Is the UN at a low ebb, or is there a shift in how the world is run?

For diplomats and UN veterans, the swirl of this week’s General Assembly will be tinged with nostalgia. For most of the UN’s nearly eight decades, this was its high point when world leaders met to argue over the pressing causes of the day. No longer.

Despite war in Europe, a spate of coups in Africa, natural disasters blamed on climate change, and friction between China and the US, this year only one leader of the “P5″ — the five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN’s Security Council — plans to attend.

Joe Biden, the US president, will on Tuesday address the assembly, as have his predecessors, often memorably and sometimes combustibly over the years. But in a reflection of the impasse on the Security Council, caused by the tensions between Western powers and Beijing and Moscow, the leaders of Britain, China, France and Russia are staying away.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, was never expected to turn up given the sanctions he faces over the invasion of Ukraine. Xi Jinping, China’s president, was always a long-shot, given the antagonism between Beijing and Washington.

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But the absence of the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak — for what would have been his first General Assembly — and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, reinforces the sense that the Security Council is no longer the premier place to address geopolitical faultlines. For both countries it would normally be inconceivable for their leaders to miss this week.

“It may be a reflection of what they see as the value of this organisation,” said Matthew Kroenig, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. “It’s the place where leaders come and give public speeches but that really nothing meaningful gets done.”

International bodies composed of like-minded powers, such as Nato and the G7, function because they bring together states with common interests to solve problems, he added. By contrast, more inclusive bodies such as the UN, which includes an array of adversarial powers, “aren’t working”.

The question is whether this is just one of the UN’s intermittent low ebbs, or whether it reflects a profound shift in how the world is run. There is no shortage of pretenders to replace it. In the past month two “newbie” multilateral bodies, the G20, which has just included the African Union, and the Brics — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — which is also expanding, attracted leaders, headlines and sweeping debates over the world order.

Diplomats with long memories recall that such was the stalemate in the 1970s and 1980s, during the Cold War, there was hardly a rash of Security Council resolutions. Even in the 1990s, the post-1960s high-water mark of UN interventionism, the world body was riven by tough debates.

They also highlight that while the G20 is a good forum for debate, it has neither binding statutes, nor an executive to deliver on the UN’s resolutions. The UN’s officials operate in missions across the developing world, often out of the headlines. This week’s UN gathering will see a series of vital meetings on tackling climate change and how to finance it.

But Western officials are deeply frustrated by the paralysis of the Security Council, and in particular by what they see as the obstructionism of Russian officials aimed at undermining its role.

They highlight how traditionally Russia never wanted to give civil society much access to Security Council debates but since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine has invited dozens of outside figures to speak about the war — including Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd bassist, who accuses the west of provoking the invasion.

“They are degrading the level of debate in the Security Council by inviting unqualified briefers and conspiracy theorists who make the debate look like a circus,” said one Western diplomat. “It makes an onlooker think it’s not worth listening to.”

“You have to work very hard to get things through. Russia is trying to grind us down and exhaust us. My concern is that it leads the Security Council into a weaker position.”

Diplomats from the developing world highlight that America and its allies have, at times in the past, also ridden roughshod over UN convention.

For all their frustration with the UN system, US officials say they still see value in an institution that can marshal collective action in areas such as food security and climate.

“There’s a demand signal from countries around the world that we the US lead responsibly and that means ... trying to make the UN and other international institutions more effective,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in an interview on Pod Save America.

He added: “I’d like to see a Security Council that functions but that is very challenging in a time when you have the antagonisms that we have with Russia and the competition that we have with China.”

In much of the world there is an increasingly fervent belief that the P5, as enshrined in 1945, should be expanded to better reflect the world. Western officials back calls for reform while knowing that the most obvious new members are at loggerheads with each other on who to promote — or would be blocked by one of the existing members.

All the while the US and its allies have fostered new groupings such as the G20, or more recently the Quad or the Aukus defence pact between Australia, the UK and US. In the latest such move Atlantic coastal countries announced on Monday a new partnership for co-operation.

“Reforming old institutions is really hard,” Kroenig said. “Essentially, that’s why the G7, the G20 have been created to get around the fact that the UN system wasn’t really working that well ... it’s much easier to just create new ones.”

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK’s UN ambassador from 1998-2003 and a staunch believer in its founding values and principles, conceded it could follow the fate of so many international institutions in fading into ineffectiveness.

But he argued it remains invaluable as the only place where global rules are laid down. “It is enfeebled but it does an enormous amount of good work in Africa, and in setting up special representatives and trying to bring closure to disputes.”

Somewhere, he said, the “spirit of collectivity has to be regenerated. Maybe it could be at the G20 — with the UN as the place to do the work.”

- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023