* Relevance of the United Nations in a Divided World * Russo-Ukraine War

UN General Assembly Opening World leaders convened last week for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), but the congregated nations were anything but united.

Geopolitical rivalries, political grievances, economic upheaval, and health and ecological crises – polycrises – are testing the legitimacy and credibility of the 78-year-old world body.

Time will tell whether and which countries are prepared to adjust their strategic and ideological competition in the interest of advancing their many shared global interests and whether the United Nations as such remains relevant in a divided and fractured world (Stewart Patrick & MinhThu Pham/ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sep. 14). The yawning chasm between the demand for international cooperation and its supply is only expanding.

The whole of humanity is struggling with simultaneous, compounding, and rapidly evolving challenges – among them accelerating climate change, collapsing biodiversity, persistent poverty and inequality, declining democracy, mass immigration and displacement, destabilizing technological innovation [for instance AI], onerous recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, and intensifying diplomatic and economic fallout from the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In all these consequential issues and many more, the UN has not been a beacon of hope, because it has not evolved with time as its member states have failed utterly to cooperate with each other. They have not repaired and maintained the house that they built after the Second World War.

The international order has become very complicated. Today’s diplomatic fault lines run not just East-West – matching China and Russia [assisted by Iran and North Korea] against the community of advanced market democracies – but also North-South, setting richer nations against lower- and middle-income countries.

Many developing-world governments and citizens regard their wealthy-world counterparts as indifferent to their needs, from access to vaccines to debt relief to climate adaptation financing.

They also regard existing institutions of global governance, such as the UN Security Council, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as overwhelmingly unfavourable to their interests and unresponsive to their needs.

This perceived lack of solidarity has reinforced the instinct of many developing nations – the so-called Global South – to stand on the sidelines and hedge their bets rather than take sides in the Ukraine war and the deepening Sino-American confrontation (Patrick/Pham).

This is the somber backdrop in which to observe some of the signs of life for global cooperation.

Progress on Security Council Reform

There is wide support for increasing the number of both permanent and non-permanent seats of the Security Council. Nearly all member states support enlargement in principle but are deeply divided on the details.

The hurdles to any reform remain high and perhaps unsurmountable. There is no doubt that such pivotal states like Japan, Germany, India, and swing states like Brazil, South Africa must be elevated to permanent membership.

Others like South Korea and Indonesia (Asia), Egypt and Nigeria (Africa), and Canada, Mexico and Argentina (N. & S. America) must be accommodated in a rotating system.

Restoring Momentum on the Sustainable Development Goals

World leaders must also access progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the 17 concrete objectives for eradicating extreme poverty, advancing social welfare, and improving environmental stewardship by 2030.

But halfway to 2030, how is the world doing, and what more must be done?

The signs are not encouraging. Progress has stalled or reversed for more than a third of the goals and is slow on nearly half; only 15 percent remain on track.

At this year’s UNGA, developing nations will be looking for more than empty platitudes from Western leaders.

Mobilizing Development Financing This year’s UNGA will also signal whether wealthy donor nations are willing to pay more.

Since the SDGs were first agreed, their estimated annual financial cost has skyrocketed to US $ Dollar 4.2 trillion, up from the original US $ Dollar 2-3 trillion.

Over the same period, hopes of expanding global development resources from “billions to trillions” by using public funds to leverage private finance have evaporated.

Meanwhile, donors have failed to fulfil their 2009 commitment to mobilize a US $ Dollar 100 billion a year in climate financing.

Finally, the loss and damage fund that nations endorsed at last year’s climate conference has yet to get off the ground.

Clearly, Putin’s aggressive war in Ukraine is taking a great toll on Western countries’ capacity to finance the Global South’s various agendas. The more need for it to pressurize Russia to end its brutal war. This should also be an eyeopener for India that seeks to lead the Global South.

Chance to Show Solidarity on Global Health

Member states will also have an opportunity to bridge global differences and mitigate hurt feelings on global public health in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, during which multilateral cooperation and humanitarian impulses suffered enormously in the face of geopolitical rivalry, niggardly financial support, and vaccine nationalism.

That opportunity takes the form of three high-level meetings on global health:

Pandemic prevention

Universal health coverage

The stubborn challenge tuberculosis

Demonstrating the UN’s Centrality in a Multilateral World

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At a time when governments have many alternative vehicles for reaffirming the UN’s continued centrality to world order.

Faced with paralysis at the UN, member states increasingly rely on more “mini-lateral frameworks” that allow narrower coalitions of the interested, caapable, and likeminded to cooperate in pursuit of shared strategic priorities, economic interests, and ideological preferences (Patrick/Pham).

For Western nations, the G 7 and NATO provide indispensable foundations to defend their rulesbased international order. The geographically limited European Union protects and sustains the allround interests of its members. Similarly, revisionist and emerging powers see the expanding BRICS group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as important platforms to challenge entrenched global inequities, like the dollar’s role as the world’s main reserve currency.

Even the G 20, whose heterogeneous membership is a microcosm of the world’s divisions, provides its members with a more flexible framework for decisions than the UN.

Given this torrent of institutional competition, it is very easy to lose sight of the UN’s enduring value for single states and the international community as a whole.

No other multilateral framework enjoys the legitimacy conferred by the UN’s legally binding Charter and universal membership, invaluable work of its specialized agencies and programmes in domains spanning humanitarian relief, global health, nuclear inspections, transnational crime, outer space, and much more. Ultimately, a resilient and legitimate world order depends on universal institutions, grounded in international law, with standing technical capabilities.

Global governance cannot depend on affinity groups and ad hoc teams. A Reinvigorated Multilateral System?

UN Secretary General Antonia Guterres is clearly sensitive to the momentous question of UN relevance in today’s world.

In an attempt to place the UN at the heart of a reinvigorated multilateral system, he has proposed a Summit of the Future that UN member states will hold during the opening of next year’s UNGA. Preparations are already being made.

In the meantime, this year’s UNGA could lay the groundwork. After all, its theme is “rebuilding trust and reigniting global solidarity”. In recent years, both ‘commodities’ have been in very short supply. This week’s annual gathering of leaders – “the first such full-fledged, in-person meeting since before the coronavirus pandemic – is an apt moment to begin replenishing the world’s store of both” (Patrick/ Pham).

Russo-Ukraine War

Ukraine on the Battlefield

There are mounting concerns about support wavering among Ukraine’s Western backers.

More immediately, how are Ukraine’s forces faring on the battlefield, as their counteroffensive plods on? Answers depend on the perspective. As the slow pace draws attention, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Russia laid mines as Kyiv waited for more Western weaponry.

At the World Politics Review, University of Chicago professor Paul Poast writes that military offensives take time and expectations were outsized to begin with.

In his Substack newsletter, University of St. Andrews strategic studies professor and international relations school head Phillips O’Brien calls last week’s Ukrainian missile attacks in Russian occupied Crimea “easily the most ominous event for Russian control of Crimea so far in the war.”

In a War on the Rocks podcast, military analyst Michael Kofman said it was too early to determine the exact scale and significance of Ukraine’s announced breaching of the first of Russia’s defensive lines in the Zaporizhzhia region. Kofman surmised “these weeks are going to be relatively decisive in terms of outcomes” for the counteroffensive, which doesn’t have any specified end date.

The Economist, meanwhile, elucidates an apparent debate over Ukrainian tactics. Pointing to anonymous pessimistic comments by Western officials, the newsmagazine writes that relatively little NATO training was insufficient to allow Ukrainian troops to change their style of fighting, from a Soviet-era doctrine of heavy artillery use to the “combined-arms maneuver” favoured by today’s Western armies.

Russia’s Economic Woes

In the meantime, Putin is digging Russia into economic disaster. In the 19th month of his full-scale invasion, Russia has been plagued by serious problems on and off the battlefield.

Putin has had to endure enormous battlefield losses and several humiliating retreats, and an attempted military coup – signs of loss of international prestige and power.

However, none of these issues compare to the massive economic hole Russia will soon find itself in as the country’s economy deteriorates due to Western sanctions on trade. August saw the Russian ruble reach its lowest point in 16 months, and its continued poor performance has forced Russians to cut back on spending.

Russia’s oil and gas industry has been effectively shut out of the European market while Western sanctions have made imports into the country more difficult and more costly.

The troubles facing the ruble will also likely have a direct impact on the war in Ukraine since the Kremlin is now spending a huge chunk of its budget on the country’s military.

The State of the War

Ukraine has made some major strikes on Russian occupying forces lately, including:

Destroying an advanced air defence system in Crimea, using drones to blind it, then cruise missiles to destroy it;

Seriously damaging a landing ship and submarine that were undergoing repairs at a dock in Crimea;

Recapturing strategic oil and gas platforms in the Black Sea (that were reportedly housing radar equipment);

Retaking various villages along the southern and eastern fronts over the past month, breaking through some initial defences (International Intrigue, Sep. 15).

In an interview with the German