The annual gathering of the United Nations General Assembly is especially strange this year, with speeches from world leaders piped in from around the globe as they mark the U.N.’s 75th birthday from afar. But the truth is, many nations were socially distancing themselves from the U.N. well before the coronavirus came along.
Indeed, the scattered assembly and empty chamber looming over the East River are emblematic of a longer-term problem than COVID-19: the widening gulf of policy and practice among dozens of key U.N. members, and a pervasive sense of the world body’s growing irrelevance. Leading the way, of course, has been an unremittingly hostile Trump administration.
