U.N. Meets Amid a Backdrop of Growing Chaos and Violence

UNITED NATIONS — When the United Nations General Assembly convenes Tuesday, attention will focus on the major wars raging in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and Sudan, amid a reckoning that neither the global body nor world powers have been able to end the violence.

By all accounts, the world has descended deeper into chaos and turmoil since last year’s annual gathering, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sudan’s civil war cast shadows. Now, those have been eclipsed by the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the war that followed in Gaza, with its catastrophic humanitarian toll on Palestinians.

The United Nations itself has had a turbulent year. A record number of its staff, 220 in total, have been killed in the war in Gaza. Its humanitarian resources, a crucial backbone of the global relief effort, are overstretched and underfunded as needs multiply rapidly because of wars, climate change and natural disasters. At the same time, its leadership struggles to play a meaningful role in conflict mediation.

“International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them,” said Secretary-General António Guterres in a news conference last week. “We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts — not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond.”

The Security Council, which typically holds one session on the sidelines of the General Assembly, is scheduled to meet three times this year, on Ukraine, Gaza and the broader question of leadership challenges in resolving conflicts.

President Joe Biden will address the General Assembly for the last time as his presidency draws to a close. With the exception of the European allies, the majority of U.N. member states have been highly critical of Biden’s staunch support of Israel and the United States’ blocking multiple calls for a cease-fire during the first eight months of the war.

Biden has in recent months led an effort, with Egypt and Qatar, to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of all the hostages held by Hamas. But the talks have stalled, and the electronic devices attack in Lebanon last week and an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed at least nine people, seem to be dimming prospects of any breakthrough.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend this year after both France and Britain sat out last year’s gathering. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will deliver three speeches in person, including at the Security Council meeting on Ukraine, where he is expected to present a new peace plan and renew his pleas to authorize Ukraine’s use of Western missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia, diplomats said.

“It feels like we say this every year, but this year’s meeting could not come at a more critical and more challenging moment,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, at a briefing with reporters. “The list of crises and conflicts that demand attention and action only seems to grow and grow.”

Thomas-Greenfield said the United States would pursue three policy priorities during the General Assembly: international cooperation on peace and stability, improving global humanitarian aid responses, and revamping the Security Council.

Iran’s new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, making his debut on the international stage, will be trying to present his government as moderate, pragmatic and open to diplomacy with the West, in contrast with his hard-line conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.

That might not be an easy sell. Iran’s support of a network of militias in Lebanon, in Yemen and in Gaza and the West Bank, and recent reports that it is supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for its war against Ukraine, pose obstacles to defusing tensions with the West that Pezeshkian will struggle to overcome.

Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations with the International Crisis Group, said that the prospects for breakthroughs on Gaza or Ukraine at the assembly were bleak. But Sudan, Gowan said, could be an exception.

“I actually think the General Assembly could do some good on Sudan, probably in a way that it cannot on Gaza and Ukraine,” he said. “There is an emerging feeling among a lot of the U.N. membership that the U.N. failed unnecessarily on Sudan and that it’s time to push for more diplomacy.”

Climate change and rising sea levels will join with restructuring of the Security Council and the World Bank as major topics for discussion. For years, countries in Africa, Asia and South America have complained that the Security Council’s core group of five permanent, veto-wielding members — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — is outdated, overlooking economic powers like India, Brazil and Japan, as well as the entire continent of Africa.

This month Thomas-Greenfield said that the United States supported adding two permanent African members to the Security Council and proposed starting preliminary negotiations on the matter. Washington also supports adding seats for Germany, India and Japan, but none of the new permanent members would have veto power.

Any changes to the Security Council require altering the U.N. charter and the approval of all five current members, a tall task given the divisions among Russia, China and the United States.

In an effort to spearhead the changes, Guterres will host a conference Sunday and Monday, before the General Assembly. The goal is for countries to approve three negotiated documents that are meant to serve as blueprints for addressing current and future challenges on climate, artificial intelligence, conflict and restructuring U.N. institutions.

“So many of the challenges that we face today were not on the radar 80 years ago when our multilateral institutions were born,” Guterres said. “Our founders understood that times would change.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .