António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, makes the right diagnosis and proposes the right remedy: faced with a world that is dangerously slipping, urgently reinvent multilateralism. His recipe? The “Compact for the Future” that he has been thinking about for four years and which was voted on Monday by the United Nations General Assembly, at the end of a two-day “summit”. Everything is there: reform and expansion of the Security Council and multilateral financial institutions, modernization of peace missions, disarmament, joint defense of human rights, fight against global warming… So many virtuous proposals on which to rely to lay the foundations of “renewed global cooperation”.
It is difficult not to be a bit ironic, given the scale of the challenge. The exercise should have been done at least 15 years ago, since these ideas are not exactly new. While it is commendable, even essential, the exercise is at the very least late., when it comes to unstuck a world frozen in its power relations. Obviously the “international community” should finally wake up and mobilize around these imperatives. In the meantime, these will remain a catalogue of pious wishes, even more so if Donald Trump regains power. The Russian aggression in Ukraine and, in the immediate future, the terrible Israeli escalation in Lebanon, threatened with becoming “another Gaza”, have come to display in New York, where a hundred heads of state and government are meeting this week, fractures that continue to widen. Two conflicts which, for many, only highlight the crisis of legitimacy of the UN and the double standards applied by the West towards Israel and Russia.
“Despite the escalation, a diplomatic solution remains possible [au Proche-Orient] “, Joe Biden said Tuesday in what was his farewell address to the international community. He did not seem very convinced, trapped as the United States is by its strategic alliance with Israel. His prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is due at the UN on Friday. The reception will be distant.
Zbigniew Brzeziński, Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser, warned in 1997 that “the worst-case scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, united by their shared hatred of the United States.” Then-Senator Joe Biden ridiculed this possibility. Yet that is where the world is, against a backdrop of the decomposition of the pax americana from the Second World War.
Where in these conditions is the possibility of true multilateralism? Not in the realpolitik American rhetoric laced with grand speeches about democracy — nor, on the contrary, in the idealism struggling to anchor itself in reality of a Justin Trudeau. Somewhere in between. The United States, as a biased policeman, should finally recognize its authoritarian past and correct itself, a past by which it has very easily accommodated violations of human rights in the world. And a past by which it has lied with impunity, leaving indelible traces, as to the justifications for its invasion of Iraq in 2003 — in the same way that JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate in the presidential election, now considers it legitimate to “make up stories.”
Let this “renewed global cooperation” dreamed of by Mr. Guterres come to pass, and it will inevitably be necessary for the countries of the Global South to become increasingly important players. First error: to speak of the Global South as we used to speak of the Third World, as if it were a generic mass of countries with interchangeable national identities. Then, to more or less reduce these countries to vassals of China and Russia, on the basis of their positioning on Gaza and Ukraine, is simplistic. It shows little regard for the independence of mind of democracies like India, Brazil or South Africa. We are in a different dynamic – worked by geopolitical upheavals – from that which was at work during the Cold War.
Volodymyr Zelensky, whose cause has been pushed aside by the alarming Lebanese news, must submit his “victory plan” to Mr. Biden on Thursday in the hope that Washington will give kyiv the military means to present itself in a position of strength for possible negotiations with Vladimir Putin. It is understood that by having allowed conflicts to fester, rather than having built peace upstream, in compliance with international law, we are exposing ourselves to the conclusion of ceasefires, that is to say shaky peace, which will contain the seeds of the following armed conflicts, in the Middle East as in Russian-Ukrainian relations. With serious consequences, moreover, on the fight against global warming, in a context where geopolitical tensions on a global scale, far from easing, are putting spokes in the wheels of “climate diplomacy” and paralyzing essential efforts at collaboration.