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In 1945, the founders of the UN wrote sovereign equality into the organization’s Charter. It was a profoundly unequal world. The U.S. emerged from World War II with unmatched power. Britain and France still ruled empires. Much of Africa and Asia had no sovereign seat at all. And five states would hold a permanent veto over international peace and security.
The Charter did not dismantle these inequalities, but it did guarantee the equal legal standing of states. Decolonization gave that principle teeth. Newly independent nations could finally govern in their own name and stand on the international stage as political equals. The multilateral system gave these states the right to speak, negotiate, and influence international decisions, even if it could not overwrite the economic and security dependencies left behind by empires.
Sovereignty has always been constrained, but what has changed since 1945 is the density and reach of the relationships shaping sovereignty.
Capital moves through international financial networks. Governments borrow at prices shaped by global financial markets, and exporters are subject to tariff treatment they simply do not control. Public institutions rely heavily on foreign-owned cloud infrastructure. Supply chains for microchips and compute power are also highly concentrated.
For the UN, this matters because diplomatic positions are formed long before a state enters the negotiating room. A delegation’s vote might be contingent on a security guarantee, tech access, or a private investment requiring another capital’s approval. Governments may still make the final choice, but the price for that choice can now be much higher.
Sovereignty with Strings Attached
I developed the concept of Transactional Sovereignty to describe the point at which one state’s dependence becomes another’s leverage. When a state relies on resources it cannot easily replace, the supplier gains the power to shape its sovereign choices.
That resource could be money, security, energy, technology, infrastructure, or market access. These arrangements can often be mutually beneficial, but smart governments negotiate hard and build alternatives so that they are not held hostage later.
To understand who holds the power, look at what alternatives each side had (if any). What autonomy was traded for access? What strings were attached? And what is the penalty for walking away?
Influence rarely requires an explicit quid pro quo. Nor can you explain how a state behaves through the lens of a single relationship. Instead, look more broadly at what a government has at stake, and what it fears losing if it steps out of line.
What Lies Behind the Vote
In 1990, when Yemen was an elected member of the Security Council, its ambassador Abdalla Saleh Al-Ashtal voted against Resolution 678, which authorized force against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. “That will be the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast,” a U.S. diplomat warned him.
Because Yemen depended heavily on Saudi and American support, retaliation followed swiftly. More than $70 million in American assistance was halted, while the U.S. blocked access to World Bank and International Monetary Fund financing. Saudi Arabia went further, expelling more than half a million Yemeni workers.
While Yemen still had freedom to choose, holding the same formal rights as any other state, it paid a higher price to make that choice.
Today, similar pressure can be applied through threats to cut off market access. In April 2025, 63 governments supported the International Maritime Organization’s Net-Zero Framework. But before the formal adoption in October, the U.S. issued a warning: Any country backing the measure would face restricted port access, new fees, visa restrictions, commercial penalties, and other sanctions.
When Saudi Arabia called for an adjournment of the adoption for a year, the motion passed by a vote of 57-49, with 21 abstentions. We cannot be sure that every government that backed the postponement did so out of fear of American retaliation, but the underlying message was clear: The United States had made explicit the bilateral cost of a global vote.
Long before it forces a visible reversal, pressure can reveal itself through procedure, like adjournments, abstentions, strategic absences, or sudden shifts in negotiating language.
The Commercial Front
Technology adds a new dimension, as geopolitical relationships flow not just through governments, but through private companies as well.
In February 2026, the UN General Assembly appointed 40 members to the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI by a vote of 117-2. Only the U.S. and Paraguay opposed the measure. Just days before, Paraguay had signed a critical-minerals memorandum with the U.S., deepening a relationship that already included military agreements and growing American investments in AI data centers.
Paraguay may simply have shared the U.S. stance on UN scrutiny of AI, but its vote sheds light on the backdrop against which sovereign choices are now made.
The recent deal between Microsoft and the UAE’s flagship AI firm, G42, reveals a similar dynamic, but from another angle. To secure Washington’s approval for the partnership, G42 was forced to remove Chinese technology from its operations. The companies then adopted security protocols drafted alongside the U.S. and Emirati governments, elevating a corporate transaction into a broader bilateral technology partnership.
In this case, a commercial transaction gained new geopolitical weight, as technology, capital, and government approval became intertwined.
Building an Alternative
Transactional Sovereignty can encourage governments to bypass multilateral institutions entirely.
Deep seabed mining shows how this can happen. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, mineral resources beyond national jurisdiction are governed through the International Seabed Authority. But in April 2025, the U.S. circumvented this body when President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to accelerate domestic licensing for mineral extraction in international waters.
There was no UN vote. The U.S. built an alternative framework of national permits and corporate concessions and relied on other governments, financial markets, insurers, and buyers to legitimize it. Can it now secure sufficient international buy-in to make the parallel system viable? Or will the multilateral system fight back?
What the Secretary-General Can Do
The 10th Secretary-General will take office on Jan. 1, 2027. The new leader will not be able to prevent a government from imposing tariffs, force a technology company to provide compute, or unwind a commercial deal.
But they can use the core question of Transactional Sovereignty to explore choices made inside UN negotiating rooms. To ask: What would this state have had to risk to choose differently?
To answer that question, a new UN leader needs analysis of financing decisions, tariff exposure, technology access, security agreements, strategic investments, and private deals. They then need to see that analysis mapped against the decisions governments take, while remembering that a postponed vote, an abstention, deleted language, or a decision to bypass the multilateral system altogether can be just as revealing as a state’s final position.
None of this would give the UN new authority, but it would equip the Secretary-General to use their reporting, good offices, and public agenda to support governments while they have meaningful alternatives.
They can intervene at the point when financing can still be negotiated, tariffs revised, technical standards unsettled, and suppliers replaced, rather than after infrastructure is built, technology embedded, debt accumulated, and commercial ties locked in.
In 1945, sovereign equality gave radically unequal states a common political standing, but this principle is increasingly hard to sustain as economic realities drive up the cost of sovereign decisions, above all for states facing the highest risks.
The incoming Secretary-General cannot reverse the erosion of diplomatic independence, but they can make its reality impossible to ignore. By the time a decision reaches the flags and the microphones, it is already too late. Votes are cast based on relationships that have often been in place for years.
By understanding the undercurrents of Transactional Sovereignty from day one, the new Secretary-General will have much greater power to help governments defend the sovereign space they need to act.
