As Antonio Guterres Faces His Final UN General Assembly, Can the United Nations Restore Global Trust?

The world's biggest diplomatic gathering—the general debates of the 81st UN General Assembly—begins on Tuesday. Traffic comes to a halt across Midtown Manhattan New York for a week as foreign ministers, presidents, chief executives and activists swarm New York, each convinced their meeting matters more than the one down the hall. It's impossible to get a table at a restaurant on the East Side anywhere between 40th and 62nd Street. Hotels are booked solid, and room rates shoot up.

This year is also embattled Antonio Guterres's final UNGA—the Secretary General’s swan song, so to speak. The 77-year-old Portuguese politician was elected in 2016, and faced a world that already included a vicious war in Syria and the shock of Brexit. Compared with what awaits his successor, that old world looks almost tame. Mr Guterres faced enormous frustrations—calling for the protection of civilians in Gaza during some of Israel's worst bombardment, and a world where US President Donald Trump's second term mutilated multilateralism.

Mr Guterres came into office at a time when UN envoys still had some respect and weight. Ten years on, he will make his final speech as a globalist in a world where the UN has increasingly little leverage. The Secretary General’s critics will say he did not push hard enough for peace in Ukraine or the Middle East. He would likely push back by saying he did what he could, attempting lukewarm diplomacy and the supply of humanitarian aid.

This year's official UNGA focus is standard fare: the Sustainable Development Goals—the 17 targets on poverty, hunger, gender equality and other issues that member states adopted the year before Mr Guterres was elected. However, this assembly will convene in a deeply uncertain moment, and its theme—Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation—is almost ironic given how stalled the SDGs actually are. Only a third of the 17 goals are on track.

As with many annual global summits, the real business at UNGA happens off the main stage—the roundtables and bilaterals tucked into UN missions and hotel suites across Midtown. Many delegates' attention will focus on the wars that are still burning. The US has entered another forever war in Iran, one with shifting goals and an early declared "victory" from Mr Trump that doesn't look much like one. Gaza and Palestine will be central, with France using its Security Council presidency to push, once again, for a two-state solution a year after the New York Declaration on the issue.

Ukraine will get its usual hearing, though after nearly five years the appetite for fresh pledges is thinning. Sudan—the war nobody wants to deal with and where the humanitarian outcome is horrific—will likely get a fraction of the floor time its casualty numbers deserve. Having just returned from a high-level security forum in Kyiv—where the train just before the one carrying foreign dignitaries such as Boris Johnson, David Petraeus and Carl Bildt was attacked by a Russian drone—I can say that nearly five years of war have exhausted the Ukrainians.

They still see themselves as the last frontline between Europe and President Vladimir Putin's imperial Russia, and they are right. But they are increasingly alone. Mr Putin is wanted by The Hague and won’t be at UNGA. Europe has done what it can, and Mr Trump has given his royal decree on Ukraine: he’s not interested. In Kyiv, our conversations were largely focused on AI warfare—the future of autonomous kill drones when humans are not in control. This is terrifying, sci-fi stuff that will also be addressed in New York this week.

Another leader wanted by The Hague, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be in New York. The Israeli Prime Minister will face down the protesters who gather every year calling for his removal. Despite his unpopularity abroad and at home, Israel’s deal with Washington for more one-tonne bombs arrives at the exact moment public opinion is turning against his government and even armies allied with Israel are pressing it toward more ethical conduct.

Climate change will also be addressed. This year's gathering follows a summer that made global warming impossible to ignore: devastating floods in Nepal; fires raging through France and California; and a Europe unprepared for the heat. The headline session is sea-level rise, timed for delegations from the Pacific and Caribbean island states whose territory is shrinking by the year.

Mr Guterres has already signalled which threats he consider gravest—Gaza and Ukraine at the centre, alongside the US-Iran war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and pushed oil past $100 a barrel. But it's runaway AI that will likely dominate the private conversations happening throughout Manhattan. Mr Guterres wants multilateral oversight, but the US and EU would rather leave it to the private sector. Meanwhile Mr Trump—whose frenemy Elon Musk is leading the charge on AI development—has shown little interest in building policy or controls to match the technology's speed.

Mr Guterres leaves office having spent nine years insisting the UN can still deliver, right as the evidence for that claim gets harder to find. Restoring trust was always going to be this session's slogan. Whether anyone stuck in that Midtown traffic, or waiting in line to get into a roundtable session, actually believes it is the story worth watching.