Tasks ahead for UN as meeting opens
NEW YORK — In person and on screen, world leaders returned to the United Nations’ foremost gathering for the first time in the pandemic era on Tuesday with a formidable, diplomacy-packed agenda and a sharply worded warning from the international organization’s leader: “We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetime.”
Secretary-general Antonio Guterres rang the alarm in his annual state-of-the-world speech at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s highlevel meeting for leaders of its 193 member nations. More than 100 heads of state and government kept away by COVID-19 are returning to the U.N. in person for the first time in two years. But with the pandemic still raging, about 60 will deliver pre-recorded statements over coming days.
“We are on the edge of an abyss — and moving in the wrong direction,” Guterres said. “I’m here to sound the alarm. The world must wake up.”
Guterres said the world has never been more threatened and divided. People may lose faith not only in their governments and institutions, he said, but in basic values when they see their human rights curtailed, corruption, the reality of their harsh lives, no future for their children — and “when they see billionaires joyriding to space while millions go hungry on Earth.”
Nevertheless, the U.N. chief said he has hope.
Guterres urged world leaders to bridge six “great divides”: promote peace and end conflicts, restore trust between the richer north and developing south on tackling global warming, reduce the gap between rich and poor, promote gender equality, ensure that the half of humanity that has no access to the Internet is connected by 2030, and tackle the generational divide by giving young people “a seat at the table.”
Other pressing issues on the agenda of world leaders include rising U.s.-china tensions, Afghanistan’s unsettled future under its new Taliban rulers and ongoing conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region.
The three most closely watched speakers on Tuesday morning are U.S. President Joe Biden, appearing at the U.N. for the first time since his defeat
of Donald Trump in the U.S. election last November; Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in a surprise move will deliver a video address; and Iran’s recently elected hardline President Ebrahim Raisi.
The General Assembly’s president, Abdulla Shahid of the Maldives, opened debate by challenging delegates to rise to the occasion. “There are moments in time that are turning points,” he said. “This is one such moment.”
In his speech, Biden, too, called this moment “an inflection point in history” and said that for the United States to prosper, it “must also engage deeply with the rest of the world.”
He urged “relentless diplomacy” and global cooperation on COVID-19, climate change and human rights abuses, pledged to work with allies, and said the United States is “not seeking a new Cold War.”
Biden was almost certainly responding to Secretary-general Guterres’ warning in an AP interview over the weekend that the world could be plunged into a new and probably more dangerous Cold War unless the United States and China repair their “totally dysfunctional” relationship.