The planet is on fire, but almost all the firefighters have deserted. At the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, which began on September 19 in New York, the leaders of four of the five permanent members of the Security Council – the UN’s most powerful executive body – were absent.
The absence of the top representatives of France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, replaced by ministers or diplomats, demonstrated the emptying of the main global multilateral forum and highlighted the speeches of the two presidents who opened the General Assembly: Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the US’s Joe Biden.
Both leaders, with decades of experience, referred bluntly to fires that are ravaging the planet - starting with the climate emergency and the war in Ukraine. And both, albeit in very different tones, pointed the finger at the central issue hanging over the meeting, which the absentees made clear: the crisis of the UN and the multilateral system that has been built around it in recent decades.
