Make the U.N. Great Again: The Uphill Struggle Facing The Next Secretary General

It may be both the most prestigious and the most frustrating job in international diplomacy: members of the United Nations are weighing who should succeed António Guterres as Secretary-General when he completes his final term in December. The timing couldn’t be more critical, with U.N.’s fortunes at a historically low ebb, for reasons both political and financial.

Indeed, U.N. insiders question why anyone would even want the job at such a testing—and turbulent—moment. Some predict that, with major powers repeatedly blocking the U.N. from intervening in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar, and with the U.S. rolling back funding, whoever succeeds Guterres will simply have to continue to do “less with less” and manage a process of institutional decline as gracefully as possible. Others still hold out hope that a new U.N. leader could reverse the slide, and persuade powers large and small to invest in the organization.

Yet, at a time when global challenges—wars, epidemics, and climate change—continue to proliferate, there is a compelling case for preserving the U.N. as a space for global deal making. Doing so will require a Secretary-General of formidable political skills, capable of persuading world leaders to listen.

It is a question of balancing two competing imperatives. The U.N. is an organization that rests on international cooperation, but the current global moment is one of international competition. The challenge facing the next Secretary-General is to explain how the U.N. can stay relevant. This is no time to preach the virtues of solidarity among nations. It is necessary to meet governments “where they’re at,” as psychologists say, and accept their rifts are real. A shrewd leader of the U.N. could find ways to help states de-escalate conflicts and cooperate on global challenges out of necessity, not idealism.

Ultimately, if political leaders do not believe that the U.N., which was founded in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” can live up to that founding goal, they are less likely to take it seriously as an authority on other international issues such as Artificial Intelligence or economic cooperation. Making sure that doesn’t happen will be the central challenge for the organization’s next leader. Perhaps each nomination should thus come with a warning: Caveat emptor, or buyer beware. 

Our Tumultuous Present

Maybe the biggest challenge for the next Secretary General lies inside the cavernous chamber that houses the Security Council, the organization’s most powerful body. The five permanent, veto power-wielding members—the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France—that dominate the council have repeatedly blocked intervention in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar. The Biden Administration’s repeated refusal to support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza at the U.N. in 2023 and 2024 stirred deep resentment across the organization.

Most member states still pay homage to the U.N. Charter and its prohibition against aggression. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. decision to attack Iran in February suggest that some of the security council’s most powerful members no longer feel bound by its guiding principles. If the U.N.’s political situation is its main headache, its financial positions is a close second.

After the Trump Administration cut off the bulk of U.S. funding for its operations in 2025, U.N. officials have been spending a lot of their time wondering about how to pay the bills. The U.S. is supposed to cover about a fifth of the organization’s core costs and a quarter of the budget for its blue helmet peace operations, which add up to roughly $8.5 billion this year. Washington was already behind on its dues when Trump returned to office, and currently owes the U.N. about $4 billion. The U.S also previously covered roughly a third of the separate budgets for the organization’s big relief agencies—such as the World Food Programme—which need tens of billions of dollars to feed, vaccinate and shelter vulnerable people each year.

Other traditional donors, including European governments, are scaling back spending on development and humanitarian aid. Potential alternatives have not stepped in to close the financial gap. China is now on the hook for almost as much of the U.N.’s core and peacekeeping budgets as the U.S., but is often slow to stump up its annual contributions. Beijing also contributes very little to the humanitarian sector. While the Trump Administration has released some funds for the U.N.’s life-saving efforts this year, big relief agencies have been forced to cut back life-saving assistance to civilians in places like South Sudan and Afghanistan.

This is a markedly different landscape from the one António Guterres encountered in 2017, when the former Portuguese prime minister became Secretary-General. At that time, the U.N. members had just agreed to the Paris climate accord and a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, including a pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. Geopolitical storm clouds were gathering—the Security Council was fiercely divided over the war in Syria—and Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 elections, coming soon after Guterres’s selection, signaled trouble ahead. Still, for believers in multilateral processes, a broad agenda for international cooperation appeared to be in place, and the Secretary-General’s task was to turn it into reality.

That brief moment of optimism proved ephemeral. Guterres spent a large part of his first term trying, with some success, to keeping rum at bay. Nonetheless rising tensions among major powers, and disputes over how to finance development projects and support poorer states’ climate change adaptation efforts, have eroded governments’ trust in one another, and their faith in the U.N.’s complex, negotiation-based approach to addressing their national interests. Guterres has spoken eloquently about the risks of international fragmentation, and has pushed U.N. members to work together on emerging challenges, such as the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But he has struggled to get leaders to focus consistently on that agenda. Increasingly, many governments are turning instead to smaller, looser decision-making clubs—such as the Group of 7, a Western club, or the BRICS, the bloc of emerging market nations—rather than the U.N. itself.

Diplomats and U.N. officials also fault Guterres for taking a low-key role in crisis management, despite major conflicts exploding on his watch. The Secretary-General has been blunt about his lack of leverage to mediate in most of today’s conflicts, and has encouraged a culture of caution among his senior staff dealing with political affairs and peace operations. Although he was involved in one notable mediation success—the 2022 Black Sea Grain initiative—many U.N. members feel that his reluctance to engage in broader peace efforts has undermined the body’s credibility.

Runners and Riders

Such critiques of the incumbent, and the manifold challenges facing the office of the Secretary General, haven’t deterred a clutch of candidates from around the world—who may yet be joined by new competitors as the race to succeed Guterres enters its final stretch. 

Eight candidates are currently jostling to replace him and assume the reins of what U.N. watchers sometimes call “the parliament of man.” Among the most widely discussed are Rafael Grossi, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Rebeca Grynspan, a senior U.N. trade official and former vice president of Costa Rica. Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s ambassador to the U.N., is also a popular candidate among her colleagues in New York. But because there is no official cut-off point for new candidates to enter the race, and many diplomats expect more challengers to emerge, especially if none of the existing crop looks like a clear winner.

While the current candidates have been speaking at public events from Europe to Korea, they have struck a cautious tone regarding their plans for the U.N. This reflects the way the selection process works. The Security Council—where the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K. hold vetoes—is central to the process, vetting candidates and recommending one to the General Assembly, where all U.N. members have seats, for approval. To date, the Assembly has always ratified the recommendation. Anyone who wants to be Secretary-General must avoid offending the five veto powers.

Talking about what is wrong with the world today without irritating at least one of the major powers is quite hard. Guterres angered Russia by criticizing its war in Ukraine, and Moscow is likely looking for a pliable U.N. chief. The biggest headache for Guterres’s successor will be maintaining working relations with Washington in the remaining years of the Trump presidency. Senior U.N. officials worry that, having imposed severe economic strain on the organization, the U.S. will insist that the next Secretary-General make deep cuts to U.N. agencies and follow the Trump Administration’s agenda on questions such as diversity, and soft-pedal criticism of Israeli actions against the Palestinians.

Tiptoeing around these sensitivities, the eight candidates for the Secretary-General position agree that the U.N. is in poor shape. All have promised to concentrate on preventive diplomacy, and have committed to managing the organization efficiently. None has so far set out a groundbreaking strategy for putting the U.N. back on its feet. If this is partly a matter of political tact, it also reflects the fact that the U.N. Secretary-General, despite being the public face of the organization, has only limited power to shape the organization. While the veto powers dominate the Security Council, a sprawling array of intergovernmental committees and boards—including dozens of entities dealing with issues from telecommunications to the environment—oversee the wider work of the U.N. system.

The Secretary-General and his or her advisers must barter with U.N. members over remarkably minor budgetary matters, down to the number of mid-level and junior staff employed in U.N. offices. It is easy to call on the U.N.’s top official to focus on problems of world order, but bureaucracy gets in the way. 

Once in office, the next U.N. chief will have to manage these institutional issues while also laying a broader agenda. She or he could address this challenge by appointing a powerful chief of staff to handle administrative matters, freeing up more time to prioritize diplomacy.

On the diplomatic front, the incoming leader’s priority will be to demonstrate the ability to insert himself or herself into one or more conflicts, signaling a shift from the Guterres era. This is easier said than done. Conflict prevention and peacemaking have become crowded fields, with a growing number of middle powers, and at times the Trump Administration, leading peace processes that the U.N. might once have overseen. 

The next Secretary-General will not simply be able to fly into trouble spots and cajole warring parties into making deals. But he or she can use the first months in office to shuttle between key capitals in regions such as the Middle East, looking for opportunities to engage, and encouraging U.N. staff—who still have considerable expertise on issues like mediation and peacekeeping operations—to table new options for dealing with ongoing or looming conflicts. This is not likely to produce quick or major wins, and there is always a risk that the U.N. will launch peace initiatives that fail. But as a European diplomat familiar with the U.N. once put it, everyone expects the U.N. to fail, and as a result it can do so without sustaining reputational damage. 

The greater danger for the institution right now is that it fails to engage in meaningful crisis diplomacy at all, cementing the impression that it is no longer a significant peacemaking force. If the Secretary-General can use this kind of early outreach to gain a place on the diplomatic map, she or he will still face the challenge of articulating what the U.N. stands for in a divided world.

Collective action in a world divided

There is no shortage of good arguments for why collective action helps address problems that transcend borders. These often get lost at a time when the predominant political narratives center on national divisions and differences.

U.N. officials do not help themselves by couching their arguments in technocratic terms, weighed down with talk of goals and policy frameworks. But the underlying political challenge is to make a case for multilateralism that resonates with decision-makers who view international affairs in zero-sum, or at least very low-trust, terms.

The best approach may be to frame the U.N. as a sort of global risk reduction organization. Over the last decade, governments, the private sector and the public have seen the knock-on effects of both the pandemic and regional conflicts causing global economic disruption. New technologies are creating further economic shocks and could make future conflicts more dangerous.

The U.N. is not a global authority with the powers to halt these trends. But it is a space in which governments can discuss the risks involved and—where they see common ground—explore steps to mitigate them. Even though it may be easier for states to meet in smaller clubs such as the BRICS and G7, the U.N.’s advantage is that it remains a neutral space where different blocs of governments can engage in dialogue.

The next Secretary-General can only encourage rivalrous states to take part in these dialogues, and will need to do so with a light touch. In the past, the U.N. has sometimes responded to new challenges by announcing new agencies and funds to address them. The resulting multilateral bloat has become hard to sustain financially and defend politically. The incoming U.N. leadership will need to show that it can facilitate discussions of difficult global problems without adding new layers of bureaucracy.

The role of the Secretary-General is perhaps to be both the world’s most prominent event organizer—bringing governments and other actors into the room to talk about their problems—and a sort of political therapist for world leaders. If the Secretary-General can win the trust of these leaders, and persuade them to work on common problems despite their divisions, he or she may be able to bring a degree of stability to a dangerous international environment. In doing so, she or he can also keep some political space open for the U.N. to do its most basic work, getting help to the suffering, mitigating the effects of suffering and – at its best – giving small states and civil society groups a rare platform to speak out on issues like human rights and climate change.

The new leader of the U.N. cannot heal all the world’s divisions, but with courage and political acumen, the Secretary-General can make international disputes a little less toxic. That may be a limited vision of what the U.N., sometimes dubbed the “parliament of man” is for.  But in an era of multiplying dangers and distrust, it is a noble and perhaps essential one.