The World’s Toughest Job

Harold Weston, Building the United Nations--#3--South End General Assembly, 1951. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Committee of the Weston United Nations Paintings, 1955.

Welcome to [Re]Group, a platform for ideas, debate, and solutions for the future of global cooperation in turbulent times.

We start with the race for the next United Nations Secretary-General — often described as “the world’s toughest job.”

Over the coming weeks, we will follow the selection process, identify issues critical to a successful transition, prepare for the first 100 days-plus of a new UN administration, and explore strategies for a new generation of multilateral cooperation.

Along the way, we will be developing a rolling open-source playbook of models for renewed cooperation, building on existing and new proposals for the reform and rejuvenation of the international system that will be relevant for the next Secretary-General and beyond.

[Re]Group is an initiative of the United Nations Foundation as part of its portfolio of work on reimagining multilateral cooperation for a better world.

We invite you to think with us, both online and in the real world. None of us knows what’s next, but we do know that a better future depends on our figuring it out together.

It is time to [Re]Group. Join us.

Wanted: Trouble-Shooter, Diplomat, and Entrepreneur-in-Chief

Seventy-three years ago, the first United Nations Secretary-General, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, welcomed his Swedish successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, to New York with a grim handshake and a single sentence: “You are about to take over the most impossible job on Earth.”

In a tenure that ran from 1946 to 1953, Lie had dealt with the partition of Palestine, the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, and a botched reappointment in which he was ostracized by the Soviet delegation and his staff prey to a McCarthyite witch hunt. He likely thought he had seen the toughest assignment the world could dish out.

The two terms of outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres have had their own ordeals, and the job isn’t getting any easier.

The next Secretary-General, like their predecessors, will be buffeted by forces beyond their control.

The UN started with 51 Member States, but the Secretary-General must now balance the demands of 193. Agreements on the most important challenges will be elusive. Performance will always need to be squeezed out of fewer resources, including overcoming a current liquidity crisis that has taken the UN to the edge of bankruptcy.

Nine men (ahem) have held a job that the UN Charter describes as “the chief administrative officer of the Organization,” but which civil society, media, and the general public sometimes expect to be able to change the world.

The 10th Secretary-General will therefore come in to lead an institution expected to deliver unprecedented results against overwhelming odds.

The world’s toughest job, indeed.

So, what can the next Secretary-General expect when they open their inbox in January 2027? Here are a few bets.

The workload will be driven by emergencies, but that can foster innovation.

While globalization has created great progress, its systems are fragile, inequitable, and highly susceptible to shock. As the world lurches from crisis to crisis, its political and economic systems struggle to keep up and humanitarian costs rise. The current Secretary-General complained early in his first term that “the television cameras are not there when a crisis is avoided,” and his successor will face the same reality. In this also lies an opportunity. Some of the greatest successes of the international system have been forged in crisis, from Blue Helmets to the Black Sea, just as the UN itself was born of war. Indeed, it is often at the height of crisis that the world rediscovers both the need for cooperation and the leadership to achieve it.

You will have more space than you think.

While geopolitical tensions and side-taking are on an alarming rise, there is always scope for political creativity. At the height of the Cold War in 1962, few would have expected a former Burmese schoolteacher to be able to help clear a path for the United States and Soviet Union to walk back from the atomic precipice that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. In every case of wars that end — and many have ended thanks to UN peace efforts — there was never space for a solution … until there was. Peace negotiations fail roughly half the time, which means they succeed in equal measure. For Secretaries-General, an aptitude for courageous ingenuity against the odds can be their greatest asset.

Money will be tight, but focus can be your new currency.

Recent trends continue to point to a budgetary crisis, despite across-the-board cuts over the past year. Without making light of the UN’s severe fiscal challenges, a different path could refocus around a tighter set of core missions with proven capacity to deliver. With more than $60 billion flowing through the UN system, a canny chief administrative officer has untapped financial leverage for undertakings that are mission critical.

You will need to keep an eye on the floor while reaching for the heights.

It may well be an uphill battle just to keep the flame of multilateralism alive in rough times. But there is also urgent need for new models of collective action and hunger for a renewed vision of humanity’s future based on our best instincts over our worst fears. Striking this balance will undoubtedly be what many expect the next Secretary-General to deliver. They will need strategies to keep the bottom from dropping out of even a “Minimal Viable Product” of multilateral order, while simultaneously setting higher ambition. The Secretary-General must be a clear and credible champion for a humane international order animated by human dignity and betterment and with a credible commitment to pursuing the conditions necessary to attain it. That is no easy path, but in today’s world, there is no alternative.

If nothing else, our current disruptions should decisively liberate us from incremental thinking.

If not now, when?

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