What the UN can do

_As the UN General Assembly opens its 81st session, an old order is dying and no one has agreed on what replaces it_

There is a particular kind of tiredness that settles over the world in years like this one, not the tiredness of a single crisis, but the tiredness of too many crises arriving together and refusing to leave. Somewhere over the Gulf, tankers still sit at anchor waiting for a strait that opens and closes like a fist. Somewhere in New York, diplomats are pressing their suits for a General Debate that will, once again, be asked to say something true about a world that keeps declining to behave. And somewhere in Antarctica, ice that has held for ten thousand years continues its quiet, unglamorous collapse, unbothered by the fact that nobody in a position of power is currently paying attention to it.

This is the world the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly opens into on September 8, a session whose own organisers have chosen, with what looks almost like exhausted honesty, the theme of “rebuilding trust.” Not achieving peace. Not solving climate change. Rebuilding trust. It is the kind of modest, almost apologetic ambition an institution reaches for when it has stopped believing it can promise anything larger.

Start with the war, because the war has a way of insisting on itself.

What began in February with strikes on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure has, over seven months, refused to resolve into either victory or peace. It has instead become something more familiar and more exhausting: a war that pauses and resumes, a ceasefire that expires and is renegotiated and expires again, a Strait of Hormuz that opens a crack and closes a fist. The language of the war itself has grown telling. Washington speaks now not just of defeating Iran but of *possessing* pieces of it. The American president’s suggestion that the Strait of Hormuz might simply be declared American territory “after we finish defeating Iran” is not a slip of the tongue. It is a glimpse of how casually the vocabulary of empire has crept back into the vocabulary of diplomacy, how easily “ceasefire” has come to mean merely “not this week.”

Iran’s own answer, that a waterway “cannot be seized with a tweet, an aircraft carrier, an executive order, or a campaign speech,” is, whatever one thinks of Tehran, not wrong. And in the meantime the war has stopped being only a war between two countries and become, as these things do, an ambient tax on everyone else. Oil that traded near sixty dollars before the strikes touched past a hundred when the strait first closed and has lived in that unstable neighbourhood ever since, spiking whenever the guns speak and sliding, briefly, whenever they fall quiet. Economists at the Dallas Fed have modelled what a prolonged closure would do to global growth and arrived at numbers that sound abstract until you remember they translate into real bread, real fuel, real school fees in Karachi and Lagos and Manila. Some estimates put the total cost to the world economy, if the war grinds on, above three and a half trillion dollars, more than three percent of everything humanity produces in a year, spent not on hospitals or harvests but on the friction of a conflict that keeps almost ending.

The countries paying the steepest price are, as ever, not the countries fighting. Gulf producers who never asked for this war have watched their export revenues collapse by billions of dollars a day. Import-dependent economies with no domestic alternative, Pakistan among them, Japan and South Korea too, absorb energy shocks they had no say in creating. This is the oldest and cruellest arithmetic of modern war: the states with the least power to start or stop a conflict are frequently the ones who pay for it longest, in currencies devalued and subsidies withdrawn and inflation that eats into wages already too thin.

And then there is the other war, the slower one, the one without ceasefires because it has no enemy to negotiate with. Climate change does not pause for diplomacy. It does not observe memoranda of understanding. While the Strait of Hormuz has occupied the world’s anxious attention for seven months, sea levels have continued their unhurried, implacable rise, and this year’s General Assembly, perhaps sensing the irony of a species distracted from its slowest catastrophe by its most recent one, has scheduled, for the first time, a High-Level Meeting devoted specifically to the existential threat posed by rising seas. It sits on the calendar between a meeting on climate action and a meeting on pandemic preparedness, three horsemen sharing a single crowded week in September, as though the Assembly itself is trying to say: choose which apocalypse you’d like to discuss first, we only have days.

There is something almost unbearably poignant in low-lying member states, the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, being asked once again to make their case before a hall full of nations whose emissions dwarf their own and whose attention, this year particularly, is elsewhere. They will speak, as they always do, with a dignity that ought to shame the rest of the room. And the rest of the room, as it always does, will nod, applaud, and return to discussing oil.

What, then, can anyone reasonably expect from these three weeks in New York?

Not a resolution to the Iran war. That will be settled, if it is settled at all, in Muscat or Doha or wherever the actual negotiators sit, not on the floor of the General Assembly. Not a binding climate breakthrough either. The Assembly does not have the teeth for that, and everyone in the hall knows it. What the UNGA can realistically offer this year is something both smaller and, in its way, more necessary: a stage on which the world is forced to say out loud, in front of everyone, what it actually thinks. There is a peculiar diplomatic honesty that happens under television lights that does not happen in closed rooms. Leaders posture, yes, but they also reveal, through emphasis, through omission, through who they choose to shake hands with and who they choose not to, where the real fault lines of the moment lie.

This year those fault lines will be especially visible, because the old architecture of the post-1945 order is visibly straining under a war that has made a mockery of Security Council paralysis. The Council could not stop the strikes in February. It has not been able to enforce the ceasefires that followed. A body designed in 1945 to prevent great powers from making war on smaller states was never well built for a moment when a great power simply announces it intends to annex a waterway once it finishes “defeating” a country, and there is no mechanism inside the UN system that can do anything about that announcement except express concern.

This is, perhaps, the real theme of UNGA 81, more honest than the official one. We are watching, in real time, the transition from a world ordered loosely around multilateral rules to a world ordered more nakedly around raw capability, where strength, not law, decides who controls a strait, who survives sanctions, who gets to redraw a map. It is not that the old order has collapsed; it is that its authority has been quietly, publicly tested and found wanting, strike by strike, veto by veto, ceasefire by broken ceasefire. What comes after is not yet clear. It may be a multipolar world of competing regional powers, none strong enough to dominate but each strong enough to defy. It may be something closer to a return of spheres of influence, dressed in the vocabulary of “deals” and “boards of peace” rather than the older, franker vocabulary of empire. Nobody in New York this September will say this plainly from the podium. But it will be audible in the silences.

And yet, and this matters, because cynicism is cheap and the UN has survived worse Septembers than this one, an institution does not need to solve a war to be worth having. It needs, at minimum, to keep a room where everyone still shows up. Ninety-three years after San Francisco, in a week when American bombers and Iranian missiles are still, technically, only paused rather than stopped, the fact that both sides’ allies and adversaries will sit in the same hall, take turns at the same podium, and be heard by the same exhausted translators is not nothing. It is, in fact, close to everything the institution was ever built to guarantee: not peace, which no charter can compel, but the persistence of a shared table at which peace remains at least conceivable.

What Pakistan and countries like it might reasonably ask for this year is not a miracle but a modest, stubborn insistence, that the Strait of Hormuz, the sea-level meeting, the pandemic session, and the general debate itself all be treated as pieces of a single argument: that the world’s smaller and more exposed nations, who bear the costs of wars and warming they did not cause, deserve more than a fortnight of speeches before the cameras move on. The UN cannot force great powers to behave. It can, if used well, make it harder for them to pretend no one is watching.

The sea will still be rising in October. The strait may still be closed. But for one crowded week in September, the world will at least sit in the same room and say so, out loud, in front of everyone, on the record. In a year like this one, that is not a small thing. It may, in fact, be the only thing keeping the room from becoming permanent.