and Aarathi Krishnan, Founder and CEO of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures, had to say.

1. Political diplomacy must lead over the “humanitarian comfort zone.”

While the UN’s crisis management has evolved to handle complex shocks, the international community often still defaults to treating these emergencies as purely humanitarian problems.

Sigrid Kaag warned against treating a “profoundly political security … crisis through the lens of a ‘Humanitarian Plus’ agenda.” Doing so provides a political comfort zone for Member States, she argued, allowing them to do no harm to their own reputations because it is hard to argue against humanitarian action. But by reducing complex wars to logistical problems, Member States avoid making difficult choices. When those crises inevitably drag on, Kaag noted, the UN becomes the “favorite go-to place to blame when [Member States] want to be shielded from any political responsibility, let alone accountability.”

Martin Griffiths echoed this sentiment, recalling his frustration when UN Security Council members would ask how they could assist his humanitarian efforts. Why don’t you do your job, which is peace and security, he would reply, rather than expecting wars to be ended by humanitarians who could serve as “a mitigating factor at best.”

For the UN to be effective, panelists argued that the next Secretary-General must prioritize risk-embracing political diplomacy. “Mediators and political diplomats, largely absent from the UN in recent times, have got to be at the front edge,” Griffiths said.

Pointing to the 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative, he emphasized that this kind of successful risk-taking improvisation cannot be delegated. Especially for peace and security, leadership needs to come from the top. Kaag agreed, reflecting on her mission to remove chemical weapons from Syria. Direct involvement from the Secretary-General, she noted, “cut out all the nonsense that could happen within bureaucracies” and provided the “latitude, full trust, and also the backup that you need when you’re dealing with uncharted terrain.”

Griffiths framed the dilemma for the next Secretary-General: “Do you not take action because it’s too risky and therefore forfeit any opportunity to do some good? Or do you take a risk and get out there?”

2. Overcoming the institutional ‘fear factor’ to anticipate crises.

In a complex crisis, we have argued that the UN must act as a conductor capable of directing a networked response to threats that cross sectors and geographies.

While the UN monitors a vast array of global data, Aarathi Krishnan argued that the multilateral system struggles to synthesize this information into actionable foresight. In her view, the UN too often reacts to headlines rather than shifting underlying conditions, failing to connect the dots on medium-term indicators. She suggested that the system misses the interconnections and domino effects of converging vulnerabilities such as sovereign debt, energy prices, or bilateral tech deals while ultimately waiting for the shock to arrive rather than preparing for it.

This fragmented landscape raises the premium for analytical foresight. Krishnan observed that states are increasingly retreating into “transactional sovereignty” — abandoning the pursuit of global common goods to make deal-by-deal choices based on immediate self-interest. The UN is falling back on the playbooks of the past, she said. It “assumes that Member States can come together, that ultimately every party wants the same thing, and that’s not true anymore,” she said.

The root cause of this analytical blindness, according to the panelists, is an internal culture that punishes honesty. Kaag diagnosed a paralyzing “fear factor” within the UN system. “A lot of analytical pieces never get written,” she said, noting that truth-telling is instead relegated to the corridors — “the worst form of governance.” By keeping vital warnings off the record, leaders are deprived of the filtered analysis they need to act preemptively.

Mark Malloch-Brown agreed that this type of informality is common in public administration and noted that it is especially damaging at the global level. The tendency of Member States to punish rigorous analysis leaves the system flying blind when it most needs a clear picture of the horizon. The UN needs to ask hard questions, he said, but putting the answers on paper causes a backlash.

3. The UN must abandon the 1960s model and embrace multipolarity.

A recurring theme throughout the episode was the misconception that the UN must be the sole actor capable of resolving global emergencies. When asked if a wealthy nation such as the Netherlands turns to the UN when a predictable crisis occurs, Kaag, a former Dutch minister, was blunt: “No.” Instead, she noted that her government had looked more to the European Union, the European Central Bank, or other regional institutions, turning to the UN primarily for “the normative side” and global standards.

Malloch-Brown agreed that not every problem needs to come to the UN. He advocated for a global “subsidiarity network” where specific crises can be managed at a regional level or by specialized coalitions that are best placed to handle them. Kaag agreed, arguing that the international community often projects an outdated “decolonization model” onto the UN, acting “as if it’s still in the ‘60s, and it’s the only place in town where everything needs to happen.” Instead, she pointed to the rise of multipolarity and alternative alliances, calling a decentralized approach “healthy.”

Krishnan noted that alternative problem-solving architectures are already forming outside of formal global governance. Because actors recognize “where power is shifting,” she observed new alliances emerging such as aid initiatives funded by private philanthropy and designed by corporate consulting firms. Krishnan warned that when states and private actors believe that the UN is no longer equipped to lead, they are bypassing the multilateral system to build their own mechanisms.

However, Malloch-Brown provided a crucial caveat regarding the rise of this decentralized “minilateralism.” He warned that ad hoc coalitions become dangerous when they drift away from foundational principles. The UN Charter, he noted, is still the “fundamental road map” for navigating global shocks. Without the UN acting as a normative platform to anchor these agile networks, informal coalitions risk delivering “a much uglier realpolitik solution.”

For Malloch-Brown, the ultimate goal of the UN is not to exert total operational control but to “put power within a framework of norms and values.”

4. The debate over how to manage crises: systems versus people.

Given the complexity outlined above, the UN’s role as an orchestrator of a response to a complex shock has become both more important and far more difficult, which is why Secretary-General António Guterres proposed the creation of a UN Emergency Platform.

This was not intended to be a new bureaucracy, but rather a set of pre-agreed protocols that would break down institutional silos and make it easier to mount a whole-of-system response. The proposal requested standing authority to trigger a modular mechanism that would bring together a bespoke mix of Member States, financial institutions, and private sector actors tailored to the specific crisis at hand.

However, Member States pushed back ahead of the 2024 Summit of the Future. Fearing an executive power grab and duplication of existing mandates, governments watered down the concept in the Pact for the Future. While recognizing the need for the UN to be at the heart of “a more coherent, cooperative, coordinated and multidimensional international response to complex global shocks,” they refused to grant the Secretary-General any new authority and insisted that responses operate within existing bodies.

On the podcast, this tension between formal structures and improvisation sparked a debate. Krishnan supported the idea of an emergency platform, noting that currently, the UN is forced to innovate and create everything from scratch in each crisis. For long-term sustainability, she argued, crisis management “cannot rely just on individual people that are known.” Instead, the system needs a “concerted, structured way” to track and respond to converging shocks.

However, Griffiths and Kaag expressed skepticism about the idea. “I’m not at all in favor of new platforms or committees,” Griffiths said, fearing it would add to the UN’s bloat. Kaag warned that the UN is already prone to letting bureaucracy rule. She recalled field missions where headquarters staff complained she wasn’t following the manual or filling out required charts and matrices — paperwork that had nothing to do with the political reality on the ground.

Instead of a formal platform, Griffiths and Kaag emphasized the importance of the crisis leader. “I wouldn’t worry about an emergency platform, but I’d worry about people,” Griffiths argued. He pointed out that as Secretary-General, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon each had a roster of heavyweights they could deploy to cut through the noise and drive a response.

Whether the UN adopts pre-agreed crisis protocols or continues to improvise, the panel agreed that successfully orchestrating a response in this fragmented environment ultimately hinges on deploying individuals with the “tested leadership experience” and political weight to get things done.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

Related Reading

We treat multilateral institutions like broken machines. To fix them, we arm ourselves with blueprints, brute force, and wishful thinking. But these institutions are living systems with deep roots and long memories. You cannot change them unless you understand how they evolved.

Instead of thinking like engineers, we need to think like biologists, asking why these systems look and behave the way they do.

Take the octopus as an example. Humans and octopuses have a common ancestor: the urbilaterian, believed to have been a tiny worm-like creature that crawled along the bottom of the ocean 600 million years ago. It had a nervous system, but no shell, no eyes, and no brain. Its descendants split into different branches of life.

On one branch, we find fish, reptiles, birds, and ultimately, humans. On the other: insects, crabs, snails, and the octopus, which has developed an intelligence so different from ours that the biologist and philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith argues that encountering one is like meeting an alien.

The ancestors of the octopus initially developed a shell to defend themselves from predators, but then, strangely, they lost that shell when the fish that hunted them equipped themselves with more powerful jaws. Why? As your neighborhood gets more dangerous, you would think it would be safer to hunker down at the bottom of the sea and work on strengthening your armor. Instead, the ancestors of the octopus chose to float around as a sack of succulent protein, unprotected by anything other than their fast-growing brains.

As Godfrey-Smith writes, they swapped the hard-shelled certainty of the mollusk for “a body of pure possibility” — and along the way developed the intellectual power to dismantle cages in captivity, short-circuit overhead lights by shooting water at them, and target keepers they didn’t like.

The standard explanation for this evolutionary leap is that external pressure forced radical change. As fish became faster and fiercer, the ancestors of octopuses had to ditch their heavy shells to outrun them and survive. That is surely part of the answer. But two other factors were in play.

First, the forcing power of catastrophic shocks. A mass extinction a quarter of a billion years ago wiped most of life off Earth and made the oceans so acidic that external shells began to dissolve. For the ancestors of the octopus, which had already begun tucking their shells inside their soft tissue, full internalization went from an evolutionary experiment to a survival necessity. An asteroid strike millions of years later delivered an even more lethal blow to creatures still relying on external armor and cleared the waters for these smart, increasingly shell-less survivors to inherit the seas.

And second, the challenge of solving new problems. Once the octopus’s early ancestors started moving from the sea floor into the open ocean, they needed to upgrade their sensory organs, motor control, and brainpower to navigate this complex, 3D space. Their brains exploded from a few tens of thousands of neurons to half a billion.

As Godfrey-Smith put it, they became smart “in the sense of being curious and flexible… adventurous, opportunistic.”

The Myth of the Jawed Fish

Let’s apply the three-pronged Octopus Theory to the evolution of the multilateral system.

The dominant assumption is that the system changes because of external pressure, mostly from the states that control what an intergovernmental system looks like. We picture governments as the jawed fish of our evolutionary story: actors who know what they want and use “reform” as a tool to get it.

This fuels enthusiasm for formal reform drives, which under the current Secretary-General, António Guterres, have arrived in waves. In 2017, delivering on a campaign promise, Guterres launched a major effort to make the UN “focused more on people and less on process, more on delivery and less on bureaucracy.” Member States then asked for more reform to mark the UN’s 75th birthday, resulting in Our Common Agenda and the Pact for the Future.

We now have a third wave for the UN’s 80th anniversary, supported by a parallel global health architecture overhaul and efforts to tame a tangled climate bureaucracy. UN80 is supposed to deliver “a paradigm shift in how the UN system organizes its work and collaborates for greater impact,” but the process is again bogged down in arguments that largely fail to address the strategic challenges of contemporary multilateralism.

This is the flaw in the jawed fish metaphor. Put a group of governments in a formal negotiation, and most will fight harder to block what they fear than to chase what they want. Formality breeds deadlock. Major powers simply veto progress or use intergovernmental processes to strip radical proposals down to their least threatening elements. A powerful reform vision sometimes proves influential over the long term, but it is seldom the fastest route to near-term change.

But this does not make governments ineffective multilateral actors. Far from it.

Episode 7 of the World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, focuses on complex emergencies and opens with the UN’s response to the 2008 global food crisis under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The narrator is Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Programme during the crisis, who tells a story that starts with her warning made in April of that year that the world faced a danger that defied the traditional mechanics of famine.

Rising food prices were like a “silent tsunami,” she said. It was a resonant image in a world where memories were still fresh of an actual tsunami that had killed a quarter of a million people just 3½ years earlier.

But she did not deliver this warning at UN Headquarters in New York or in Rome where WFP is based. She spoke in London, where British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had called an ad hoc summit to explore the crisis, to which he invited a similarly ad hoc coalition of food supply chain stakeholders and heads of major global institutions.

Brown does not merit all the credit for triggering the global response, although he deserves his share. But his actions highlight a pattern: A national leader who wants to tackle a global challenge has long chosen the informal route or has at least started out along an informal path.

Maybe there was a golden age where passing a formal resolution was the best way to get things done, but if so, it has left little trace in the UN’s evolutionary record. Instead of formal reform driving lasting change, we find Member States (when they know what they want) using agile coalitions to drive innovation at speed. Minilateralism within the multilateral system, in other words.

Shocks and 3D Problems

That brings us to the two other forces that drive Octopus Theory: the forcing power of catastrophic shocks and the challenge of navigating multidimensional problems.

The 2008 crisis was a perfect storm. This was a systemic emergency driven by chronic underinvestment in food systems and climate shocks in major grain-exporting nations. As the U.S. housing market crumbled, speculative money surged into food commodities, while record oil prices meant more food being burnt as fuel. Spiking prices then triggered tit-for-tat protectionism, as countries used export bans and prohibitive tariffs to protect their own populations.

This shock, which crossed agriculture, finance, energy, and trade, demanded a new type of “operating system.” As Sheeran tells World’s Toughest Job, shortly after the London Summit, Ban Ki-moon transformed a routine April 2008 Chief Executives Board meeting in Bern, Switzerland, into a crisis summit. The CEB has the generally thankless task of coordinating the international system, but Ban seized the moment to bypass standard protocols and bring 22 entities under a single coordinating umbrella: the UN System High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTF). Urgency was the mother of multilateral invention.

Ban appointed John Holmes, his top humanitarian official, and David Nabarro to coordinate this body. Nabarro came from the public health sector, where he had honed his approach to herding cats during the avian flu scare. He functioned as a roving fixer, persuading competing entities to share data, synchronize funding appeals, and operate under a unified command. Rather than trying to build a permanent bureaucracy, he saw himself as a movement-builder, “in the system, yet outside; cooperating, yet challenging.”

Nabarro spent much of his time trying to prevent interagency warfare, above all the friction between the Rome-based agricultural agencies (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Programme, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development) and the Washington-based financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). The HLTF had a budget of just a few million dollars and no formal authority. “The big challenge is how to converge and energize actions for nutrition without precipitating discord,” Nabarro recalled. “We cannot have discord; there is too much at stake.”

But look beyond the structure — the Task Force itself — to the unfamiliar problems it tried to solve. The UN knew how to deliver emergency aid to vulnerable populations (if it could afford the food), but this crisis prompted innovation in the tools and funding needed to drive and fund longer-lasting improvements in crop yields. From fighting fires to building resilient food systems, in other words.

The crisis also accelerated a shift from sending food to providing cash. As Sheeran pointed out as the storm clouds were gathering, “there is food on shelves, but people are priced out of the market.” The fastest way to correct that was to inject cash into existing social protection systems. This ensured that poor families could afford to eat, while incentivizing local farmers to grow more. This pivot toward social safety nets, cash transfers, and food vouchers became a model for subsequent crises, matched by the provision of rapid balance-of-payments assistance that helped governments fund national priorities.

Even failures triggered innovation. The global response struggled to stop the wave of export bans (although it may have slowed the tit-for-tat dynamic) or to end Western subsidies for biofuels. But that spurred a hybrid of minilateral momentum and multilateral machinery. With a mandate from the G20, the UN system launched the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), hosted at the FAO, which provides the data on food stocks needed to reduce panic buying and hoarding. In parallel, the G20 endorsed the GEOGLAM network of satellites, an initiative housed at the World Meteorological Organization, to spot droughts and predict harvest shortfalls months before crops are gathered. These are vital global public goods, generated as a direct result of a crisis.

This is not to paint a Pollyannaish picture of multilateral performance, but to highlight the deliberate attempt always to do more than fight fires. In its strategy, the Task Force paired firefighting interventions with actions to strengthen global food systems. As Sheeran tells the podcast, this parallel pursuit of short- and long-term objectives was “not easy to do, not a muscle that was often flexed in the UN system.” But it had a lasting impact on the multilateral system.

Scar Tissue and System Upgrades

When viewed through this lens, large parts of the international system are best seen as accumulated scar tissue of past complex shocks — or the living tissue that grew back in their wake.

Successive crises have driven the structural upgrades we expect formal reform processes to deliver — and have done so more consistently and with many fewer arguments than those processes. Emergencies have encouraged interagency coherence, compelled data sharing, and accelerated the focus on human security. Some positive habits are lost once the crisis is over, but others are encoded in new protocols, coalitions, or legal instruments.

Yet we remain strikingly incurious about the history of this dimension of multilateral evolution. The contrast with biology is stark. Tracing the evolution of octopuses is notoriously difficult because soft-bodied animals leave few fossils, but biologists keep plugging away to build consensus. They look hundreds of millions of years into the past.

But we lack consensus over what can be learned from how the international system has tackled emergencies over just the past quarter century. My wager: More high-quality research on octopus evolution is published every year than on the entirety of global crisis management. Given the lives, money, and political stability resting on the latter, that is an absurdity.

Part of the problem is that institutional post-mortems fixate on what failed in a crisis, rather than what held. But that creates a danger for UN80 and other formal reform drives, especially when they are driven by a desire for simplification. In the absence of agreement on which structures are actually load bearing, any back-to-basics overhaul risks knocking down pillars that may matter most in the next emergency.

There is also a danger in undervaluing the UN’s ability to drive coherence in an increasingly fragmented international system. Like the UN, the octopus faces the challenge of radical decentralization, with the vast majority of its neurons distributed down its arms. Godfrey-Smith likens the octopus’s central brain to the conductor of a jazz band whose players love to improvise and receive “only rough, general instructions from the conductor, who trusts them to play something that works.”

But the conductor matters. If the arms are adventurous and opportunistic, the brain’s role is to force attention onto what matters most, especially when danger is high (for example, a sharp-toothed predator is approaching). When an octopus is dying, the brain degenerates first, and the decentralized arms begin to wander without purpose or coordination, leaving the creature unable to care for or protect itself. A highly decentralized body, it becomes clear, cannot function when the conductor stops doing their job.

When the Conductor Stops

This brings us back to the central question of this episode of World’s Toughest Job: Can the UN act as the emergency platform the world needs?

Octopus Theory helps us understand what is meant by playing the role of a platform. From the center, the UN cannot — and should not — micromanage the response to any shock that crosses sectors and geographies. But it can set a direction and coordinate execution by actors who possess the autonomy, flexibility, and on-the-ground intelligence to operate in a fast-moving environment. The center conducts the band. It should not try to play every instrument.

That requires a different type of intelligence at the center, with the oversight and vision to get the most out of a decentralized network. It puts a premium on an institution that is smart enough to navigate a complex, 3D space and secure enough to create the conditions for others to excel.

These days, a new complex global crisis pops up about as often as the Olympics. And the UN Secretary-General may be the only leader who can persuade a divided world to respond as one.

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Sigrid Kaag, a former Dutch deputy prime minister and finance minister and UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process; Martin Griffiths, a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; and Aarathi Krishnan, the founder and CEO of RAKSHA Intelligence Futures.

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

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This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: How can a new UN Secretary-General protect the infrastructure on which the world depends?

The episode opens with a look back at the early 2000s, when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recognized that the digital divide could lock the Global South out of the 21st-century economy. He used the UN to champion connectivity, helping create the conditions for the private sector to bridge the gap and give the African continent greater access to global networks. Read about that history here.

Today, the world is much more intensively connected, which has created new vulnerabilities. Over 95% of international data and trillions of dollars in daily financial transactions travel through a network of undersea deep-ocean cables. Maritime choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea have been disrupted by attacks on shipping, while cyberattacks and the severing of deep-sea cables have demonstrated the potential for a digital breakdown.

In this episode, co-hosts Jasmin Bauomy and are joined by an expert panel to discuss these vulnerabilities. Guests explore how states are reacting to these single points of failure, the limits of international maritime law when actors sever cables or block straits with impunity, and whether the UN could convene public and private actors to defend the networks on which global commerce and communication relies.

Here’s what Parag Khanna, the strategist, author, and founder and CEO of AlphaGeo; Salvatore Mercogliano, maritime historian and associate professor of history at Campbell University; and Elisabeth Braw, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the forthcoming Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines That Connect Our World, had to say.

1. The erosion of maritime law threatens the global commons.

The centuries-old doctrine of freedom of the seas is at risk as state and non-state actors flout maritime law. From illicit tolls and GPS spoofing to infrastructure sabotage, adversaries are shifting their attacks to the global commons — the ungoverned expanses of international waters and outer space.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has shown that weaponizing choke points offers actors important leverage. This creates the risk of copycat blockades as states and non-state actors seek to replicate the disruption without the costs of a full declaration of war. Growing lawlessness challenges the legal bedrock provided by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which was designed to guarantee transit passage and protect subsea cables.

Elisabeth Braw pointed out the contagious nature of gray-zone aggression — hostile acts that fall below the threshold of formal war. “The more countries violate maritime rules, the less incentive other countries have to stick by the rules,” she said. Nations may conclude that adhering to international treaties places them at a strategic disadvantage. “It took the world centuries to get to a place where countries could sign a treaty, and now the reality is the world is slipping away from that, which is a massive loss,” Braw warned.

Salvadore Mercogliano emphasized that this regression involves actors across the globe. “We’re seeing countries like the United States with its attacks on shipping in the Caribbean. We see Iran. We see the Houthi. We see the Russians and Ukrainians in the Black Sea. We see the Chinese and the Philippines in the South China Sea,” he said. Left unchecked, Mercogliano argued, this trajectory points toward “a return of great power competition on the high seas,” which he said would be “a massive step backwards.”

2. A single point of failure can send shock waves through global networks.

As countries work to protect their critical national infrastructure, they are forced to confront sources of vulnerability that lie beyond their borders. Domestic energy grids, healthcare systems, and financial sectors all depend on borderless digital architectures. National systems are only as resilient as the global infrastructure on which they depend.

Parag Khanna noted that global trade relies on “an immovable geography” that allows an energy and food crisis to ripple through complex systems already under pressure from the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the trade war triggered by the Trump Administration.

Mercogliano agreed that vulnerabilities overlap, with choke points for shipping doing the same thing for undersea cables. “Will those nodes become much more vulnerable to potential interdiction and attack?” he asked. When they are attacked, he said, disruption does not remain geographically contained. Digital sabotage threatens the systems ships use to navigate, he said, which can “lead to collisions … to groundings” in physical corridors.

Assessments of global risk highlight infrastructure vulnerability. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2026, geoeconomic competition is ranked as the leading threat, with experts across academia, business, government, international organizations, and civil society concerned by its impacts on critical infrastructure that is already prone to failures and accidents. Meanwhile, the Allianz Risk Barometer finds that just 3% of global businesses view their supply chains as very resilient, and risk managers rank global supply chain paralysis as the most plausible black swan scenario over the next five years.

As Mark Malloch-Brown warned, we may all have to learn to live with much higher levels of risk. “Which system is going to fail this week, year, or month?” he asked.

3. The privatization of risk creates disparities in global resilience.

Modern infrastructure is increasingly owned and operated by the private sector, with governments having less say on how it is protected. As a result, Malloch-Brown noted, “multinational corporations are now the de facto defenders of infrastructure we all depend on.”

Commercial repair schemes work well under normal conditions, but as Braw asked, “What would happen if the situation were to continue to deteriorate, where it’s not just commercial considerations and risks facing the cable owners and the repair crews, but geopolitical ones as well?” Mercogliano echoed this, questioning if companies will be able to insure themselves in dangerous waters.

Because resilience is a capital-intensive local good rather than a global public one, a geopolitical divide has emerged. Wealthy nations can afford to insulate themselves. Khanna pointed to Singapore as an example of a nation “hell-bent on redundancy.” In contrast, countries in the Global South lack capital for adaptation and remain exposed to sabotage and natural disasters. “Building redundancy costs money,” Mercogliano said, with poorer countries left to “get by with the minimum.”

According to the Global Infrastructure Risk Model and Resilience Index, the loss of infrastructure during disasters costs $732 billion annually, with low- and middle-income countries facing double the relative risk of high-income countries. This creates a vicious cycle where scarce capital is diverted from new development to repairing destroyed assets.

4. The next Secretary-General must assemble functional coalitions to defend global networks.

Protecting global infrastructure from attack is an extension of the UN’s mandate to maintain peace and security, but securing these networks requires engaging actors outside the realm of traditional foreign policy.

“You can’t solve critical infrastructure without the private sector at the table,” Malloch-Brown said. For the next Secretary-General, the lack of binding international law governing these spaces is a mandate to “move beyond the classic interstate formulas of the law and the UN of 1945 to convene these multi-stakeholder groups.”

The UN has a track record of evolving to protect the global commons, from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to the 2015 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, while Mercogliano highlighted how the International Maritime Organization had been able to “qualitatively change shipping on the world’s oceans.” Building on this legacy, the International Telecommunication Union and other bodies are adapting to modern threats, with Nigeria co-chairing its International Advisory Board for Submarine Cable Resilience.

But Malloch-Brown noted the attacks that the IMO had faced for its work on shipping and climate change, demonstrating to the maritime industry the dangers of “major power wrath.” The United States “absolutely destroyed the political consensus,” he said, “threatening delegates that they would lose their right and visas to come to America, and that their countries would be punished in other ways if they voted for it.”

Khanna pointed out that as formal global governance fractures, new transregional alliances are emerging. “I’m not suggesting that fragmented governance would be a better way,” he said. “It’s obviously suboptimal.” But he praised the “functional” nature of coalitions on semiconductors, critical minerals, trade, and other priorities. Regional groups are also stepping in to create and protect standards.

By wielding convening authority, a new Secretary-General may find space to unite tech giants, maritime insurers, environmental nongovernmental organizations, and sovereign states. Braw highlighted the unprecedented nature of such alliances. “It must be the only situation in which, for example, Greenpeace could team up with Meta and the government of Nigeria,” she observed.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

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The sixth episode of World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, explores the world’s critical infrastructure: the physical and digital transboundary networks that connect the world.

In it, Salvatore Mercogliano, the maritime historian, tells the story of the Alert, a ship owned by the British postal service. On the second day of World War I, the ship sailed into the English Channel to dredge up and sever five of Germany’s submarine cables. It was the opening salvo of a campaign in which British ships cut Germany’s transatlantic connections to the Americas, Spain, and its African colonies.

Its communications network wiped out, Germany was forced to rely on the cables of neutral countries like the United States or radio transmissions that were easily intercepted. This left the German regime vulnerable to British intelligence, which found out about a plot between the Germans and Mexicans and used it to end American neutrality.

After that, everyone knew the playbook: The first thing you did once a war started was to cut the cables.

The Swamp That Spoke to the World

It was the vulnerability of physical cables that made radio so attractive, as can be seen in a place called Coltano, stranded in the no-man’s-land between Pisa and Livorno.

Coltano was once a swamp and will be again if environmentalists get their way. While Coltano was partly drained by the Medicis, Mussolini’s government finished the job as part of its program known as internal colonization. Sharecroppers were brought down from the North to tame the wilderness and to live in standardized farmhouses named for the First World War’s battlefields, rivers, and mountains.

At the time, Italy was as much a young country as Egypt or Haiti is today, but the demographic wheel turns fast (a story we told in episode 3 of the podcast). In the Boom Economico of the late 1950s and 1960s, Coltano’s young people moved away as fast as they could. Coltano is now largely depopulated and may be reflooded to “rewild” it as a stopover for migratory birds.

But Coltano has another tale to tell, which is why its name may sound familiar. This story is rooted in the estate’s geography: a vast basin that acts as a natural parabolic dish, alongside marshy soil with extremely high electrical conductivity. This combination attracted the son of a wealthy Bolognese landowner and the heir to the Jameson Irish Whiskey fortune: Guglielmo Marconi.

Marconi was a college dropout but an inveterate tinkerer. He had become obsessed with Hertzian waves, locking himself in the attic of his family’s country estate, from where he managed to send a radio signal to the other side of a nearby hill. Spurned by the Italian government when he offered up his invention, Marconi moved to London in 1896 with his mother, who used her family’s industrial connections to help the 22-year-old secure an audience with the chief electrical engineer of the British Post Office.

The British were impressed, and Marconi was granted the world’s first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy. The shock wave came in 1901. Told by scientists that radio waves could never be sent across the ocean due to the curvature of the Earth, Marconi decided to try anyway. In December, he stood in a freezing shack in Newfoundland, listening to a receiver connected to an antenna carried into the sky by a kite. Across the Atlantic, his team fired up a transmitter. Through the static, Marconi heard three clicks: dot-dot-dot — the letter S in Morse code. He had bounced a radio wave off the ionosphere, an atmospheric layer no one even knew existed at the time.

Overnight he became the Elon Musk of his era, and the Italians fought to get their prodigal son back. King Vittorio Emmanuel III personally championed the inventor, arranging for the Italian navy to provide a warship to serve as his floating laboratory. When the ship anchored in the Baltic Sea, the King even brought the Russian Tsar on board to watch Marconi demonstrate the technology.

While surveying the Tuscan coastline on that same cruiser later that year, Marconi spotted the perfect site for the world’s first intercontinental ultra-power station: Coltano. The Medici estate now belonged to the Crown, so the King smoothed out any obstacles, and parliament voted through the budget to fund what was the Manhattan Project of its day. Over six years, engineers erected massive iron masts to support a complex umbrella of aerial wires that covered Coltano’s fields.

The King came for the launch. As he watched, Marconi tapped out a signal to a receiver in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. “First wireless from Italy,” ran the headline in The New York Times. “Marconi Sends Greetings to The Times Across 4,000 Miles of Space.”

Breaking Monopolies

By the time Marconi powered up Coltano, the tussle between wired and wireless signals was already baked into the burgeoning market for telecommunications.

The first fixed telegraph signal had been sent across the Atlantic 50 years earlier, when American businessman Cyrus West Field finally managed to plant a cumbersome cable onto the seabed without its snapping on the way down. On Aug. 16, 1858, Queen Victoria sent a congratulatory telegram to U.S. President James Buchanan. It took 16 hours to transmit fewer than a hundred words.

Barely three weeks later, the project’s chief electrician — convinced he could speed up the transmission — pumped too much voltage into the line, frying the cable’s insulation. The line went dead.

The Italian King. The British Queen. You could say that these were more farsighted times, in which visionary leaders were committed to using technology for the good of humanity. Or you could argue that European countries were desperate for ways to exert control over their empires and armies. Tellingly, Marconi’s second broadcast was to Italy’s colony in Eritrea. Later, Coltano became the primary voice of Mussolini’s Impero Fascista.

Marconi was a hot ticket, because the British empire had a monopoly on gutta-percha, a natural latex mostly used today for dentistry. Then, it was the only material that could effectively waterproof subsea wiring, allowing the Brits to corner the market in oceanic cables. They could charge adversaries what they liked and listen in to their messages as well.

Marconi’s wireless offered the Italians that modern buzzword: strategic autonomy. And they weren’t going to let the nascent multilateral system take it away from them without a fight. Marconi wanted his own monopoly, and his company caused a storm when one of its transmission stations refused to accept a message from the brother of Kaiser Wilhelm II because it was broadcast on equipment made by a German rival.

Germany called the first International Radiotelegraph Conference in Berlin in 1903 to promote global standardization, but Italy refused to sign anything that would force Marconi to open his network to competitors.

From the beginning, the parameters of the geopolitical game were set: Get as much bandwidth as fast as possible, because that provides economic and political power. Establish a monopoly if you can, and resist international rules if you have one. Sabotage and tap cables, especially at choke points. Jam, hack, and decrypt wireless signals. And if either cable or wireless becomes too dominant, invest in the other to hedge against your strategic vulnerabilities.

The One-Megabyte Flight

In our podcast, we pick up this story around a century after Marconi sent his first transatlantic signal, when a young project manager, Brian Herlihy, spent a week printing a 1 megabyte file. A week.

This was the era when the price of transmitting international data had collapsed almost to zero. During the dot-com boom — and the telecoms bubble it inflated — billions were spent on laying oceanic cable, just as a technological breakthrough expanded the capacity of existing cables by a factor of a hundred. Suddenly, the world had so much connectivity that most oceanic cable lay dark, waiting for someone to need it.

But this boom had not reached Guinea, or much of Africa, where bandwidth was scarce and data eye-wateringly expensive. As Kofi Annan’s Deputy Secretary-General, Mark Malloch-Brown, tells World’s Toughest Job, when Annan became UN Secretary-General in 1997, he made the digital divide a rallying cry. At the time, the African continent of 750 million people was connected to the global network by just a handful of exorbitantly priced oceanic trunk lines. Annan was convinced that if Africa missed the communications revolution, it would be permanently locked out of the global economy.

This was not a popular stance. Many leaders — and Silicon Valley titans — believed the UN’s priorities were backward. In a turn-of-the-century debate in Seattle, Bill Gates dismissed the focus on connectivity, arguing that the developing world needed clean water, healthcare, and education more than the internet. But to Annan, being online wasn’t a luxury. It was the engine that would allow societies to pay for both basic and more advanced needs.

The Secretary-General understood geopolitical reality: The UN couldn’t lay hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic glass. It needed the private sector. “The UN was an enabler,” Malloch-Brown says — it was about convening the right players to overcome regulatory hurdles and stimulate demand.

This was when Herlihy, our project manager, was tormented by a document no one could print. Part of a team trying to build a refinery, the contract emailed from France by the lawyers just wouldn’t download. Being the youngest guy on the team, he was told: “Get on a plane, fly back to Paris, get the document, and come back to Guinea.” Flights were infrequent, so it took him a week to return with a hard copy.

Like Marconi before him, Herlihy was fighting a monopoly. He spent his evenings in Guinea building a business case for what would become the Seacom cable, focusing on East Africa, where demand for data was spiraling but government-funded cables were forever delayed. Herlihy sold his plan to investors, assembled a $600 million fund, and started work. Resistance came from regional efforts to block private investment on the one hand, and threats from pirates off the Horn of Africa on the other.

When Seacom went live on July 23, 2009, the economic impact was immediate. Within three days, internet speeds across Kenya increased up to five times, and the bills of local businesses that had been paying $3,000 a month for 1MB of satellite data were slashed by 80%.

This activity catalyzed East Africa’s tech boom. the so-called Silicon Savannah, which today accounts for over 8% of Kenya’s economy and is the largest engine for employment growth for Kenya’s young people.

Severed Cables and the New Space Race

Today, Africa has been reached by 77 submarine cables, part of around 600 worldwide, an increasing proportion owned by Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers. That is a largely privatized network of a million miles of fiber-optic glass on the ocean floor, carrying over 95% of all the world’s intercontinental data traffic.

But wireless hasn’t gone away. In the 1970s, the U.S. Navy tapped Soviet military cables, creating a scramble for a more secure alternative. The space race wasn’t just about putting a man on the moon, it was about putting communication relays in orbit where submarines couldn’t reach them. For a brief period in the 1970s and 1980s, satellites were viewed as the secure future of telecommunications. But as Herlihy found, cables continue to dominate intercontinental traffic because satellites are too slow.

But just as cables were cut in WWI, the past few years have seen a spike in “gray-zone” warfare. From severed cables in the Baltic Sea (linked to Russian- and Chinese-flagged ships) to disruptions in the Red Sea, cutting physical cables is back in style. And natural disasters are also a threat. When a suspected underwater rockslide off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire severed four major subsea cables in March 2024, internet access across more than a dozen West African nations slowed to a crawl, forcing the countries to scramble for satellite backup.

As happened a century ago, the countermove is wireless, using low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Elon Musk’s Starlink. The initial pitch was utopian, targeting Kofi Annan’s digital divide, but the market has pivoted to the rich and the powerful. Cruise ships, cargo fleets, and airlines have stripped out their slow geostationary satellite systems and replaced them with LEO terminals. Satellites are increasingly used to provide redundancy for finance and business operations that cannot afford downtime.

But it was the war in Ukraine that changed how governments view LEO by showing that it could be used to create resilient networks for military communication. Cables can be severed and traditional military satellites are massive stationary targets, but LEO constellations, in contrast, form a self-healing “mesh.” If an adversary shoots down or jams 50 satellites, the network simply routes the signal through the other 5,000.

This has led to a new space race, as governments realize that LEO is critical national infrastructure and that they cannot rely on a foreign trillionaire to provide it. China, Taiwan, and the European Union are all launching their own mega-constellations, seeking the same strategic autonomy that Marconi offered his state sponsor more than a century ago.

Protecting the Civilian Network

The technology may have evolved from gutta-percha and spark-gap transmitters to glass threads and orbital meshes, but the geopolitical game of whack-a-mole remains the same. Nations and corporate titans race to build monopolies, adversaries scramble for alternatives, and the pendulum swings between the ocean floor and the stars.

As in Marconi’s time, the appetite for multilateral solutions is limited by those who believe they have a technological lead. But while individual nations and private companies can lay cable and launch satellites, they cannot police the global commons — the international waters and shared orbits — where this fragile hardware resides.

And as the competition for connectivity militarizes the seabed and balkanizes the sky, the need for international guardrails becomes more urgent. “Whatever we’ve suffered from so far is probably just the thin end of a much bigger wedge,” Malloch-Brown warned. Our everyday lives are increasingly reliant on physical and digital choke points, with single points of failure capable of disrupting banking, transport, and water supplies.

Just as Kofi Annan convened the world to build the network, the next Secretary-General may be called upon to figure out how to protect it. “This would be a classic case where a forward-looking SG would start to convene people around this issue of civilian infrastructure protection,” Malloch-Brown said. The law of war evolved over centuries to protect civilians but now may need to shield everyday life from digital attack. It is a massive undertaking, he argued, “but it would be a critical win.”

Our connectivity has created new vulnerabilities, with physical and digital chokepoints that are exposed as single points of failure. So now, the next United Nations Secretary-General inherits a different problem: As the infrastructure connecting the world becomes a target for attacks, what can they do to protect it?

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Sal Mercogliano, Associate Professor of history at Campbell University who runs a YouTube channel on shipping, Elisabeth Braw, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of the upcoming book Undersea War, and , founder and CEO of AlphaGeo. 

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

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Security Council Report (SRC) is an independent organization that provides in-depth analysis of the UN Security Council’s work. As the 2026 Secretary-General race enters its decisive phase, SCR has built a growing body of research, analysis, and real-time commentary tracking the selection process, from procedural mechanics to the UN Security Council dynamics shaping the outcome. All SCR resources can be found here.

Key resources include:

Research Report: “Power, Process and Participation: The Search for the Next Secretary-General” (April 2026)

SCR’s flagship report on the 2026 race was recently published and serves as a go-to guide for diplomats and others on how the appointment and selection process of the Secretary-General has evolved in the past decade. It examines the formal and informal dimensions of the selection process, the roles of the Security Council and General Assembly, and the structural factors shaping candidate prospects. At the launch event for the report held in April 2026, experts highlighted the tension between evolutionary innovation and entrenched practices that continues to shape the process.

Read the report

Podcast: Highlights from the Research Report and Key May Decisions (May 2026)

This episode of SCR’s podcast discusses highlights from SCR’s flagship research report on the selection of the Secretary-General and walks through the key decisions the Security Council was expected to make in May. Report co-authors Shamala Kandiah Thompson and Sara Bertotti highlight the changes made to the process since the 2015/16 selection and what we can expect in the months ahead.

In Hindsight: The Search for the Next Secretary-General (May 2026)

SCR’s latest retrospective piece reflects on how the selection process has unfolded and what recent developments reveal about Council dynamics. It tracks the state of the process following the General Assembly interactive dialogues with the four candidates at the time, and it flags several questions about transparency of the Council meetings as Council members began planning for straw polls, whether the General Assembly will be able to find ways to register their preferences for candidates, and how cohesive the E10 (the 10 elected members of the Council) would be in the months ahead as the process gets underway.

Read more

Podcast: The Search for the Next UN Secretary-General Begins (December 2025)

This episode of SCR’s podcast reviews the main steps of the selection process and the negotiations behind the joint letter issued by the Presidents of the General Assembly and Security Council on Nov. 25, 2025, the formal starting gun for the 2026 race.

Research Report: “The UN Secretary-General Selection and Appointment Process: Emerging from the Shadows” (April 2017)

This is SCR’s foundational report on the 2016 selection, the first selection process to introduce public hearings and greater General Assembly involvement. To date, it serves as an essential reference for understanding how reform efforts have shaped the process and what precedents apply to the 2026 race.

Read more

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This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we ask: As the world faces compounding economic crises, how should the next Secretary-General respond?

The episode opens with a look back at the 1990s, when Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali launched a direct challenge against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank’s Washington Consensus and tried to wrest some control over global economic governance back to the UN. (Read about that history here).

Next, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host are joined by an expert panel for a discussion of today’s economic order, which, thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, faces a real-time stress test of its capacity to absorb shocks.

With global public debt at record levels, the G20 paralyzed by infighting, and developing nations harmed by fallout from a system they do not control, the new leader will take office at a time when the multilateral financial architecture is under severe strain.

The panel explores whether the next Secretary-General can forge a new economic consensus, how developing nations can build their own financial power rather than compete for aid, and whether the UN can, and should, champion a global tax convention, a Borrowers’ Platform, or other new approaches.

Here’s what panelists Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; Carlos Lopes, Honorary Professor at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town; and Attiya Waris, Professor of Fiscal Law and Policy at the University of Nairobi, had to say.

1. Shocks are hardwired into the economic system, but the global steering committee is asleep at the wheel.

The era of optimism about globalization is over. In its place is a fracturing order defined by rapid shifts in economic power, growing inequality, rising protectionism, and, above all, repeated shocks.

In fact, the vulnerability of globalization to these shocks has become one of its defining characteristics. In the 1990s, just as governments had finished watering down Boutros-Ghali’s Agenda for Development, the Asian Financial Crisis was brewing. The world has since faced a cascading series of complex emergencies with severe global economic impacts (a theme we will explore further in episode 7 of World’s Toughest Job on June 23).

As Homi Kharas pointed out, “I don’t think there are many people who think that the frequency and severity of [these] kinds of shocks … is now going to disappear, that it was just an unfortunate string of bad luck. Many people are now thinking that that bad luck is actually part of the hardwiring of the global economy.”

Historically, the system has upgraded itself only when in a panic. The G20 was established at the finance minister level in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis and was elevated to the leader level when the 2008 global financial meltdown occurred. Today, however, the G20 — which one of its architects hoped would become a “steering committee” that could break the deadlock on the world’s biggest challenges and a route to reform of “the great institutions of globalization” — is itself struggling to reach a minimum level of consensus. And while regulatory reforms after successive crises may have increased top-level resilience, Carlos Lopes noted that they often come at the cost of collateral damage for economies in the Global South.

For a new Secretary-General, this is the reality. If the global economy is already heading toward its next crisis, there is essentially no one at the wheel.

2. As traditional global institutions drift apart, countries are building alternatives.

Our history lesson this week explored the tensions between two multilateral tribes — the universalists of the UN in New York, with their links to foreign ministers, and the Bretton Woods camp in Washington.

Attiya Waris noted that the IMF and World Bank are formally part of the UN family, but this happened in a deal that gave them political independence and budget autonomy. Part of the system, then, but “really not,” she said. Mark Malloch-Brown sees this as creative tension. While there is “a much deeper technical bench strength around financial issues in the Bretton Woods institutions,” he said, there is “much greater policy ambition in the UN.” Reaching the best outcomes, he added, requires “that push and pull between the two.”

For many developing nations, that push and pull is broken. With grant financing in decline, the UN’s leverage is weakening, concentrating more power in the better-funded World Bank and IMF. But with Bretton Woods voting power skewed toward Western economies, emerging markets are poorly represented relative to their share of global GDP. Consequently, as Lopes bluntly stated, developing countries are “increasingly seeing the IMF [and] World Bank structures as beyond repair.”

As Kharas noted, “the world of multilateralism, of universal collective action to solve global problems ... is disappearing.” Lopes agreed. “Realistically we are moving from … universalism to managing fragmentation,” he said. In its place, a two-track reality is emerging. On one hand, smaller coalitions of like-minded countries are teaming up to tackle immediate issues in a trend Kharas calls “plurilateralism.” On the other hand, emerging powers are building parallel financial architecture, from alternatives to the SWIFT messaging network to the BRICS-led New Development Bank. Highlighting how this shift is playing out regionally, Waris pointed out that “there’s [a new] African credit rating agency that’s a public agency, not a private company unregulated like it is in the United States right now.”

3. To fix a rigged system, developing nations are demanding equalizers rather than charity.

The rules of the global financial system have historically been dictated by wealthy creditor nations, leaving developing countries deeply vulnerable to economic shocks and trapped in compounding crises.

“The Paris Club is a group of creditor countries. They created the rules of the game,” Kharas said. “And every individual debtor country was basically given a ‘take it or leave it’ kind of proposition.” To counter this one-sided approach, developing nations are creating innovative mechanisms to level the playing field. A new Borrowers’ Platform has been created with backing from the UN’s trade and development wing, UNCTAD (and support from Kharas and his colleagues). Launched by 30 countries during the April 2026 IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings, it acts as a counterpart to established creditor networks. Rather than functioning as a collective bargaining cartel, this voluntary forum allows borrowing nations to share policy experiences and enter complex debt restructurings on a more equal footing than they were previously subjected to. As the current UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the launch: “Today, 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more servicing debt than [on] health or education. Developing countries are forced to climb the development ladder with one hand tied behind their backs.”

On the revenue side, the panel agreed that the Global South must break free from the cycle of competing to be recipients of a shrinking pool of foreign aid. Pointing out that Africa is paradoxically a net exporter of capital, Lopes said the continent must focus on harnessing its own untapped domestic wealth rather than pleading for outside help. “We can completely change the reality because we have about $4 trillion worth of assets that are not invested in the continent,” he said. “And to be chasing the 50 billion coming from aid and concessional lending every year ... is obviously something that doesn’t make sense. This is not about charity.” This makes Lopesis a supporter of the New African Financial Architecture for Development, which aims to “scale Africa’s financial firepower in support of Africa’s transformation.”

Some governments are also pushing for a legally binding UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation to ensure global financial transparency. Waris believes that getting such a convention — planned for presentation to the General Assembly in late 2027 — to the finish line will be a critical task for the incoming UN chief. “I think there isn’t anything more important right now than us being able to put that into play, and getting countries to ratify and roll out those treaties,” she said. Malloch-Brown cautioned that the next Secretary-General will face fierce pushback from wealthier nations. Pushing a global tax agenda, he said, will likely require “more sympathetic governments in the U.S.” and elsewhere before the new Secretary-General “is going to want to lead with her chin on that.”

4. On the global economy, the next Secretary-General needs to frame problems and articulate policy choices

The panel was clear-eyed about the limits of the Secretary-General’s economic power. As Kharas said, the incoming UN chief must accept that “the real action” on the global economy lies outside the UN, while Member States increasingly want to coordinate economic policy among themselves without intermediation. The Secretary-General’s job, Kharas argued, is not to dictate or act as a top-down coordinator, but rather to facilitate discussion and pull people together.

Lopes believes the UN needs a visionary more than a micromanager. He framed the core dilemma: the next Secretary-General can either play it safe as a cautious “system stabilizer” or can take the path of global leadership by defending “institutional neutrality” and brokering agreements among fragmented alliances. Waris agreed that the leader’s tone will be everything. Acknowledging that the world is currently “quite despondent,” she argued that the next Secretary-General must “raise the level of ambition” and project optimism — or risk being entirely “weighed down by the enormity of it.”

Ultimately, Malloch-Brown said, the UN’s true strength isn’t executing financial strategies but “framing the problem” and articulating policy choices. The new leader must act as “a fierce spokesman,” laying out a clear vision of “just how unfair the global economy remains.” Kharas saw an opportunity to look to the future. With time running out for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, he said that designing their replacement will be one of the first and most important economic tasks awaiting the new Secretary-General.

But as the Hormuz blockade pushes the global economy toward the IMF’s worst-case scenario — a near-recession with growth dropping to around 2% and headline inflation above 5% — the next UN leader may face more immediate concerns. Guterres called for a regular summit to force the UN, the G20, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank into the same room. While the Pact for the Future ultimately watered down the mandate to exclude the G20, the Secretary-General used his convening power to bring them to the inaugural summit anyway. Some assume this initiative is destined to expire quietly in the graveyard of good ideas that lack political support. But who knows? In another global financial crisis, the next Secretary-General might just find this summit is exactly the tool the world needs.

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

Listen to the latest episode of World’s Toughest Job below

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In June 1992, the United Nations decided to set an agenda. Or rather, the UN being the UN, it decided to set two. The first survived a painful birth, but was hailed as a triumph of post–Cold War diplomacy. The second was part of a trilogy, the magnum opus of a UN Secretary-General who believed he could use words to change how the world worked. It marked the beginning of the end of his career.

Agenda 21, adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, was a blueprint for sustainable development. It is not the topic of this article, but it is worth a detour to remember how different multilateralism was in the 1990s than today. Agenda 21 was “the most extensive and comprehensive program of action for the future of our planet ever agreed by governments,” a 40-chapter, 500-page to-do list for government, big business, and global citizens.

The Blueprint and the Backlash

Maurice Strong, the Canadian diplomat and industrialist and the Secretary-General of the Rio Summit, had dreamed of a binding Earth Charter, of the sort that would be “taught in schools, hung in homes, memorized, and recited.” But he was forced to back down in the face of opposition from the Global South, worried that environmentalists would block their path to development, and from the United States, driven in part by conspiracy theories that Strong was the head of a plot to impose world government.

With the charter watered down into a toothless declaration, the agenda became the summit’s big ticket item. Even though it was also nonbinding and did not require ratification, it had a reporting mechanism that mimicked those used by formal treaties. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development was set up with the task of encouraging countries to report what they were doing to tick items off the Agenda 21 to-do list.

If your reaction to this is, “Who cares?,” the answer is: the residents of the 20th century, who were touchingly concerned with what was going to happen to us in the 21st. Take Local Agenda 21, just one of the 40 chapters. LA21 invited communities to sit down with local leaders to see if they could engineer a sustainable global future from the ground up. At its height, more than 6,000 municipalities, largely but not exclusively in Europe, were using LA21 in their planning — and this at a time when austerity was forcing ever-greater responsibilities on the grassroots.

Let’s not pretend that LA21 made people suddenly care about the UN. It did not. But many local citizens actively liked the sustainable development recipe with its blend of social, economic, and environmental ingredients, and they valued the chance to do something for their families and communities during a period of unsettling instability. In 1992, the Japanese bubble burst, Europe suffered its first currency crisis, the post-Soviet world was on the verge of economic collapse, and Africa faced drought and brutal structural adjustment programs. Times were tough.

This was the first time the UN managed to get the world to care about an international agenda and, in my view, it has never really repeated the trick. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were bolstered by a campaign, but this used the modern definition of the “activist,” which asks as many people as it can to do as little as possible. The crowning achievement of this era was setting the mark recognized by the Guinness World Records for the “largest stand up in one week”: That’s 100 million people around the world supporting an end to poverty by… standing on their own feet. A decade after the adoption of the MDGs, the UN was still struggling to retrofit an engine for local action into what was a primarily top-down agenda.

And there was another problem. Popular mobilization continued from the opposing side. The Agenda 21 conspiracy theory was steadily progressing from the American fringe to the global mainstream, as one prominent opponent warned that the Rio to-do list was driving “a new kind of tyranny that, if not stopped, will surely lead us to a new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind.” Underestimate this movement at your peril, as it is now winning more battles than it loses. It sunk its teeth into climate science during the Climategate leaks, which contributed to the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. It mobilized across Europe to torpedo the 2018 Global Compact for Migration. And it then weaponized the COVID-19 “infodemic” against the World Health Organization and its pandemic treaty. The United States threatened to leave the WHO twice — and finally found the exit.

But none of that is the topic of this week’s episode of World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation. While the grassroots energy of Agenda 21 showed the UN at its most expansive, a new Secretary-General was opening up what would prove to be a more dangerous front: a direct assault on the global economy and the Washington Consensus. It was the beginning of an epic institutional turf war — and the beginning of the end of his career.

The Holiday from History

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian academic and a veteran diplomat, took office in 1992 as the sixth Secretary-General as the world began its post–Cold War “holiday from history” and cheerleaders persuaded themselves that a golden age of multilateralism would allow the UN to finally fulfill its potential.

But there were competing ideas for what the world needed — and as often happens in the international system, one school of thought lived in New York and the other could be found touting the newly formed Washington Consensus. This had its roots in a Latin American debt crisis, when John Williamson, a British economist, set out a checklist for the “prudent macroeconomic policies, outward orientation, and free-market capitalism” that “Washington” urged on struggling economies.

The consensus was a product of a hive mind with two hemispheres: on the one hand, “political Washington” by which Williamson meant the U.S. administration and Congress, and on the other, the “technocratic Washington of the international financial institutions, the economic agencies of the US government, the Federal Reserve Board, and the think tanks.”

Diplomats versus Finance Ministries

Boutros-Ghali would have been struck by how casually the IFIs — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — were lumped together with the American economic establishment. As — unusually a member of both the IFI and the UN tribes — says in this fifth podcast episode, the two institutions have very different origin stories, which has left the former as “creatures of finance ministers and finance ministries” and the latter “an organization of the street [of the mobilization we discussed earlier], of foreign ministers, and of politics.”

Boutros-Ghali was never a man of the streets, but he was a politician and a diplomat and a natural opponent of the Washington Consensus. When he welcomed the Socialist International to the UN headquarters, he told delegates that economic globalization required the “globalization of democracy,” bringing more countries into places where decisions were taken, in other words. As an Egyptian minister, he had already tried to drive change from the outside, forming a short-lived club of countries to negotiate with the G7 on debt. Now he planned to use his power on the inside to articulate a “new rationale for development … to the widest possible audience.”

This became the second installment in what would eventually be a controversial trilogy. Boutros-Ghali had already fired the first shot just three days after the Rio Summit with the publication of an Agenda for Peace. The Secretary-General did not even like summits and was outraged by the number of UN officials using the trip to Rio as the chance for a free holiday. Nor was he a fan of Strong’s freewheeling style or his “big tent” approach to multilateralism. By publishing his own agenda as soon as he got home, Boutros-Ghali less than subtly tried to elbow Strong’s baby out of the way.

Unlike the Rio outcome where every word had been fought over, this was very much a personal vision. It had been commissioned by a Security Council worried about new types of conflict — often internal or fueled by economic instability and ecological collapse — and Boutros-Ghali used this opportunity to extend the focus to the “economic despair, social injustice and political oppression” that led to wars. He was driven, at least in part, by anger in his team that the IMF and World Bank were failing to loosen the purse strings in countries where the UN was supporting a precarious peace. The Washington Consensus offered medicine strong enough to kill a patient in the emergency room.

The second part of the trilogy took the development challenge full-on. Boutros-Ghali had taken to writing to the G7 each year to complain about its lack of support for Africa and for conflict-affected states, receiving only “perfunctory acknowledgements.” Now, with the blessing of the General Assembly, he started to make the case for a “dynamic and enabling international economic environment” that would support development across the Global South.

Boutros-Ghali used an Agenda for Development to warn that “the globalization of financial markets” was generating “ risks of instability” that needed a different approach from the multilateral system. That meant breaking the Washington Consensus, or at least putting poverty reduction and social protection on a par with the goal of protecting macroeconomic stability. And it meant the World Bank and IMF working hand in hand with the UN, at every level from headquarters to the field.

This salvo did not go down well. Boutros-Ghali was losing friends with each new installment in his trilogy, a process that accelerated when — unbidden — he launched the finale: an Agenda for Democratization. But his real problem continued to be the fight he had picked with Washington, which worsened when he used a 1996 lecture at Oxford University to float the idea of a global tax to pay for the UN.

Bob Dole, running against Bill Clinton for the U.S. Presidency, turned Boutros-Ghali into a campaign target, sponsoring legislation to block any global tax and threatening U.S. withdrawal from the UN. He also took to deliberately mispronouncing the Secretary-General’s name at campaign rallies (”Bootros! Bootros!”). Rumors were rife of black helicopters primed for a UN takeover of the United States.

Boutros-Ghali lost his final battle with Washington on Nov. 19, 1996, less than a thousand days after the publication of an Agenda for Development. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the UN and a bitter Boutros-Ghali foe, cast a lone veto against his second term. That year, in what he described as a “strange twist of fate,” he finally made it onto the agenda of the G7 and traveled to France with great hopes that he would finally gain a fair hearing. But all anyone wanted to talk about was whether the United States would force out the beleaguered UN leader.

The fate of an Agenda for Development was not settled until after Boutros-Ghali had left office, to be succeeded by Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian diplomat and statesman. His report had been swallowed up by the intergovernmental system, a victim of diplomats who spend their careers slowing things down. To deal with it, the General Assembly had set up the snappily named Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group of the General Assembly on an Agenda for Development. And bodies with names of that sort are not known for their speedy work.

It took three years for the working group to dismantle Boutros-Ghali’s agenda. The G7 stripped out provisions that threatened the authority of the IMF and World Bank. The G77 contested the pillars on the environment and democracy, viewing them as unacceptable conditionalities on their economic growth. The end result was a shadow of the Secretary-General’s radical vision.

Diagnosing the Disease

But then the kicker. In July 1997, just weeks after the General Assembly adopted its diluted resolution, the Thai baht collapsed. The resulting financial contagion swept through Indonesia, South Korea, and emerging markets globally. The IMF dusted off the Washington Consensus playbook, organizing bailouts contingent on structural adjustment programs: massive interest rate hikes, slashed government spending, and forced bank closures.

The austerity measures turned a liquidity crunch into a regional depression, destroying millions of jobs and triggering food riots in Indonesia. The UN struck back, or at least its trade and development wing, UNCTAD, did. Using its landmark 1997 and 1998 Trade and Development Reports, it launched a frontal assault on the Washington Consensus, blaming IMF-mandated capital account liberalization for creating the crisis and austerity measures for worsening it. This was the institutional challenge to Washington’s hegemony that Boutros-Ghali had designed his agenda to provoke.

Which brings us back to the central question of this episode of World’s Toughest Job: What role, if any, can a Secretary-General actually play in tackling the global economy?

Boutros-Ghali’s story offers an answer: You can diagnose the disease, but you might not survive prescribing a cure. The Secretary-General lost his job, but three decades later, he may be winning the argument. His career-ending demands for debt relief, global taxes, and a more balanced global economy are now the baseline for those working to reform the global financial architecture. Maybe Boutros-Ghali wasn’t wrong, just 30 years ahead of his time.

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Today, more than 50 countries are in serious distress because of their debt. And now, the crisis in the Hormuz Strait is affecting food prices, currencies, and fuel supplies all at once. And the G20 can’t seem to agree on a course of action for how to solve it all.

So what could or should the next UN Secretary-General do? Can the UN become a platform for global economic governance — the way Boutros-Ghali hoped it could be?

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.; Carlos Lopes, Professor at the Nelson Mandela School, University of Cape Town and a former UN Under-Secretary-General; and Attiya Waris, Professor of fiscal law and policy at the University of Nairobi.

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

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This week on World’s Toughest Job, a podcast co-produced by Foreign Policy and the United Nations Foundation, we tackle a defining challenge for the next UN Secretary-General: Does the international system have a say in the governance of artificial intelligence?

The episode opens with a look at the UN’s very first resolution: an attempt to govern the atomic bomb as the world grappled with a frightening new technology (read about that history here).

Next, Jasmin Bauomy and her co-host are joined by an expert panel for a discussion of today’s technological frontier. With explosive innovation driven by private capital, tech monopolies are increasingly intertwined with the national security agendas of the world’s most powerful governments.

The panel explores whether the next Secretary-General can invent a form of diplomacy that brings tech CEOs directly to the table and whether the UN can mobilize the Global South, middle powers, and civil society to ensure that global governance isn’t captured by Silicon Valley lobbying or superpower rivalry.

Here’s what Ambassador Philip Thigo, Kenya’s Special Envoy on Technology; Dr. Nur Laiq, a Technology Policy and Geopolitics Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Maxime Stauffer, co-founder and CEO of the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance, had to say.

1. The new arms race is corporate.

The challenge of artificial intelligence mirrors early efforts to grapple with the atomic bomb, but unlike the state-controlled nuclear era — where science was locked inside secret government laboratories — today’s AI decisions are being made primarily by private tech CEOs.

This presents a new problem for public governance. “Since the 1990s, big tech has sold governments a deal,” Dr. Nur Laiq said, “essentially just saying, ‘Let us regulate ourselves, and we will deliver growth and innovation.’” But as co-host Jasmin Bauomy asked the panel, if a leading AI lab decides to withhold its newest model because it is deemed too powerful to release, does that mean we have global governance in the hands of one (unelected) man?

Frontier AI is controlled by tech monopolies whose capital expenditures eclipse national research budgets. This shifts the balance of global power. As Ambassador Philip Thigo noted, the UN finds itself in an ironic position. “You sit in an imperfect system that governs multilateralism, trying to challenge a power that is concentrated between a few companies and a few countries,” he said.

Maxime Stauffer agreed. While a tech company might pause its own rollout, relying on self-regulation is a symptom of a deeper governance gap. “It is unlikely that the U.S. government or the UN system will be able to specify safety standards in the next year or two or three years to be able to handle [advanced models],” she said, “so we need some form of action.”

2. Governments may have more leverage than they think.

The tech industry uses its origin story as a shield against oversight. “Silicon Valley likes to say that it’s built by nerdy geniuses in garages,” Laiq said. “Now, the reality is that a lot of the stack actually sits on public money and public effort, on defense budgets, on public universities and R&D, global supply chains and global labor, and, of course, our data.”

That gives governments leverage. As Laiq pointed out, “Governments and citizens aren’t just recipients, we’re co-builders and investors in this system. ... So AI firms are formidable, but they’re not untouchable.”

That said, the intimidation factor remains high. Stauffer acknowledged that “the state of knowledge of AI is still quite low among diplomats, and it’s quite hard to ramp it up.” Yet, the idea that policymakers must fully grasp the detail may be a trap. Laiq pushed back against the contention that only software engineers can write AI regulations. “You don’t have to be a banker to regulate Wall Street,” he noted.

Thigo, drawing on Kenya’s push for equitable AI governance, challenged the perception that the public sector is destined to be left behind. “I reject this false narrative from Silicon Valley that governments have no place to govern AI, or that they don’t have the capacity or competence, or that technology moves faster than laws are designed. I think it is a false narrative,” he argued. “I would tell the SG to double down on that.”

3. Beware the military-AI complex.

The push for AI governance increasingly collides with national security interests. Co-host Mark Malloch-Brown warned of an emerging “military AI complex,” where tech executives align with national security states — primarily in the United States and China — to build closed systems. These actors have little patience, he said, “when the ... woman from the UN comes knocking and says, ‘We want you to sit down at a conference table and discuss rules of the game.’”

For the rest of the world, superpower rivalry intensifies the risks from AI. Laiq pointed out that policymakers are concerned about “being forced to choose between rival AI blocks — an American stack or a Chinese stack — and then getting locked into technological dependence.” At best, governance discussions happen in invite-only forums where, as Thigo pointed out, “We don’t have a seat.”

States risk being relegated to passive consumers of the AI future rather than co-builders of it. The divide is already wide. “Only 1% of global data centers are in Africa,” Thigo said, claiming that the continent’s young demographic, young Kenyans in particular, are “the largest consumer of AI products per capita.” For the global majority, the fight isn’t just about managing AI risks; it is about ensuring they aren’t left out of the AI economy entirely.

4. The intergovernmental ‘Hail Mary.’

Despite its flaws, the United Nations remains the only platform where states can meet as equals. As Thigo put it: “Outside the UN, countries in the Global South have nowhere else ... to engage in these types of conversations.”

The UN is unlikely to have the power to create, let alone enforce, a top-down treaty, but should instead build what Stauffer calls “stepping stones” and “option value” for the future — promoting international interoperability and establishing shared frameworks before a catastrophic technological shock forces everyone’s hand.

However, the Secretary-General cannot act on AI alone. Effective regulation requires an injection of political vision from Member States themselves. Stauffer noted that he is often “taken aback by the lack of ambition or leadership among Member States to have a vision for what the UN can do on AI governance,” arguing that the primary job of the next Secretary-General should be to put the onus back on Member States to create and champion a vision.

Ultimately, the choice facing governments may be stark: find a unified platform or be pushed aside by more powerful interests. That may mean dusting off the 1946 playbook of collective security. In the age of artificial intelligence, Benjamin Franklin’s (apocryphal) warning at the dawn of another revolution may resonate as much for governments as for rebels: “We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

Quotations have been lightly edited for clarity.

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The first United Nations resolution promised to “establish a Commission … to deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy and other related matters.” But right from the beginning, it was a fix without a fix.

Resolution 1 was agreed Jan. 24, 1946, during the General Assembly’s inaugural session at Methodist Central Hall, just across from London’s Westminster Abbey. It was a bitterly cold winter, and delegates sat shivering through the discussion of an immediate threat to the UN’s mission to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” But it wasn’t much of a debate. “The general attitude of the Assembly was that members could not change it without antagonizing the powers that controlled the atomic secrets,” the New York Times reported, “so they did not try.”

On behalf of the leader of those powers, U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes told the Assembly that “we entered this race not to destroy, but, on the contrary, to save civilization, but if the race continues uncontrolled the civilization we hope to save may be destroyed.” The United States had already caucused with its collaborators in the Manhattan Project — the United Kingdom and Canada — and then hashed out with the USSR the wording of what would become Resolution No. 1. The fix was in.

Pushback came on two fronts. From Poland’s delegate, the plea to focus not just on the risks from nuclear weapons, but on “the use of atomic energy and other conquests of science for the good of humanity.” And from Pedro Lopez, representing the Philippines, a furious reaction to the idea that the Commission would be under the full control of the UN Security Council.

After getting somewhat lost in a metaphor about how this left the General Assembly “in the same awkward predicament as a woman who gave life to a child and yet was not permitted to fondle it,” Lopez addressed the victorious Great Powers directly: “If you grant to this General Assembly the power to create the Commission, then by all means you should be prepared to meet the logical and legal consequences by conserving to the Assembly the power to alter, modify, control, or abolish altogether, that which it has created.” The resolution, however, was adopted by a show of hands. Lopez did not dissent.

The Illusion of a Nuclear Monopoly

Back in Washington, a second tussle between right and might was moving toward its preordained conclusion, as Kai Bird, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Robert Oppenheimer, tells the fourth episode of World’s Toughest Job.

Oppenheimer’s government, however, saw the issue differently. According to Bird, the physicist and President Harry S. Truman disagreed about whether the United States had a lasting nuclear monopoly. The President thought it did and that it should use the leverage this provided. Oppenheimer believed that scientific discoveries always flow across borders and that a USSR bomb was inevitable.

This clash led to an American position that was a bit of a mishmash. The United Nations Atomic Energy Commission had been created at its behest. Now it formed a brain trust to develop a proposal for what the Commission should do, with Oppenheimer the only nuclear physicist on board. The result was the Acheson-Lilienthal blueprint , which argued that a UN body — the International Atomic Development Authority — should be given a global monopoly over dangerous nuclear material and the operation of any reactor capable of breeding significant amounts of plutonium. Only “safe” nuclear activities would remain under national control.

This seemed like a big concession, but Washington was banking on its latent nuclear capability. If any other state ever attempted a nuclear breakout, the United States assumed it could rely on its industrial and scientific lead. For the realists in the Truman Administration, however, this assumption wasn’t enough. As Bird recounts, Truman passed the blueprint to Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator who pops up advising every American president from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy. Truman secretly loathed Baruch. But he wanted someone with the credibility to turn what many conservatives believed was a naive giveaway of America’s greatest weapon into something that could be sold to the U.S. Senate.

The Poison Pill

Baruch demanded — and was given — a free hand, and he made full use of his mandate. Labeling the Soviets as obstructive and untrustworthy, his plan demanded they give up their UN veto on nuclear matters and accept intrusive inspections long before the United States would surrender a single bomb. It was a deal designed to protect American supremacy, and an offer the Soviets couldn’t possibly accept. As Cold War historians Joseph L. Nogee and John W. Spanier have written, the Baruch plan was “a superb tool of psychological warfare: If the Soviets agreed to it, they would place themselves in a position of permanent military and, therefore, political inferiority to the United States; and if they turned it down, they would be spurning America’s gesture of good will and assuming the responsibility for the Cold War.”

The Soviets were supposed to veto, and they did. Their counterproposal reversed the sequence, demanding immediate destruction of all American atomic weapons before any international control mechanisms were established. But it was all shadow play. Stalin’s nuclear program was in full swing, and the Soviets would test their first weapon In 1949. Truman initially refused to believe what had happened. A nuclear monopoly had evaporated in just a couple of years.

In World’s Toughest Job, we tell the story of Resolution 1 — and all it failed to accomplish — not because of what it tells us about nuclear competition, but for the light it sheds on the governance of another revolutionary technology: artificial intelligence.

From the Atom to the Algorithm

Eighty years after Truman assumed the United States could maintain a monopoly over the atom, today’s great powers are fighting for control of the algorithm. The geopolitical dynamic is uncannily similar to the early years of the Cold War. As former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently argued, analysts disagree on whether AI is charging toward superintelligence or whether it will follow a “less dramatic path.” And they also disagree on how important it is to be first out of the gate. But those who believe the pace of innovation is rapidly accelerating and who think that leadership matters are concluding that “the lead may become self-reinforcing, making meaningful catch-up not merely difficult but effectively impossible.” In this scenario, it is worth doing almost anything not to be second.

Of course, only a handful of nations are competitors in this race. It is a contest driven primarily by the United States and China, with perhaps a few others poised to play supporting roles — much like the secondary nuclear powers of the early Cold War. Other governments are just as much onlookers as the vast majority of UN Member States were in 1946. Many are genuinely terrified — palpably panicking — both about how fast AI technology is moving and what that could mean for a U.S.-China showdown. Yet, just like Poland’s delegate in 1946, a second group of countries is focused more on the opportunities. As the UN Foundation’s AI lead, Claire Melamed puts it, they hope that AI will prove to be the “next electricity” rather than the “new nuclear.” And a third group echoes the frustration of the Philippines during that first UN debate: They look at the power concentrated in Washington, Beijing, and Silicon Valley, and wonder if the global majority will get any say over developments that will shape their future.

In Search of an AI Foothold

Which brings us to the role of the international system and the challenge facing its next leader. The UN’s first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, viewed global peace not just as a policy challenge, but as a “sacred mandate” from the victims of World War II. When Resolution 1 failed and the Cold War intensified, Lie refused to let the multilateral system be sidelined. He launched a “Peace Tour,” traveling to Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow while trying to create diplomatic space by reaching beyond governments to scientists and the global public. But the superpowers froze him out and, as he became increasingly marginalized, he resigned, handing Dag Hammarskjöld the leadership baton.

With AI, the UN is once again scrambling to find a foothold. The current Secretary-General has pushed for the launch of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which will bring together Member States, industry leaders, and civil society for the first time in Geneva in July. As our podcast roundtable discussed, these initiatives are building some kind of foundations, although it will not be until the watch of a new Secretary-General that we see whether the UN has a substantive role to play in AI governance or if the future will be carved up by superpowers, tech billionaires, and invite-only summits.

The Governance Long Game

But let’s not assume from the failure of Resolution 1 that the UN simply gave up on the nuclear issue. In the 1950s, Hammarskjöld worked tirelessly to champion the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency and bring it under the UN’s aegis. Following the “near-death experience” of the Cuban Missile Crisis (a story told in episode 2), nonproliferation came back on the agenda, as President Kennedy worried that there could be as many as 25 nuclear-armed nations by the 1970s. That fear was given form by a secret experiment that showed a viable nuclear weapon could be designed in less than three years by a part-time team of young physicists using only public information.

The breakthrough came when Secretary-General U Thant threw the UN’s full weight behind the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It relied on a formula that Oppenheimer had once doubted: a diplomatic treaty backed by a rigorous inspection regime. But this new architecture of restraint actually worked. Between 1970 and 2000, it curbed global proliferation, even when factoring in countries hiding under NATO’s nuclear umbrella. For states most likely to develop a nuclear program, joining the treaty slashed the annual probability of pursuing a bomb from 6.65% to just 1.14% — meaning the NPT likely prevented at least nine countries from becoming nuclear powers by the turn of the century.

That’s quite a return for multilateral diplomacy, given that every additional nuclear power moves the risk of miscalculation, accident, or aggression closer to a certainty. Not a safe world, but a safer one. It is a reminder to the next Secretary-General that global governance is a long game. The UN may be outgunned on AI today, but its first job may simply be to stay in the game.

This year, one of the leading artificial intelligence labs decided its new model was too dangerous to release. It was essentially a private CEO making a governance call for the entire world. The UN wasn’t in the room.  In fact, it wasn’t even invited.

The UN is trying to catch up. It has launched a new scientific panel, and it is hosting global dialogues in Geneva to get everyone on the same page. But is that enough? Or will the next Secretary-General get left behind while Silicon Valley writes the rules for the future?

Host Jasmin Bauomy and co-host are joined by Ambassador Philip Thigo, Kenya’s special envoy for technology; Nur Laiq, a technology and policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Max Stauffer, co-founder of the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance in Geneva.

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

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Thant Myint-U is an award-winning author, historian, conservationist, and international public servant. His most recent book is Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World, a history of the 1960s told through the life of U Thant, the first UN Secretary-General of color. He is a Senior Fellow at the UN Foundation.

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Your report outlines several priorities for the next Secretary-General’s first 1,000 days. Can you tell us about your recommendations?

We see a once-in-a-generation opportunity, because for the first time in decades, fundamental governance questions are on the negotiating table. We have multiple reform processes converging, and there is political will in some quarters for transformation. But we also have seen that reform can become synonymous with austerity and cuts, which would miss the opportunity to address the real crises of power and legitimacy within the system.

That is why we are proposing a 1,000-day framework in which the next Administration takes a sequencing strategy, building political capital and deploying it thoughtfully over time.

Read the report

The first priority — the first 100 days — is to establish credibility through transparency. It is extremely important that the next Secretary-General understands the mandate and the power they have, makes credible decisions, and develops a strong narrative for both the inside — meaning the UN system at large — and the outside, meaning Member States.

The second recommendation is to build coalitions. This means fostering a “friends of UN reform” dialogue, bringing together and bridging Member States beyond the traditional negotiating blocs.

The third recommendation is to institutionalize changes — completing a mandate review pilot and launching the first UN Development Charter [a proposed compact linking agency coordination to donor funding], which would give stakeholders within the system authority to clarify and test reforms in pilot countries. The main message here is to experiment, take risks, and test what can work and what cannot. That is a liberty the next Secretary-General should embrace in order to adjust a system that is very difficult and very slow to change.

The fourth recommendation, in year three, is to demonstrate results. This means enabling Member States to begin proposing the next wave of reforms based on the framework that has been established.

You describe the UN development system as “ungovernable by design.” What makes it ungovernable?

Underlying all of this is what we call a triple disconnect that the next Secretary-General will inherit: Authority without resources, because over 80% of funding is earmarked with no governance control or accountability. Resources without oversight, as just 10 donors provide nearly 70% of funding. And States without a voice, because the countries that most need technical cooperation and policy advice have the least power over priorities.

The bottom line here is that formal governance structures do not match power dynamics. Boards do not actually control the direction of institutions — they are quite passive — and this is where I see an imbalance of power within the UN system itself. And the Secretary-General does not have direct oversight over the agencies, funds, and programs that execute on the ground. It is a mismatch by design. It makes reform difficult and makes it hard to have a holistic view of development within the UN system.

People have been talking about UN reform for years. What hope do you have that now is the time for change?

There is an expression that every crisis holds an opportunity, and this is an existential crisis, which is why I believe people will take it seriously. I do not think we will see fundamental changes immediately, but none of the major players — including the P5 [the five permanent members of the Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States] — want to leave the UN. Smaller Member States will fight dearly for the UN because it is the only space at a global level where they can be heard, can negotiate, and can have a voice, and sometimes they have influence over outcomes. We have reform agendas on the table and people actively working on them. Even though a growing number of countries would like to see a weakened UN, they don’t want to abolish it because they know that the UN helps bring the world together in one place.

The report claims that power increasingly operates outside formal governance structures. Why have informal mechanisms become dominant?

Funding is the primary driver of parallel systems and of Member States pursuing bilateral agendas rather than what was negotiated multilaterally.

Boards approve strategic plans but control only a small fraction of spending. Donors shape priorities bilaterally through earmarking, and multilateral entities have effectively become executors of bilateral agendas. What is even more worrying is that transaction costs have multiplied. Currently, more than 60% of UN grants are below $1 million. Anyone who has worked with the UN knows it is not an inexpensive institution to work with because it has a very large bureaucracy. Sometimes, transaction costs can exceed the benefit delivered on the ground.

Core funding has not grown; in fact, it has actually declined. The goal was that Member States would commit at least 30% [of their contributions] to core funding by 2023. That did not happen. COVID-19 and other crises served as cover, but for whatever reason the target was not met. Now, the goal is for that to happen by 2027.

In the report, you discuss four forms of power — symbolic, managerial, network, and Charter — and note that network and Charter power are underutilized at the UN. Can you give concrete examples of how a Secretary-General could use those forms of power more effectively?

There has long been a debate about whether we need a Secretary or a General — or these days, a CEO — and I think the answer is that we need all of the above.

The Secretary-General has a limited mandate but has significant power to work the aisles of the UN and conduct quiet diplomacy. This leader has the power to set agendas, as we saw with the Sustainable Development Goals, and will probably do it with the post-2030 agenda [the framework that will replace the SDGs], migration, AI, and other issues. And this person will have the power to mediate and facilitate dialogue among Member States, nudging them toward convergence.

We have seen very successful Secretaries-General who may not have been the most visible on television, but they do their work quietly, through direct engagement with Member States and careful stewardship of the system itself. It requires a lot of diplomatic skill. Many incoming Secretaries-General have come from ministerial or even prime ministerial backgrounds. They are accustomed to giving orders that are executed. In the UN, an order is debated, questioned, filtered through layers of power, and what you write in the morning rarely looks the same by afternoon. So you really need to know how to navigate the system in order to influence it.

Do you think the next Secretary-General will have the political space to deliver on the recommendations in the report?

The next Secretary-General will have to earn it. It’s about how much you can make out of the system. This is why we believe the next Secretary-General must be someone who understands the system and knows how to navigate it. The frustrations will come early because the desire to reform faces a world of bureaucracy, competing interests, and States that like the status quo because it works just fine for them.

From day one, what matters is narrative, clear messaging, and keeping up the morale within the system itself.

They will be on the defensive immediately and will need to find ways to gear up to be on the offensive as much as possible.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.