United nations

British prime minister Liz Truss’s speech at the United Nations this week was spot-on. It was clear, concise and left no question that the UK would do everything in its power to lead in the defense of the West and its values. President Biden’s address, by contrast, left you feeling overwhelmed and unsatisfied. That's not to say he failed to speak about Ukraine — he spent a reasonable amount of time on it — but the substance just was not there. Truss made a clear commitment to continue to “sustain or increase... military support to Ukraine, for as long as it takes,” a concrete and actionable statement. Though Biden issued a ringing condemnation of Putin’s war, he only made a vague pledge to “stand in solidarity against Russia’s aggression.

Every year in late September, the east side of Manhattan morphs into a giant sea of immovable cars. The culprit: the annual United Nations General Assembly debate, where diplomats from around the world fly to New York to shake hands, give speeches, and participate in dozens of side meetings and events throughout the city. This week’s UN General Assembly debate, however, is unique. For the first time since the UN was established after World War II, the meeting is occurring amid a large, deadly, conventional conflict in Europe. The war in Ukraine, which will cross its eight-month mark this Saturday, will dominate the session from beginning to end.

When all this is over, we will have to hold a grown-up and perhaps very difficult conversation about the United Nations. No institution is perfect, or has supernatural powers to stop war or despotism, and perhaps nothing could have dissuaded Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. But the UN’s failure to prevent one fifth of its permanent security council from overrunning another member state should give us pause. There are the hard realities of realpolitik, of course, but there is also the question of endemic institutional failure. It may be that we will either have to change how we think about the UN or change the UN itself.

Haiti has never been known as a beacon of stability and tranquility. Most of its politicians are feckless, in league with criminals, or too consumed with trying to stay alive themselves. America not so long ago intervened on the island twice in 10 years — the first time in 1994, when President Clinton’s threat of an invasion compelled the junta to reverse its coup three years earlier, and the second in 2004, when the Bush administration participated in an international stabilization force after Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned. But this year has been an especially tough one for the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

President Joe Biden walked into the grand UN General Assembly chamber this morning with a list of asks, an appeal for greater cooperation among the world’s great powers and a bit of controversy trailing behind him. Biden’s first UN address came at a difficult time in American diplomacy. The European Union, led by an irate France, is livid over a $60 billion US-Australian nuclear submarine deal that European leaders view as skeevy and duplicitous. And last month’s American troop exit from Afghanistan remains a sore point for contributing nations in the Nato coalition, some of which wanted more time to evacuate their own nationals. Biden, however, sidestepped all of these disputes.

António Guterres, the UN's secretary-general, has described rising anti-Semitism as a ‘multi-headed monster' of intolerance that's creating a ‘tsunami of hatred’ across the world, and the UN proclaims ‘anti-racism’ as its defining ideology. But the UN is failing to confront discrimination and violence against Jews — and at times even nurturing it. The UN special rapporteur on racism, E. Tendayi Achiume, ought to be among the leading global voices speaking out against Jew hate. Last year, she called on Bulgaria to stop hate speech and discrimination against the Roma, she urged the Human Rights Council to address abuses against people of African descent and she appealed to world leaders to confront 'structural forms of racial and ethnic injustice’.

It was one of those forgettably historic moments at the United Nations. The year was 2015, the UN’s 70th anniversary, and China’s President Xi Jinping was in New York, speaking in person to the UN General Assembly. In festive spirit, Xi announced that China would set up a $1 billion trust fund to be dispersed over ten years to ‘support the UN’s work’ and ‘contribute more to world peace and development’. So began the Peace and Development Trust Fund, one of China’s more insidious projects to co-opt the UN, its logo and its global networks.

It’s almost 25 years since the atrocity at of Srebrenica, the last massacre on European soil. It’s not the kind of event that anyone will be too keen to remember: we quite rightly salute D-Day veterans, a reminder of those whose sacrifice led to the freedom we have today. But it’s worth remembering Srebrenica too - it offers a shocking case study in how a perfectly peaceful community could be almost destroyed when forces of xenophobia, racism and imperialism are allowed to proceed unchallenged. I was in Sarajevo recently to listen to the stories about that massacre.