What Happened at the 2026 UN General Assembly?

The Just Security Podcast

Host Viola Gienger interviews Daniel Forti and Maria Sekijima of the International Crisis Group to analyze the 2026 UN General Assembly High

Key takeaways

• The 2026 UNGA mood was described as 'pretty gloomy' but less existentially fraught than the previous year, with leaders defending multilateralism despite institutional strain.
• U.S. financial contributions remain a critical bottleneck, with the Trump administration owing approximately $4 billion in arrears for regular and peacekeeping budgets before recently paying $900 million.

Main topics

• 2026 UNGA High-Level Week atmosphere
• UN financial crisis and U.S. dues arrears

Notable quotes

"It was quite striking that the mood was pretty gloomy, but not as existentially fraught as this time last year."

Conclusion

The episode underscores a UN at a financial and geopolitical crossroads,

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:08) Thanks for joining us on the Just Security Podcast. I'm Viola Ganger, your host for today's episode. The United Nations General Assembly High Level Week just came to a close, gathering some 130 presidents and prime ministers for the annual session in New York at a time of major institutional and financial challenges for the UN. Today, we'll recap that week and look at what's ahead with two of the foremost UN watchers. We'll talk about the atmosphere at the UN during this year's gathering, how the UN is navigating global challenges and its own. And we'll hear about the latest developments in the race for the next UN Secretary General to succeed Antonio Guterres when he steps down at the end of this year after a decade in office. Joining us today are Daniel Forti and Maria Sekajima of the International Crisis Group. both of whom have been following the latest developments at the General Assembly very Speaker 1 (1:07) closely. Speaker 2 (1:08) First Daniel and then Speaker 3 (1:09) Maria, would you mind introducing yourselves to the audience? Speaker 1 (1:15) Thanks for having me, Viola. I'm Daniel Forti, head of UN affairs at the International Crisis Group, with whom I've been working for the past three and a half years, and I've been covering the UN based out of New York for the past eight. Speaker 3 (1:30) Maria? Speaker 2 (1:31) I'm Maria Sekijima. I am the UN analyst at International Crisis Group. I've been working on and following the UN for about seven years, first as part of a member state delegation and now with Crisis Group as research and advocacy. Speaker 3 (1:47) Great. Thank you very much. Daniel, let's start with you and just dive right in. This is a particularly fraught time for the United Nations during this 81st UN General Assembly session. Think of that 81 years. What was the mood there? Speaker 1 (2:03) It was quite striking that the mood was pretty gloomy, but not as existentially fraught as this time last year, which was inevitably the reference point for a lot of the leaders and diplomats who were in New York last week. It was still a time of crisis, and leaders who came to the UN were under no illusion about the organization's poor health, the political crises that beset it. The financial challenges that have been well documented and have really come into times questioned the organization's solvency. But there was a general sense that if last year was a major threat to the organization's viability on the world stage, this year was just merely bad. We got the sense that there were a lot of leaders who came to New York prepared to defend. both the UN and multilateral cooperation more broadly. There was an even announcement by a few heads of state and the head of the European Union about a new partnership on multilateralism, P4M, which was a sign of a commitment to states coming together to solve their problems in a way that was less confrontational. Many of the leaders' statements were quite clear. defending both the UN's role on the world stage and the need for collective action and international solidarity to deal with threats ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence. But there was no doubt that there is going to need to be a lot of work about the UN and reforming the organization, particularly with the new secretary general coming in 2027. And then lastly, I think the other and more damaging aspect that the UN's leaders faced last week was the split screen that happened in the middle of high-level week, where on the one hand, you had President Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, meeting in Washington, D.C., at the same time that heads of state and government and ministers were in New York separately dealing with a range of international crises. So there was a sense that if these two leaders don't invest as much time in multilateral cooperation through the UN, it does present a major problem for the organization's relevance on the world stage that governments and the new UN's leadership will need to deal with over the months to come. Speaker 3 (4:38) Yeah, and the two of them being, of course, among the five. Speaker 3 (4:43) veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. So that's pretty major there. Thank you very much for that, Daniel. Mariette, what did you see as the priority issues for the leaders that were gathered there this year? I mean, the priority issues sometimes are on the formal agenda, or sometimes they're not. Just this split screen. scenario that Daniel just described, but what was uppermost in the minds of the leaders at the UN? Speaker 2 (5:15) I think you can split it into sort of two categories, the geographic files and the thematic issues. On the geographic side, you have the sort of big geopolitical crises of the day. So the wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine. And on the thematic side, there was a big focus on AI. So starting with sort of the latter bits. And this big focus on AI is no doubt fueled by recent reporting talking about the potential existential threats that AI may pose. So in the UN space, you had a high level UN Security Council meeting with briefings by sort of big, three big tech CEOs. And then you also had in the general debate, leaders talking in their general debate speeches about AI as well. Speaker 3 (6:07) Interesting. OK, any movement on those issues? Speaker 2 (6:11) So if you take kind of the geographic issues one by one on the Iran side, what we saw was a lot of diplomacy on the sidelines. You had the U.S. and Iran both meeting at working level. You also had Trump meeting with the various GCC leaders. Speaker 2 (6:30) At the end of the week, we saw Iran proposing a new seven-day deal that we understand has now been rejected by the U.S. But it is good that what we're seeing is a bit more diplomacy and a return to that rather than a return to aggression, what we've seen in the past few months. Speaker 3 (6:46) That's interesting. Okay. So can we do it like just a quick lightning round on some of the other? developments, if any, at UNGA related to some of the other world's hotspots like Gaza, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar? I mean, is anybody talking about that anymore? Speaker 2 (7:07) Sure. So I'll take Gaza first on Israel-Palestine side. So last General Assembly week, we had a... there was a big, strong momentum around Gaza. You had the big two-state solution conference and a slew of member states deciding to recognize Palestine. This year, it's been slightly more muted. You had two kind of big side events, potentially competing side events. You had the follow-up meeting of the Global Alliance of the Two-State Solution, as well as the U.S. Board of Peace. briefing the various member states. So there is what we're seeing a bit of tension between these two tracks. But it's good to not allow the Board of Peace to necessarily control the multilateral space on the Israel-Palestine issue. Elsewhere on Israel-Palestine, another big announcement from the UK just ahead of UNGA high level week. was the announcement of sanctions against West Bank settlements. That was a major announcement. It was no surprise that Benjamin Netanyahu's speech in the General Assembly was quite hard line. And it was more seen as a message to the domestic audience ahead of Israeli elections later this year. On the Ukraine side, you know, little little progress to show from that. You had the what's now becoming a bit of an annual Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. But the one meeting of significance that we were tracking was the meeting between Germany and Russia. And that was the first bilateral talks that they've had since the start of the war in 2022. So that was quite significant. Speaker 2 (8:52) You also asked about sort of less or