Diplomacy’s remaining room

Bury the United Nations too soon and you’ll be amazed by its refusal to stay buried. That’s the lesson of this week’s UN General Assembly in New York which arrived after a year of eulogies — it’s a cash-starved institution, an American president musing about walking away, a rival “Board of Peace” floated as a replacement.

Instead, the week delivered something closer to relevance: the UN Security Council’s first-ever dedicated session on artificial intelligence, and Donald Trump, belligerent as ever, doing the one thing the UN exists to enable — talking to adversaries instead of past them.

The honest accounting is that the UN’s founding mission — conflict prevention — has atrophied. It played a marginal role in Gaza, no role in Iran. Veto power ensures that on the hardest questions — sovereignty, war, now AI — the major powers will not be bound.

When Washington, Beijing, and Moscow all insist that no outside body governs their technology decisions, authority shrinks to whatever is tolerated by the P5 (UN Security Council’s five permanent members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the US) which, this week, was very little.

But that mistakes the UN’s current job for its old one. What it still uniquely offers is aggregation: 193 states under one roof, the only venue where a Nepal flood, a Sudan famine, and an AI safety debate share the same week’s agenda.

In actuality, that produces little that’s immediately actionable. But it keeps channels open that would otherwise be closed. And on humanitarian logistics — moving food, staff and planes into Gaza, Sudan, earthquake-hit Colombia and Venezuela — there is no substitute for what the UN still does. No NGO coalition in the world replicates that infrastructure. Remove the UN from the world’s emergency response and the gap goes unfilled, not reassigned.

The Iran episode captured a paradox that can only happen in the UN. Trump threatened annihilation of the Islamic Republic from the podium and yet, within the hour, American and Iranian officials were meeting for two hours on the sidelines.

What happens in the UN is a back channel unavailable almost anywhere else — which is now the General Assembly’s real function, not peacemaking in the classical sense.

Which brings us to AI, the week’s genuine surprise, and its sharpest danger. Elevating AI to a full Security Council session signals that the major powers now treat it as a peace-and-stability issue — even as none will accept a binding framework governing it. And that is a crucial problem: recognition without restraint.

Used well, AI could strengthen the UN’s own machinery — faster disaster modeling, satellite verification of ceasefire violations, early warning on famine and displacement before it becomes a crisis.

But used by states that reject UN oversight while racing each other on capability, it could do the opposite: autonomous weapons decisions made faster than any Security Council session can convene; information warfare that erodes the consensus diplomacy depends on to function at all.

The UN moves by deliberation and unanimity-seeking; AI moves by iteration and speed. Nothing in this week’s session suggested the institution has resolved that mismatch — only that it has finally admitted that it exists.

The UN that emerged this week is not the one its founders had originally designed. It is a triage ward and a talking shop — less able to stop wars, more essential for surviving their aftermath, and now facing a technology that could extend its reach or expose how badly its pace has fallen behind.

Currently well underway is the race to succeed Antonio Gueterres as the 10th UN Secretary General by 1 January 2027.

Regardless of who takes over, he or she will be at the helm of an 81-year-old institution whose relevance no longer rests on resolving conflicts, but on proving it can still matter around their edges.

This week suggested that the bar, however lowered, can still be cleared.