See the sad, stressed state of the world when Australia’s prime minister goes to a Quad summit in the US but doesn’t bother going to the United Nations.
Anthony Albanese went to the Quad last month seeking balance of power, while the UN confronted a world out of balance.
The UN leaders’ week got off to an ambitious start with the Summit of the Future on 22 and 23 September, which produced the Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. In the effort to reboot multilateralism, the UN gets an A for ambition. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily translate to A for able, achievable or attainable.
The procedural blocks Russia kept throwing at the pact supported such scepticism. The absence that mattered at the UN gathering wasn’t that of Albanese, but of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
The leaders of China and Russia don’t have to attend because they have the power that trumps all else in the UN: they wield the veto held by the five permanent members of the Security Council. The veto can block any attempt to restructure the Security Council, despite calls for change.
The US supports new permanent seats on the Security Council for Germany, India and Japan, plus two African nations. The new members would not get the veto power. In his UN speech, France’s President Emmanuel Macron proposed major limitations on the veto:
Reform of the composition alone of the Security Council is not sufficient to make it more effective. I also wish for reform to change the operational methods to limit the right to a veto in case of mass crimes.
Translation: Russia should not be able to veto resolutions condemning its mass crimes in Ukraine. The day the veto power is reformed, however, we really will have a world body showing an ability to change the world.
The need for change was captured in a New York Times headline previewing the leaders’ week: ‘United Nations meets as growing chaos and violence spread across the world’. The UN’s own people pay part of the price of a world locked in a ‘purgatory of polarity’—220 of its staff have been killed in the Israel-Hamas War.
The ‘purgatory’ line is from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his annual statement to the General Assembly, decrying the ‘whirlwind’ of out-of-control geopolitical divisions in an ‘era of epic transformation’.
Guterres pointed to three major drivers of the unsustainable whirlwind:
—A world of impunity, where violations and abuses threaten the very foundation of international law and the UN Charter.
—A world of inequality, where injustices and grievances threaten to undermine countries or even push them over the edge.
—A world of uncertainty, where unmanaged global risks threaten our future in unknowable ways.
Following the secretary-general to the podium, Joe Biden delivered one of the last foreign policy speeches of his presidency by surveying the 52 years since he became a senator. His poetic version of what he sees today drew on lines from Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’.
Seeing an inflection point in world history, Biden called on the UN to hold the centre:
There will always be forces that pull our countries apart and the world apart: aggression, extremism, chaos, and cynicism, a desire to retreat from the world and go it alone. Our task, our test is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart, that the principles of partnership that we came here each year to uphold can withstand the challenges, that the centre holds once again.
Biden’s quote was highlighted in a commentary by Richard Haass, the veteran diplomat and analyst who is one of my go-to guides for following US international policy.
Haass described the speech as being ‘reminiscent of the book that influenced me most on international relations, The Anarchical Society, by the Australian academic Hedley Bull. For Hedley, the state of the world reflects the relative balance between forces of order and disorder, or in his terminology, “society” and “anarchy”.’
Haass wrote that order is not the natural way of the world—entropy and disorder is what happens in systems unless they are influenced by benign actors:
Several trends have moved things towards disorder of late. There is the proliferation of power (above all military, but also economic) that ensures the United States and its partners will encounter increasingly strong opposition from China, Russia, and others when they seek to expand their influence and promote their interests. There is as well the emergence of global issues—above all climate change—for which it has become impossible to forge a common approach. And there is another factor adding to disorder: the eroding commitment within the United States to play the sort of leading international role that has characterized our foreign policy approach for the past 75 years.
This sentiment was echoed in most leaders’ speeches throughout the week of high diplomacy. Beyond the words, the hard question facing the UN is what weight it can muster to deal with a world out of balance.