Lawfare Daily: Key Takeaways from the UN General Assembly’s Recent High-Level Meetings with Richard Gowan

[Intro]

Richard Gowan: Bloc politics was still very evident especially in these discussions of Ukraine and Gaza. I did, I did also feel that there were certain points of concern that, that crossed regional lines this year.

Scott Anderson: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson with Richard Gowen, UN director for the International Crisis Group.

Richard Gowan: Trump was the Voldemort figure of the General Assembly. No one dared to speak his name, obviously in public, but everyone in private was asking whether he's coming back. And there is no doubt that a second Trump administration would cause enormous disruption at an already pretty fragile United Nations.

Scott Anderson: Today, we're reviewing what happened at the UN General Assembly during its recent high-level week and what events there can tell us about the state of the United Nations at this pivotal moment.

[Main Podcast]

So, Richard, last week was one of probably the busiest weeks of your life, I strongly suspect. The busiest weeks of a lot of the lives of UN followers and people who work at or work with the United Nations. That is the UN General Assembly meeting that takes place annually in New York every September, or at least it's always been in September to my memory, perhaps that's, that's not a universal truth. That is one of the big premier international diplomatic events from which we get a number of high profile speeches, a good amount of agenda setting for the year to come for the United Nations and an opportunity to see world leaders interact in a way that that doesn't happen in a lot of other fora.

This year is kind of a little bit of a unique UN General Assembly, or UNGA, as we'll probably refer to it, at least I will, in that it is happening against the backdrop of several active conflicts. We have Gaza, we have Ukraine, a lot of, a number of other global conflicts from Haiti to Sudan that were taking place here. Notably a high degree of superpower or major power tension between Security Council members, China, Russia, the United States in particular. And a lot of high-profile UN or UN org in action, ranging from debates at the Security Council that have, have often gone a few places regarding Ukraine and Gaza, to General Assembly actions regarding both conflicts that are quite notable, to International Court of Justice decisions just in the last couple of weeks over controversies like the status of the Palestinian territories.

Talk to us about what the big context picture was for the meeting this year. What does this all add up to in terms of the challenges facing the participants in this year's UNGA and how the people organizing the UNGA tried to situate themselves amidst these events and pressures?

Richard Gowan: Well, I think it was very striking that this was a year when the General Assembly high-level week was fundamentally focused on matters of war and peace. That isn't always the case. Every year there's a discussion of a multitude of topics at the UN, but usually one theme bubbles up as the key point of interest. And in recent years that has sometimes been climate change. Last year it was actually international development. There was a very strong focus on the economic interests of the global south. But this year there was a sense that we were going back to basics by default, and the focus was really on three major conflicts.

The dominant one, obviously, being the situation in the Middle East, and both Gaza and the escalation between Israel and Hezbollah that was taking place in parallel with the General Assembly. Then Ukraine, which was prominent, although not quite as prominent as in recent years. And then finally, Sudan. And there was a big push, which we can discuss further if you want, by the U.S. to get a greater focus on the civil war in Sudan at the UN. Now those three conflicts were the, the top agenda items, but they converged, I think, to contribute to a general sense that the UN is falling down on its fundamental charter responsibility to maintain international peace and security. And so although everyone was talking about Gaza. Everyone was calling for a ceasefire there or a ceasefire in Sudan, there was also just a lot of backchat about the weakness of the UN, the apparent irrelevance of the institution to a lot of these conflicts. And also the weakness of international law. So there was a deep sense of concern about all these topics running through the week.

I heard one foreign minister, the foreign minister of Estonia, saying that he felt like, this was a 1938 moment. Not everyone was being quite as frank as that, but everyone was being pretty honest about their level of concern about the global scene and the UN's weak position in the global scene. And again, that's striking, because in my experience, when leaders and diplomats come to New York, they often sugarcoat a lot of their statements about the quality of multilateralism. There's a tendency to look on the bright side. Well, that was not very obvious this year. There was a tendency to look on the dark side, I think because we just couldn't ignore the very live conflicts, and by the end of the week, a very obvious path to escalation by Israel in southern Lebanon.

Scott Anderson: Well, why don't we start with those three conflicts because each one really was, even from my fairly casual watching of events over the course of the week, a recurring theme. But the one that I think caught a lot of, at least American observers by surprise, to some extent, was the Sudan angle, which got a lot of attention because it was featured fairly Biden's address to the General Assembly.

Talk to us a little bit about why this conflict, which has not had the same profile as Ukraine or Gaza by any stretch of the imagination certainly in the United States, has risen to be such a point of emphasis to warrant a, again, such a, a fair amount of discussion, not quite on par with those conflicts, I wouldn't say, but still featured very centrally in President Biden's address. And what was the effort generating around the Sudan conflict that the United States was leading and others were involved in?

Richard Gowan: So Sudan tipped into civil war in the spring of 2023. And it was striking that the UN's initial response was quite tepid. That the war was not, for example, a big focus at the high level General Assembly meeting in September of last year. And there were a number of reasons for that, one of which was in fact that many of the African members of the UN, including the African members of the Security Council, urged the United Nations to take a backseat in diplomacy over the war and allow the African Union and other African organizations to try and mediate a solution.

But to date no mediation efforts have succeeded in Sudan, including African efforts, Saudi led efforts, a U.S. push. And I think there's a growing sense of embarrassment, frankly, amongst a lot of diplomats at the UN, that this war, which doesn't have the same geopolitical ramifications as Ukraine or Gaza, has escalated massively with so little multilateral response. 10 million people have now been displaced and this is an appalling situation. The Biden administration has been attempting to push it up the UN agenda through the year. The U.S. has led on a couple of Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefires. And coming into the General Assembly week it was clear that the Biden team wanted to use this as a moment to try and elevate essentially, international messaging about the need for peace in Sudan.

I think there was a suspicion that was in part an effort to distract from Gaza, but I think it was also a sincere effort to get a focus on Sudan. There are a couple of factors to keep in mind. I think the dry season is coming in Sudan, which creates opportunities, opportunities for aid deliveries, but sadly also creates opportunities for the warring parties to launch new offensives. So there was a feeling that this was a good moment to get as many countries as possible to speak out and demand a ceasefire.

Did it work? I'm not 100 percent sure that it did. President Biden did reference it, other leaders referenced it on in their speeches. There were quite a few side meetings about the conflict, attempting to increase a sense of political pressure for a ceasefire, but in private diplomats say that because of the Israel-Hezbollah escalation. it was very hard to focus on events in Africa. Everyone was having to look at events in the Middle East. And so I think there's a slight sense that this was all a well-intentioned push, but a missed opportunity as well.

Scott Anderson: So the second conflict that you mentioned, one of the other two remaining conflicts, is the conflict in Ukraine. And you made the case, or mentioned in passing, and in some of your writings, I should mention the Crisis Group had phenomenal coverage and kind of a day to day run of program throughout the week that was a real invaluable point of reference. A point that was made, I think a couple of points to those materials that you just referenced is the idea that Ukraine kind of took a little bit of a backseat on the agenda for this meeting, no doubt because it is such a point of major power conflict and that changes the dynamics. So what was the approach to Ukraine? How did it come up and influence the events here? Was there any sort of formal effort or was it simply this shadow hanging over the proceedings of a pretty momentous global conflict that the UN body is fairly paralyzed on?

Richard Gowan: So I think the Ukrainians themselves were nervous coming into the high level week that their struggle was going to be overshadowed by the Gaza situation. And actually the Ukrainians had been very irritated because initially Slovenia, which was the president of the Security Council in September, didn't schedule a, a special Security Council meeting on Ukraine during the high level week. Now, the Ukrainians and the U.S. and their friends lobbied the security council did meet on Ukraine and Zelensky addressed the council on the war as he did last year.

But I think it was still quite notable that if you put Kyiv's close friends aside, not many UN members really seem to want to concentrate on this particular conflict. So, at the Ministerial Security Council on Ukraine, David Lammy was there, Radek Sikorski was there from Poland, Blinken was there, and they all gave very powerful speeches condemning Russia. Lammy in particular was very, very hard hitting. But no, no foreign ministers from Africa or Latin America turned up. The only, the only Global South countries that were present were those that are on the Security Council, so were there by default. Everyone else, largely let this go by.

And I think that is indicative of both the sense amongst many UN members that just talking more about the war at the UN doesn't really make any difference. And secondly the fact that everyone felt, you know, that they should be concentrating on the Middle East. There was also an interesting point of reference on Friday last week, when China and Brazil got together a group of non-Western countries such as Egypt and Mexico to release a statement on conditions for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was very much based on previous Chinese and Brazilian initiatives that the Ukrainians don't like. And actually Zelensky said at the UN that he doesn't like. Because the way the proposal is laid out seems to emphasize satisfying Russia's concerns and doesn't really emphasize the need to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty. And so, you know, there was a sort of faint feeling through the week that an important part of the Global South at the UN is drifting away from, from Kyiv.

Scott Anderson: Talk to about some of the kind of, before we move on to talk about Gaza, some of the bloc dynamics and the regional dynamics that kind of manifest here. I think that's always an interesting part of General Assembly meetings and really the General Assembly's operation overall, the very regional based politics that often come into play.

How much of an agenda setting priority is that? We've seen in the past a lot of competition, particularly in the General Assembly, when there were efforts to mobilize for particularly kind of anti-Russia, pro-Ukraine General Assembly action, particularly early after the invasion. Well, a lot of focus on Africa as a voting bloc and the Global South because you need their votes to get General Assembly action. How does that affect the agenda as the other powers kind of weigh in? Because it is, it strikes me as informing a lot of the priorities and agenda setting that we're seeing kind of emerge from this, this event and from the GA generally.

Richard Gowan: Well, it was clear that different groupings came to the General Assembly with different priorities. As I say, for the Europeans, shining a light on the situation in Ukraine remained a priority. For the Arab group, clearly Gaza was the top issue. That said, I mean, I, I think that more generally, the wide, the wider UN membership as a whole, regardless of bloc politics, did feel a need to talk about Gaza. That was a, sort of an overwhelming issue that cut across lines.

And, I was also interested to see that some other concerns cut across regional, regional groupings. For example, there were quite a lot of events on the eve of the General Assembly and during the General Assembly about small states concerns that international law is weakening and that that is of specific concern to smaller countries that rely on international law for their security. I attended a number of those events and, you know, there was some interesting discussions going on about whether it's possible for UN members to work through the General Assembly to address crises when the Security Council is stuck. So, although bloc politics were still very evident, especially in these discussions of Ukraine and Gaza, I did also feel that there were certain points of concern that crossed regional lines this year. And, for example, smaller states, despite some differences, still felt a certain shared interest in speaking out for international law because of what they saw crumbling, frankly, around them.

Scott Anderson: Well, let's turn to Gaza then, because that obviously is no doubt a source of a lot of angst around this, around this particular topic and a lot of other priorities the UN has traditionally approached. And the fact that it weighed so heavily was such a featured theme for so much of the world, in spite of, you know, Ukraine being in a lot of ways a more dedicated policy focus of the United States and Russia, certainly, another major power that I think is pretty notable.

And this has been the pretty unprecedented year for UN action on Israel/Palestinian issues in response to the Gaza conflict in the October 7th massacre between, like I said, International Court of Justice decisions, General Assembly actions, all regarding the status of Palestinian territories. At the same time, ceasefire negotiations there, you know, actively being facilitated by the United States without much or any visible success among other parties. You know, obviously there's a big credibility gap between the United Nations and the State of Israel that is frequently on display, was no more in display than during Prime Minister Netanyahu's address to the General Assembly where he essentially called out the General Assembly and to some extent the whole international community and said, we're going to keep pushing Hezbollah back and you're hypocritical for trying to stop us.

So what was the tack on Gaza then? I mean, what were the deliverables, the targets, the objectives that one could actually accomplish? Or was it more a messaging communication reinforcing the, what is pretty solid consensus in the international community, opposition to the continuation of this conflict in the manner that Israel has been pursuing it?

Richard Gowan: So I think that everyone felt a need to talk about Gaza, as I've said. That doesn't necessarily mean that a lot of the leaders arriving in New York really believed that what they had to say on the conflict was going to move the needle. And it's been striking over the last four or five months, although Gaza has remained a very acute topic of conversation at the UN, there's also been a sense that everyone is accepting that the problem is not going to be resolved through UN action. I think if you go back to the last quarter of 2023, when you had incredibly intense debates in the General Assembly, and security council in the early months of the war, a lot of states did hope that the Security Council, or the UN as a whole, could step in and affect events on the ground. As time has gone by, people have come to accept that that is really not the case.

And back in June, the United States passed a Security Council resolution calling for a phased ceasefire. That hasn't been implemented. But since then, at least as far as Gaza is concerned, I think a lot of states have been willing to accept that the U.S. is broadly on the same page, at least when it comes to halting the current conflict. And I felt a sort of normalization, frankly, of diplomacy around, around Gaza because no one thinks the UN is going to step in and solve all the problems. And to some extent, that came through in speeches at the General Assembly where leaders made token references to the need to end the war or secure a two-state solution but didn't necessarily offer, you know, very much in the way of concrete guidance on how, on how to do that.

That said you know, there were some striking speeches where leaders of different sort of backgrounds and loyalties drew lessons from what we've seen in Gaza. Erdogan from Turkey, President Erdogan, gave an extremely strong condemnation of Western double standards. President Boric from Chile, by contrast, gave quite a subtle speech in which he spoke about the need to support both the people of Ukraine and the people of Gaza. He sort of tried to draw the two causes together. So, you know, people were still referring to this a lot. It was still top of mind. But I don't think anyone imagined we were going to get a ceasefire last week out of the General Assembly. And to some extent Gaza was also superseded by the question of whether Israel was going into a full-scale war with Lebanon or potentially with Iran.

And there were efforts around the General Assembly to get a ceasefire call. The U.S. and other countries did put out a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire. There may have been some more genuine hope there that the UN meeting could stop events on the ground. But by the time Netanyahu arrived on Thursday and gave his speech on Friday, it was very clear that Israel was not going to be taking instruction from anyone at the UN. And Netanyahu's speech, which you referred to, was predictably very tough. And was predictably very unpopular with the majority of UN member states.

A lot of participants actually walked out as he began speaking, although the Israelis seemed to have bussed in a bunch of Netanyahu fans who sat in the public gallery and were cheering him loudly, which was an obvious effort to offset the disapproval from other states. At the end of the day, I don't think Netanyahu really cares what the bulk of UN members and UN diplomats think about him or his strategy. It's worth remembering he was the Israeli ambassador to the UN in the 1980s and he's hated the organization ever since.

What he came to New York to do was to lay out his case for war, I think primarily for his domestic audience and the U.S. audience. And he pulled all his usual tricks. He had a map of the good Middle East centering on Israel and the bad Middle East centering on Iran. He is like him, like him or not very, very canny at using the UN as a space to send out messages that frankly resonate a lot more on social media than sort of well considered thoughtful discussions of international law of the type that Scott Anderson and Richard Gowan might listen to, but very few other people take notice of.

Scott Anderson: So those were the kind of the three big threads, but we saw a couple other priorities and items pop up as well. One that's gotten a fair amount of attention from us here at Lawfare to, in the United States, because of proximity and has a clear nexus with the United Nations because we've seen a kind of nascent plan come under stress because of disagreement at the UN between major powers is Haiti.

And we saw that feature also to the extent in the background of these debates. Can you talk to us a little bit about what the status that came out of this week of the peacekeeping plan, peacekeeping is not quite the right way to describe it, but kind of stabilization plan for Haiti? Which I won't, seem to be coming under pressure from Russia in the few weeks leading up to the UNGA. And whether any success, there was a success on having a breakthrough there or refining the path forward?

Richard Gowan: So Haiti was not front and center in discussions in the General Assembly in the way that Gaza or Sudan were, there were meetings in the margin. And the acting Haitian leader came and gave a speech. But, you're right to say that there is quite a lot of concern in the background about the future of international stabilization in Haiti. Earlier this year, Kenya deployed a few hundred police to Port-au-Prince as part of a UN backed stabilization effort. The Kenyans, as we understand it, have actually been very proactive on the ground.

They've been out on patrol, they've been exchanging fire with gangs, but there are only a few hundred of them. They don't have air assets and other assets that they would need to make a big strategic difference. And so over the summer, the U.S., not to at least my surprise, and I don't think to many people's said, okay, this was a initial experiment with the Kenyan led force. But we're going to need to shift and we're going to need to shift to some sort of full UN Blue Helmet type operation down the road, similar to those which the UN has deployed to Haiti in the past on a number of occasions.

Now this has come up against opposition from China and Russia. I think partially because they simply enjoy finding an issue on the U. S. doorstep where they can run interference. But also because the Chinese are very unhappy with the Haitians over their continued diplomatic links to Taiwan. And so, earlier in September, before the high-level week, the Chinese in particular were making it clear that they didn't think that the situation was ripe for UN peacekeepers.

Now, I think just, just this week, in fact, the Security Council passed a, a resolution extending the mandate for the Kenyans, which certainly is not as specific as the U.S. had wanted about the need to start planning for a future UN force. And I think that creates a headache for the U.S. because the Kenyans are on the ground. I think the Kenyans actually said last week that they would increase their deployments into the thousands. But still there is a general sense that for operational reasons, a bigger, more sustainable mission is going to be required down the road. But getting that through the Security Council is going to be, it's going to be tricky, although I think not impossible because of all these geopolitical rifts.

Scott Anderson: So the challenges around Haiti really are reflective of a broader set of challenges that the United Nations has encountered across in a range of peace building, peacekeeping, stabilization sort of operations that it has traditionally played a central role in. And that system is coming under new stress now. Of course, we're about to see or are already seeing the beginnings of what could be a major new conflict in Lebanon, which has been, you know, the center of another high profile UN peacekeeping and monitoring operation in the form of UNIFIL, whose future I think is a little uncertain at this point.

So another event happening at UNGA I thought was very interesting was a review of the peacebuilding architecture, the idea of how do we approach these sorts of missions as the United Nations. Talk to us a little bit about what inspired that meeting and what might have came, come out of it. Are we seeing progress towards a new architecture that might be more effective or is it all at this point just kind of issue spotting the problems before without really a clear sense of where we might go from here?

Richard Gowan: Well, so there was a ministerial discussion of peace building, but that was actually laying down the tracks for a deeper, more technical discussion of the UN's peace building architecture, which will run into 2025. And this was something that is actually automatically takes place every five years. But there is a lot of interest in what the UN can do in peace building at the moment, because I think there is a general sense that obviously at the political level, the Security Council is frequently getting stuck, although not always.

And then at the operational level, big blue helmet operations of the type that the Security Council used to mandate routinely in countries like Liberia or the Democratic Republic of Congo seem to be past their sell by date. Mali actually expelled a big UN peacekeeping force from its territory last year. And so I think it's premature to say that UN peacekeeping is dead. UN peacekeeping is pronounced dead sort of once every 20 years. That's a fairly guaranteed cycle, but it does also come back to life. And actually, quite a lot of UN member states at the moment including some that have sort of a proud history of peacekeeping, like South Asian countries, are saying, hold it, we should, we should really talk about how to preserve the peacekeeping tool.

Nonetheless, there is, there's also an urge to say, well, what else can we do? What other mechanisms, what other approaches do we have to avoiding conflict or resolving conflict? This is something which has interested António Guterres a lot as Secretary General, because he doesn't instinctively trust blue helmet peacekeeping. He, he would like to look for alternative ways to engage in conflict matters. And so there is a focus on peace building and specifically the UN Peacebuilding Commission, which is a sort of junior cousin of the Security Council that works collegially with states to address their internal problems. And also a, a support office that backs a commission and a peace building fund that provides small amounts of money to sort of carefully targeted projects that may help promote dialogue or reduce tensions within communities and so forth.

That's all up for review next, next year, as I say. And I think that there is a hope that this will be an opportunity to at least improve the way the UN approaches that sort of peace work. One idea that is out there is that the peace building team in the UN Secretariat should develop much closer ties with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which would allow them to access some of the much greater resources that the international financial institutions have to help with conflict prevention efforts. These sort of ideas are, they're interesting to developing countries. They're interesting, I think, to Western countries too. And so we don't know where the, the review will land, but there is a mild sense of optimism that this is one area where you can enhance the way the UN does business, even if the geopolitics is very hard and even if older school peacekeeping is in a, in a fragile moment.

Scott Anderson: In addition to discussing kind of reforming or adjusting approach to peacekeeping missions we also saw some discussion around what has been a pretty big shift in the United Nations of last year or two, which is the, a humanitarian exemption that's been installed for existing UN sanctions program, a debate about extending, tweaking, adjusting, making potentially more permanent that exception. Something the United States has been involved in, a lot of other countries have been involved in, I think has broad support among certainly humanitarian actors and others working in kind of the conflict space. Talk to us about what progress you might have seen on that particular issue and how that fit in here and how it might relate to certain circumstances like Afghanistan where it's been a recurring point of concern.

Richard Gowan: Well, this is, this is an ongoing debate because in 2022 the Security Council did approve across the board humanitarian exemptions for, for sanctions, which means that it should be easier to, you know, finance humanitarian efforts in areas which, where otherwise money is blocked under the, the UN regimes. But back then, there were some countries, I think notably France, Russia, and India, which was on the Security Council at the time, that didn't want to extend these exemptions to cases where sanctions were applied to Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their various offshoots. And so the agreement then was that for most cases the humanitarian exemption is indefinite.

But, specifically for cases involving jihadist groups, the Security Council has to decide, I think this December, whether to extend it. And there was some concern, especially after the terrorist attacks on Moscow earlier this year, that Russia might use its veto to block the extension. Now, this does seem to be one topic where we're seeing maybe less tension than we have expected. The signaling we're getting from the Russians is that they have concluded that they, they will not use their, use their power in the Security Council to, to stop the application of the exemption in cases involving jihadist groups.

But I think there's still quite a lot of work to be done to actually make sure that this humanitarian carve out really helps aid agencies. We've heard that it's still very difficult to get banks to sign off on moving money in cases involving UN sanctions because they don't really understand the new exemption and so on and so forth. So there's quite a lot of downstream work to be done. But it is, you know, it is one area where I think the Security Council, primarily at the instigation of the U.S. supported by Ireland, did do something useful and helpful in recent years. And in a period when the, you know, the UN often is only able to provide humanitarian aid and, you know, can often only use its humanitarian arms to deal with conflicts which are politically impossible to resolve, it is good to see that there is general support for improving the openings for humanitarian action.

Scott Anderson: So this forward looking effort across a couple of different domains, it's really reflective of kind of a broader agenda that was at the General Assembly or married to the General Assembly meeting. Because kind of preceding the General Assembly meeting and not coincidentally as part of an effort to kind of, I think, ride the coattails or ride the wave ahead of such a massive summit of global leaders, there was also a meeting of the Summit of the Future, a major priority for Secretary General Guterres, that tries to bring together threads of how the UN can approach a whole range of issues from AI, I think there's a climate element. I think there's a bunch of other things that kind of get brought in that are kind of emerging issues. Talk to us a little about those developments, what came out of the talks, how much progress may have been made towards a pact, some sort of agreement that's supposed to, in theory, come out of this process that the summit is part of and where the trajectory seems to be headed on those issues.

Richard Gowan: So the Summit of the Future was something that Guterres first proposed back in 2021 in the wake of the COVID pandemic. And he put out a report three years ago called “Our Common Agenda,” which in essence argued that COVID had shown there are genuine global vulnerabilities that require genuine global responses. And the UN system is not fit for purpose. It's not designed to deal with all the potential challenges that are out there. And Guterres essentially put down a challenge to UN members and said, well, let's have a big summit, the Summit of the Future, to, to talk about how we fundamentally reform the international system.

He initially wanted that to be in 2023, it got pushed back to this year. And so just on the eve of the normal General Assembly week, there was two days of special meetings, the Summit of the Future, trying to address the the path forward for the multilateral system. Now, I think it's rather obvious that quite a lot has happened since Guterres raised this idea in 2021. Ukraine, Gaza, and so forth. And it doesn't necessarily now feel like a very propitious moment to try and overhaul the multilateral system.

And so, although member states did manage to agree an outcome, “The Pact for the Future.” A 30 page document covering a lot of multilateral policy areas. It definitely didn't live up to the initial level of ambition which Guterres had sketched out. It is actually more of a laundry list of useful, but mainly quite technical ideas about ways to address some gaps in the current international system. Developing countries insisted that it should have a strong focus on getting the sustainable development goals back on track because, you know, the UN's development efforts have been rather derailed by, by COVID. It contains a few useful ideas on peace and security issues, including an endorsement of an ambitious peace building review that we've already. But most of it is not going to cause enormous excitement, and I think a lot of people may say, is this really the best that we can do at a moment of general global crisis?

I think there were two elements of it that are really worth noting. One is that it contained some surprisingly ambitious language on Security Council reform. Nothing massively new substantively, but the text does include some general principles for reforming the council, such as the need to give Africa a greater voice in the council and the need to review how the veto works. It also calls for an acceleration of negotiations on reforming the council. That wasn't something which I would have predicted six to nine months ago. I would have thought that it would be too difficult to get agreement on that text, but it is there.

Secondly, there's an annex to the pact which focuses on digital issues. It's called the Global Digital Compact and it is essentially quite an important step forward, because for the first time it creates a baseline for UN discussions of artificial intelligence and related technologies. And although that is non-binding, I think that experts in the tech field are quite excited about it, because it does open up a new space for discussion around AI and other issues at the UN that wasn't previously there.

So I think those, those two things are positive. There's also a second annex called the Declaration on Future Generations, which is a bit vague and aspirational. But is interesting because it it's arguing that UN members, when they negotiate on different issues like climate or development, should take a longer-term view of global interests and the interests of generations yet to come. That sounds very, very idealistic indeed, but it's the sort of idealistic document which the UN puts out and over time can pick up momentum. But I think in the short term, the greatest excitement was around the digital stuff and this unexpected opening on Security Council reform.

Scott Anderson: So let's dig into this a little bit, because that is one of the big questions. There's a lot of discontent at the United Nations about the United Nations, and a lot of it centers on the Security Council and its current structure, particularly, you know, the veto structure that prevents anything that there's a point of disagreement between Russia and China and the United States on, from seeing really meaningful action, as long as they're willing to wield their veto. Do we see actually progress movement towards an idea about ways to change that or other aspects of the Security Council system that may make it more effective or efficient so that the sense of ennui that's kind of hanging over this particular Security Council won't necessarily have to be repeated in the same way in the future?

Richard Gowan: So what was agreed through the Pact for the Future is in essence that UN members should start more concrete negotiations on what Security Council reforms should look like. And over the last year Austria and Kuwait have been leading some quite interesting talks about Council reform where different countries and groups have come forward with models for what they think a reformed Council would look like.

And what the pact says is that more of these models should be discussed and then there should be a diplomatic effort to see if it's possible to take bits from the different ideas on offer and produce a consolidated model of a reformed Security Council. Now that sounds very technical and it also sounds very difficult, but actually it would represent more concrete negotiations about shifting the Council than we have seen for many years.

Does that mean that it will be possible to find a consolidated model that everyone can live with? That is very far from guaranteed. There are still, you know, deep issues around council reform, such as whether India can secure a permanent seat with a veto, that, I think, will be politically extraordinarily difficult to resolve. But what is striking is that at least there's now agreement on a pathway to explore these topics, with increased energy. And I think that reflects the fact that no one, including the current permanent members of the Council, can pretend that this body is working any longer. You can't write off some of its recent failures as unfortunate glitches. There is, as I said earlier, a unusual degree of frankness about how the council and the wider UN isn't working.

I think, you know, it's also a, an area where the Biden administration has had a certain impact at the UN. President Biden talked about the need for Council reform in his 2022 general assembly address. And then in early September, just before this year's assembly meeting, Linda Thomas Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, set out some new American ideas on Council reform, including offering two permanent seats to the African group. And so, you know, Biden, Biden is unquestionably not going to see Council reform during his presidency. Even if you have a Harris presidency that takes up the issue, it will take years to resolve the harder problems around this file. The U.S., I think, has played a useful role in nudging the topic forward in a way that, for example, the Obama administration never really did.

Scott Anderson: Well, that tees us up perfectly for our last question in our last few minutes here. Obviously, a major objective of this meeting each year is to set the agenda for the year to come, to some extent tee things up for multiple years to come down the road for the General Assembly, and for the United Nations, and to some extent, the broader international community as a whole, right? Because it is just a big convening of global leaders and a chance to, to do that sort of diplomacy that you don't get that often.

But this is a weird year to do it in because we're, we are, among other major developments, you know, a month from now, give or take, going to see an election in the United States that could yield two very different administrations. Neither of which is going to look exactly like the Biden administration that has had a very lean forward internationalist sort of vision over the last four years in which the United Nations has played a, not always effective, but nonetheless fairly significant role. Presumably we assume the Harris administration is going to look somewhat in that same direction, but you know, their priorities, their level of commitment might look very different from the Biden administration. And the Trump administration obviously has a very different international vision.

How does that affect the agenda that came out of this week's mission? How are people preparing for that election, the potential global ramifications of it for the UN, outside of the UN? And what does that mean in terms of the ability to plan so far ahead? What are people planning on that contingency, one way or another, for the UN?

Richard Gowan: So I think I was quoted by the London Times as saying that Trump was the Voldemort figure of the General Assembly. No one dared speak his name, obviously, in public. But everyone in private was asking whether he's coming back. And there is no doubt that a second Trump administration would cause enormous disruption at an already pretty fragile United Nations. I mean, we know some of the things that he would do because he did it during his first term. He's very likely to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement again, pull out of UN bodies like the Human Rights Council, which he doesn't trust.

And I think it's also widely feared that a Trump administration would very severely reduce and in some cases zero out American funding to the UN and its various agencies. That isn't just because of Trump himself, it's actually in many cases because the congressional Republican Party is going profoundly suspicious of the UN and all its works. And over the last year, we've seen a lot of anger in Congress from the Republican side about the way that, for example, Antonio Guterres has criticized Israel over Gaza or the General Assembly has criticized Israel over Gaza. We've seen even quite mainstream Republican figures like Mitt Romney sign on to ideas to reduce or zero out funding to the UN.

So, to be quite frank, if you ask UN officials up to quite a high level what their planning is for a, a Trump term, the answer is we're, we're wondering how on earth we work without any, without any U.S. cash. And without U.S. cash, you know, there's, there's a, there's a massive, massive gap in the UN budget, and the UN is already facing a lot of budgetary strain.

It's harder, in a sense, to know what a Trump administration would mean politically in organs like the Security Council. You know, you can read Trump's various meanderings and conclude that he wants reconciliation with Russia. That would imply that in the Security Council, you might see tensions with Moscow go down over certain issues. Conversely, you know, when he was last in office, Trump took a very strongly anti-China and anti-Iran stance. That would presumably also filter into UN diplomacy in a very disruptive way. But, you know, I think as in any field, guessing exactly what Trump's policies will be at the UN is a bit of a fool's game and it's complicated by the fact that there is no obvious candidate to be Trump's ambassador in New York. We don't know if he will appoint someone, you know, politically quite serious, as he did with Nikki Haley in 2017, or whether he will just send a donor or a culture warrior to New York to fill the slot.

When it comes to a Harris administration, no, no one has a clear picture of what President Harris would do at the UN. She has not made this a major campaign theme and nor should she, because it's not something which is going to swing a lot of votes. There have been, there have been hints that we've heard from Washington that Harris maybe feels that Biden has been too hard on the UN at times over Gaza. There was a story we heard that she had disapproved of the U.S. cutting off funds to UNRWA, the UN humanitarian agency supporting the Palestinians, over allegations that some of its staff had colluded with Hamas. But, I mean, these are, you know, these are shreds. These are shreds of information.

Harris's own main foreign policy advisor, Phil Gordon, is not someone who's concentrated on the UN, in contrast to someone like Susan Rice, who was a UN expert who was very close to Barack Obama. So I think, generally, as far as Harris is concerned, we assume that there would be a reasonable degree of continuity, possibly with some shifts in nuance. If we get Trump 2.0, we get un-nuanced chaos.

Scott Anderson: Well, on that note, we are out of time for today. But as always, Richard Gowan, thank you so much for joining us again here on the Lawfare Podcast.

Richard Gowan: Thank you very much indeed.

Scott Anderson: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter through our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, Chatter, Allies, and the Aftermath, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja, and your audio engineer this episode was Isabelle Kerby-McGowan of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening.