Secretary-General Guterres speaking at his year-end press conference had little positive to say

Read Devex author Colum Lynch’s article (3 January 2023) on the UN leader’s year end speech.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres holds an end-of-year press conference in December 2022. Photo by: Mark Garten / UN Photo

It’s getting harder to wish someone a Happy New Year these days.

The final days and weeks of 2022 were marked by Russian missile strikes in Kyiv, crackdowns on and executions of young Iranian protesters, reversals for women’s rights in Afghanistan — where the Taliban have prevented women from working on aid projects — and ongoing missile tests in North Korea.

For now, there is little hope that 2023 will usher in a new season of peace in Ukraine, mark the retreat of global poverty, or provide fresh evidence that existential threats to humanity, such as global warming, will be nipped in the bud before the planet and its inhabitants endure further irreversible losses.

Speaking at his year-end press conference in December, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres sounded as though he was delivering a sermon on the End Times.

The global financial system, established after World War II to stabilize the world economy, has grown “morally bankrupt,” exacting higher borrowing costs on those less able to afford it, Guterres said. The world’s “poor are getting poorer,” while rising inflation has condemned struggling countries to “staring down the abyss of insolvency and default” in a place he described grimly as “‘debt row.”

Prospects for a cease-fire in Ukraine are essentially nil at the moment, as Russia, possibly with the aid of Belarus, prepares for a winter offensive. “I do believe the military confrontation will go on,” Guterres said.

It is hard to remember a time when the U.N. and its leader have provided such a gloomy forecast and the prospects for international cooperation or multilateralism. Kofi Annan’s 2004 so-called annus horribilis — when rampant corruption over the organization’s management of the multibillion-dollar oil-for-food deal in Iraq “cast a shadow” over the U.N. and almost cost Annan his job — pales in comparison.

Today, the world is hurtling toward a best-case scenario for combating global warming — limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius — that appears the least likely to be achieved.

The list of setbacks has set the stage for diminished expectations for multilateralism to solve the most pressing challenges, such as achieving the U.N. Charter’s goal of ending the “scourge of war for future generations.” For the U.N. that means a more limited role in taking the edge off some of the most challenging crises, such as helping Ukraine export grain to a war-torn world or helping to facilitate an exchange of prisoners. In the coming year, Guterres will ramp up pressure on governments to meet their commitments to scale back greenhouse gas emissions and bolster funding to meet the Sustainable Development Goals.

The goal, Guterres said, is to find “practical solutions” to the world’s problems. “Not perfect solutions — not even always pretty solutions.”

In a sign of the challenges ahead, the U.N. issued its largest humanitarian appeal for 2023, calling for $51.5 billion to assist 230 million people in dire straits.

“The needs are going up because we’ve been smitten by the war in Ukraine, by COVID-19, by climate,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said last month. “I fear that 2023 is going to be an acceleration of all those trends, and that’s why we say … that we hope 2023 will be a year of solidarity, just as 2022 has been a year of suffering.”

Griffiths notes that extreme weather events, including floods and droughts from Pakistan to the Horn of Africa, have deepened human misery, contributing to the suffering of the more than 100 million people who are currently displaced. He added that at least 222 million will face “acute food insecurity in 53 countries by the end of this year.”

Five countries “are already experiencing what we call famine-like conditions, where we can confidently and unhappily say that people are dying as a result — and it tends to be children — of displacement, food insecurity, lack of food, starvation,” he added.

And yet, not everyone is gloomy about the prospects for 2023.

The deadliest conflict in the Horn of Africa — the Ethiopian civil war, which pitted the government against Tigrayan rebels — showed signs of abating with a Nov. 2 peace deal. It remains unclear whether a key player in the conflict — Eritrea, which joined the anti-Tigrayan offensive — will withdraw its troops from Ethiopia or whether the pact is durable enough to preserve the peace. On New Year’s day, the U.N. secretary-general’s office welcomed the announcement of a six-month cease-fire between the Colombian government and armed groups.

Sarah Cliffe, the executive director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, began 2022 in a pessimistic mood. She recalled the persistence of the pandemic, deepening economic inequality, and the looming war in Ukraine.

Many of her fears came true, yet she has grown more optimistic about the future of international cooperation in 2023.

For one, the U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain deal has helped stabilize global food prices, while U.N. officials remain engaged in talks aimed at facilitating Russian fertilizer exports — a key plank of U.N. strategy for easing global fertilizers costs this year — and seeking a prisoner exchange. The International Atomic Energy Agency has deployed inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and other nuclear facilities last year in Ukraine, which had been seized by Russian forces in the early months of the invasion. The nuclear agency is now seeking to negotiate the terms of a nuclear safety and security protection zone between Ukraine and Russia.

In the months following the invasion, the United States and European powers engaged in what Cliffe described as a “dialogue of the death” with capital cities in low- and middle-income countries. They demanded fealty in the diplomatic struggle against Moscow but failed to adequately assuage concerns over the impact the war between two major food producers would inflict on the world’s lowest-income countries.

The two sides have made steps in bridging the divide, including an agreement at the 27th U.N. climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to recognize the need to establish a “loss and damage” fund, a form of climate reparations. The Group of 20 leading economic powers, or G-20, has also sought to address complaints that billions of dollars in Special Drawing Rights, assets the International Monetary Fund issues to members to boost global liquidity during economic crises, have been unavailable to low- and middle-income countries.

In August 2021, IMF issued some $650 billion worth of SDRs, but the vast majority of those assets were allotted to high-income countries, many of which had little need for them while leaving lower- and middle-income countries in the cold.

IMF recently created the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, a fund that permits high-income nations to make their excess SDRs available as long-term loans to less well-off nations at low-interest rates. IMF has already reached agreements with three countries — Barbados, Costa Rica, and Rwanda — to use RST funds to shore up budgetary support for projects that provide pandemic relief and address climate change.

“Western countries went back to realizing what diplomacy was for: you have to listen to what other people want and have to find some compromises,” Cliffe said. “I think they understood that if we want to maintain this degree of support for Ukraine we’re going to have to give a bit on issues the developing countries care about.”

Still, Natalie Samarasinghe, the global director for advocacy at the Open Society Foundations, said that today’s U.N. leadership has settled for a less ambitious role in peacekeeping than in the past, when legendary U.N. figures, such as Annan, former U.N. Secretary-Generals Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Dag Hammarskjöld, and the Algerian trouble-shooter Lakhdar Brahimi, played central roles in negotiating conflicts and political standoffs in Afghanistan, Congo, Kenya, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

“Today, our hopes seem diminished,” she added in an emailed response to questions. “I agree with those who say the U.N. did better than expected last year – the SG [Guterres] deserves praise for the grain deal. But doesn’t that say something about our expectations? Have we come to accept a U.N. that sits on the sidelines when it comes to the big challenges.”

About the author

Colum Lynch Colum Lynch is an award-winning reporter and Senior Global Reporter for Devex. He covers the intersection of development, diplomacy, and humanitarian relief at the United Nations and beyond. Prior to Devex, Lynch reported on foreign policy and national security for Foreign Policy Magazine and the Washington Post. Lynch was awarded the 2011 National Magazine Award for digital reporting for his blog Turtle Bay. He has also won an award for groundbreaking reporting on the U.N.’s failure to protect civilians in Darfur.