In early September 2022, in the no man’s land between the military frontlines of Ukraine and Russia, I had a decision to make: press on under fire, to establish a team of International Atomic Energy Agency safety experts at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, or turn around. It had taken weeks of diplomacy to get this far; we decided to push on. Our armored vehicles zigzagged to avoid land mines, jostling the IAEA symbol on our jackets—a spinning atom surrounded by the two olive branches that the organization shares with the UN. As we drove past bombed buildings, burned-out cars, and families fleeing westward toward safer parts of Ukraine and its bordering countries, talk turned to whether Europe would have enough gas reserves for the winter.
The line between conflict and international consequences is thinning. Wars are displacing a record number of people and upending global trade and energy networks. The integrated global economy built after the Cold War, in which goods, capital, and technology flow relatively freely across borders, is fraying. The traditional separation of trade, security, development, and environmental concerns has become increasingly artificial. Cyber vulnerabilities, too, are expanding beyond mere technical concerns to affect vital infrastructure, energy grids, elections, and banking systems. As diplomatic standoffs and military conflicts disrupt supply chains, countries are moving to decouple.
The return of war to Europe has reshaped security perceptions and strategic calculations across the continent. In the Middle East, cycles of confrontation are generating consequences that extend well beyond the region, contributing to political divisions and disrupting energy markets, trade routes, food prices, and confidence in the world economy. In Asia, competition now spans military, economic, technological, and maritime domains. In Africa, demographic growth and economic potential run up against unequal access to finance and uneven institutional capacity. In Latin America and elsewhere, more sophisticated transnational criminal networks are exploiting global markets, financial systems, ports, logistics chains, and governance gaps. In this system, the consequences of failure travel faster and wider than ever before.
Meanwhile, multilateralism and international law and norms, which reduce the chances of catastrophic errors, provide stability, and offer shared solutions to shared problems, have come under strain as they struggle to adjust to these structural shifts. Most of the nuclear arms reduction and control treaties forged during the Cold War, such as the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, are dead or weakened. Major nuclear arsenals are modernizing and expanding, rather than getting smaller, and the channels of communication that reduce the risk of miscalculation between powerful states have eroded. In some countries that have upheld their legal obligations to not develop nuclear weapons, debates have emerged over the merits of pursuing them.
Today, we are at greater risk of a major conflagration, including a nuclear one, than at any time since World War II. As the generations that experienced the horrors of two world wars and built the frameworks to prevent a third disappear, so does the memory of the consequences of unchecked global rivalry. The United Nations—which, despite its shortcomings, has in the past 80 years facilitated shared responses to common threats, supported decolonization, and helped prevent World War III—has been so weakened that some commentators suggest that it is heading the way of the League of Nations. Just when the world needs it most in the quest for peace, the UN is absent, including from the war in Ukraine; the confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran; and regional conflicts in Asia and Africa.
The UN cannot be expected to prevent or end every war, but working toward that end is its core task. It can again become a capable, impartial, and present broker for peace. Failing to be in the room where it happens creates disillusionment and puts the UN on a path to irrelevance. Institutions that cannot explain where they add value become vulnerable to indifference, and indifference in the current climate is not a passive condition—it is actively eroding the UN’s finances and political will. The UN has a liquidity crisis, which, at its core, is a crisis of confidence in the institution by its member states.
The most immediate action that the international community can take to address this crisis of confidence is in its choice of the next secretary-general, for which I am contending. History suggests that a more active secretary-general, who goes into the field to prevent conflict and who is present at tables where diplomatic solutions are negotiated, can be effective, even in a deeply divided world.
NATIONS FOR PEACE
The United Nations should focus on reducing the conditions that produce crises rather than mainly responding to their consequences. Doing so requires a renewed focus on facilitating peace, development, and human rights as mutually reinforcing priorities.
Throughout the Cold War, UN secretaries-general supported member states in preventing conflict and finding paths to de-escalation when it occurred. As the historian Thant Myint-U wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, the quiet diplomacy of his grandfather, U Thant, as secretary-general helped end the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s. The man who filled that role two decades later, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, facilitated diplomatic solutions for conflicts in Cambodia and Central America.
As history has shown, secretaries-general can build off-ramps from which exhausted belligerents can exit a conflict and establish conditions that help prevent a future crisis. To measure up to this task, the next secretary-general will need to be a facilitator, preserving communication, conveying messages, clarifying positions, and working persistently across divides to reduce the risk of misunderstanding and escalation. This requires patience, discretion, political courage, and a willingness to speak to all sides when others cannot or will not. It also requires a person who has already built up the rapport and support needed to open doors. Building those relationships starts long before the negotiation table comes into play. It is through active work in support of international security, development, and human rights that trust and the foundations of peace are laid.
When it comes to development, the gap between collective ambition and delivery has grown too wide. A significant proportion of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at alleviating poverty, improving health and education, reducing inequality and environmental harm, and supporting sustainable economic growth, are off track or regressing. Financing is constrained, debt burdens are rising, and aid budgets have been slashed by a third. When states cannot provide basic services, and as repeated external shocks erase their development gains, people stop believing that their lives can improve, and social cohesion suffers.
The UN secretary-general needs to be a realist.
The UN’s response to these trends must be practical. Working alongside the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other development banks and institutions, the UN’s distinctive contribution is its unique legitimacy, universality, and ability to place development within a broader political and human context, which allow it to give voice to the countries most exposed to the consequences of economic dislocation. This external support is most effective when it helps unlock domestic potential, enabling investment, strengthening institutions, expanding access to energy, and building the infrastructure that allows societies to participate in the modern economy. Here, the secretary-general serves to understand member states’ priorities and to act on that information, creating opportunities, mobilizing civil society, and attracting private partners for joint ventures.
Two technological forces are reshaping the path to development as the world has known it. First is the uneven arrival of the energy transition. Access to energy remains the precondition for a functioning modern economy; without it there is no modern health system, no competitive industry, and no digital economy. But the countries least responsible for the conditions driving the need for the energy transition are often those least equipped to finance that shift. A transition that is unaffordable or that fails to provide more reliable energy access to those without it will not endure.
Artificial intelligence is also changing the reality of development, concentrating productive capacity and raising questions about labor, access, and military risks. The office of the secretary-general may not be able to resolve these challenges, but it can ensure that they are considered in the context of the development and that the states most exposed to the consequences are present when decisions are made.
The protection of human rights and human dignity remains at the core of the United Nations’ purpose, but it cannot be treated as a pillar detached from the realities of peace and development. Rights are most effectively protected where there are functioning institutions, credible economic opportunities, and stability. When those foundations are weak, rights become vulnerable. The defense of human rights cannot rely on declarations and reporting mechanisms alone but must also target the conditions that enable those rights—state services, the rule of law, and inclusive institutions.
When things go wrong, whether because of natural or manmade disasters, the United Nations must continue to play a role in supporting and coordinating rapid and effective humanitarian action. The office of the secretary-general, however, needs to focus on prevention. Last resort assistance is a costly substitute for conflict prevention and sustained investments in development and effective governance.
SETTING THE STAGE
To advance peace, development, and human rights in a more fractured world, the UN secretary-general needs to be a realist, recognizing the central and enduring role of national interest. This is not a cynical observation; it is a rational one. States can be best encouraged to support a durable international order when their interests overlap, risks are shared, and cooperation can serve sovereignty rather than weaken it. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “No nos une el amor sino el espanto,” meaning, “It is not love that unites us but fear.” States may disagree profoundly on core issues but still know that escalation, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, financial panic, or technological disruption would harm them all.
The founders of the UN understood this, having just survived the most destructive expression of such forces. Their achievement was to create a framework in which politics could be managed in a way that averts catastrophe. That vision can be restored not by idealizing a UN that pursues utopian harmony but by striving for a more practical UN that works steadily and credibly to support peace, enable development, and protect human rights.
Some reform efforts are already underway. The UN80 debates, which aim to make the institution more cost effective and accountable, are a step in the right direction. But the underlying problem undermining the UN’s effectiveness is too complex for any single process to address. Decades of lax management and diffuse priorities have led to the expansion of the UN’s mandates and produced overlapping agencies, duplicative processes, and reporting cycles that consume institutional energy without producing measurable results. The system has become heavy on declarations and light on achievement.
A more effective UN would concentrate on what only it can do: convene parties that would not otherwise meet, sustain dialogue when political trust has collapsed, and ensure that the states most exposed to global risks have a voice in managing them. That requires not just a restructuring of the organization but an assessment of the breadth of the agenda, making way for results that are visible to the people the UN exists to serve.
The secretary-general alone cannot reform the UN, resolve every conflict, and eliminate every ill. The office cannot command armies or override member states. But it does have a convening authority that it can use to foster diplomacy, responsibly and with courage. And that authority is squandered by absence. The next secretary-general must show up at the frontlines of war, in communities in need, wherever the mission may call. Presence is the job. Whether it is fear or shared interests that bring states to the table, they need to find the United Nations already there.
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