Arab News | Can a UN in crisis deliver with the Gulf, Gaza and Sudan in need of action?

NEW YORK: World leaders are gathering for the high-level week of the 81st UN General Assembly as crises in the Gulf, Gaza and Sudan compete for diplomatic attention. The race to choose the next secretary-general adds to the pressures on an organization that one longtime UN watcher described as stuck in “an open-ended crisis.”

The assembly’s session has already opened, but the leaders’ general debate begins on Tuesday, with speeches scheduled through Sept. 26 and again on Sept. 28.

Inside UN headquarters, the mood is tense. “The mood before high-level week is always one of high stress, as we try to get everything organized,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told Arab News.

The message Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wants heard, he said, is that the organization must confront overlapping crises at once — conflict, climate, technology and deepening inequality between and within countries, which he called “a very destabilizing factor” — while pushing member states to recommit to the UN’s founding values and modernize an institution still built for 1945.

“Reform is not a one-night stand,” Dujarric said. “It’s not a one-week stand. It’s a constant push.”

Despite a Gulf crisis analysts describe as massive in scale, diplomats interviewed said no dedicated high-level meeting on Iran or the wider standoff had been announced — an absence several diplomats and analysts called surprising.

Diplomats from several missions conceded the issue was “not really visible right now from the agenda.” One diplomat told Arab News the issue was “difficult to get a handle on” and said it was expected to feature prominently in meetings on freedom of navigation and the Strait of Hormuz.

Another diplomat said the Gulf crisis, despite being absent from the formal agenda, will be “built into” every other meeting on the agenda — a response one analyst dismissed as “a diplomatic answer.”

Richard Gowan, program director for global issues and institutions at the International Crisis Group, said he saw no indication of backchannel diplomacy between Washington and Tehran this year — “nothing like 2019,” he said, when a meeting between US President Donald Trump and his then-Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani nearly materialized. 

Iranian officials, he said, are expected to use their platform “to make their case in terms of, firstly, the fact they are victims of aggression; secondly, the fact that their own acts of aggression are really acts of self-defense.”

Daniel Forti, Crisis Group’s head of UN affairs, said the more consequential diplomacy will happen not at the podium but among Gulf states themselves while their leaders are gathered in New York, and that “how the Gulf states individually and collectively conduct their quiet diplomacy next week will be quite integral.”

Forti recalled how leaders from eight Muslim-majority countries met Trump unannounced last year to push for a Gaza ceasefire — a push that ultimately led to the ceasefire the US president went on to broker.

The same meeting is set to take place again this year, while the usual meeting between the GCC and the Security Council has been taken off the agenda this year.

The only related gathering on the calendar is a Germany-World Food Programme event on food security, a far cry from the major US-led food security summit Washington convened in 2022 during the first year of the Russia-Ukraine war.

It is a gap Gowan called striking given “a massive global crisis in the Gulf” with “no real meeting focusing on the fallout.”

A senior UN official overseeing peace and security said the Security Council has been discussing splitting Iran-related discussions into separate tracks — one on the Strait of Hormuz, another on the Houthis — and was blunt about the limits of what New York can do: “Something’s got to give,” the official said.

Yemen, the official added, is now entangled in the broader Gulf crisis and “getting a lot worse,” with 73 UN national staff still held by the Houthis, some for more than three years.

The Palestinian issue will also draw a noticeably smaller spotlight than it did 12 months ago.

A French diplomat told Arab News the format of this year’s follow-up event on the two-state solution, jointly hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, is still being finalized.

But it is expected to be narrower than last year’s co-chaired gathering, likely without Israel and centered on shortcomings in implementing the New York Declaration: humanitarian access and governance in Gaza, conditions in the West Bank, and Palestinian Authority reform.

Gowan tied the lower profile to the Security Council-endorsed Board of Peace mechanism, which he said has left “quite a lot of UN member states” trying to “say less about Palestine and focus on other issues.”

Chaired by Trump, the Board of Peace is tasked under the Gaza peace framework with overseeing transitional governance and reconstruction in the territory.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is separately co-hosting a two-state meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, building on last year’s declaration and the 20-point peace plan.

And Germany is again co-hosting a Gaza reconstruction meeting with Egypt — with a diplomat acknowledging that the humanitarian situation “has not improved” and that reconstruction “is not happening yet.”

The senior UN official listed a string of further side events, including a gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League on Jerusalem. And a meeting of the Norway-chaired Ad Hoc Liaison Committee, which coordinates international donor support for the Palestinians — evidence of an issue still generating activity even as its headline profile fades.

Sudan’s crisis, meanwhile, looks set to repeat a pattern that has held for three years running. The war pits the Sudanese army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

“This is a pattern that again we have seen for the last three years,” Gowan said. “It just doesn’t seem to get the same level of attention, sadly.”

A German diplomat conceded that the Berlin Principles Declaration, signed a year ago by Sudan’s neighbors and beyond, remains unimplemented, while another was equally candid that a Sudan ministerial this week was unlikely to produce anything “radically different” but was still worth holding to keep the crisis from falling off the radar entirely.

The senior UN official called Sudan the top priority, citing a humanitarian truce effort alongside the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, and a separate Quintet working with civil society on an inclusive peace framework — the first time the two groups plan to meet jointly.

The Quintet brings together the UN, African Union, EU, Arab League and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, an East African regional organization, to support a Sudanese-led political process.

“Really frustrating, really difficult,” the official said, adding that a resolution to expand the arms embargo had already failed to advance in the Security Council.

The proposed expansion would extend the existing Darfur-focused arms embargo to all of Sudan, broadening its geographic coverage to restrict supplies to the warring sides nationwide.

The official told Arab News that the most frustrating aspect of Sudan’s crisis was the continuing flow of weapons to the warring factions, without which the war could not have continued.

Lebanon adds another regional pressure point. France, as the Security Council member leading work on Lebanon, expects insufficient support for a full extension of the mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, beyond Dec. 31, 2026, and anticipates the discussion shifting toward some broader UN or international presence instead.

Guterres had floated three scenarios for what followed the peacekeeping force, but the senior official said there has been no response yet from the Council member most resistant to any extension, understood to be Washington, which has signaled openness to a non-UN-mandated force but not one under a UN flag.

Those regional dynamics unfold against the backdrop of an organization Gowan said is no longer in the “free fall” analysts described a year ago but has not stabilized either.

“We would no longer say that the UN is in freefall, but we would say that it is an organization that is stuck in an open-ended crisis, which is probably a marginally better position to be in, but still not great,” he said.

He credited a shift in Washington’s approach since Ambassador Mike Waltz arrived in New York — “a very tough customer” but a more predictable one — pointing to roughly $4 billion in restored US funding for UN humanitarian operations as evidence Washington wants to reshape the UN rather than dismantle it.

Even so, financial strain persists: the secretariat, Gowan said, “can only pay for the high-level week by pulling money from other budgets to get us through to the end of September.”

Running beneath all of it is the contest to succeed Guterres, who steps down on Dec. 31, alongside pushes on artificial-intelligence governance and climate.

Forti said the eight declared secretary-general candidates have converged on similar diagnoses of the UN’s problems — reform and budget cuts as a shared plank — while staying deliberately vague on remedies, too risky to show their cards “at a moment when the P5 still holds Damocles’ sword over your candidacies.”

The P5 are the Security Council’s five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — each of which can block the council’s recommendation of a candidate.

Both analysts cautioned against “magical thinking about how much one individual can do to lift up the UN,” with Forti noting that no single leader could realistically reverse the pressures the organization faces overnight.

On AI, Gowan credited Guterres with being “ahead of the curve,” calling the UN’s Digital Cooperation Day “a culmination of some of what he’s done.”

Scheduled for Sept. 21, the event aims to advance practical cooperation on AI science, policy and countries’ capacity to use the technology. Its program covers national AI strategies, skills, financing and digital infrastructure, with new partnerships among the intended results.

A central issue is how countries with fewer technological resources can help shape AI governance and share in its benefits.

Climate diplomacy will also extend beyond UN headquarters. Climate Week NYC’s opening ceremony on Monday was expected to bring leaders together to discuss how to accelerate action and move from commitments to implementation, adding a parallel forum for climate cooperation during the assembly gathering.

Even so, in Gowan’s assessment, the outgoing secretary-general leaves behind an uneven legacy on the conflicts central to the UN’s mandate, one that will shape how much credibility his successor inherits in a Middle East where the UN’s own relevance is increasingly in question.