Next UN Chief Faces Daunting Task: Reform an Aging Institution Sidelined by Global Crises

On New Year's Day, someone will walk into the United Nations building and inherit an institution that has lost its way. The organization is eighty-one years old, still shaped by the power arrangements of 1945, and in the last few years it has been pushed to the margins of nearly every major conflict that matters. The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have unfolded largely without it. Meanwhile, the U.S. owes the organization billions of dollars, forcing cuts so deep that humanitarian and development programs—the areas where the U.N. still actually works—are shrinking.

Antonio Guterres, the outgoing secretary-general, made this plain in his farewell address to the General Assembly last week. "The world does not need a weaker United Nations," he told the gathered leaders. "It needs a U.N. strong enough to face the world as it is, and determined enough to build the world as it should." The words landed in a room full of people who agree in principle but cannot agree on what to do about it. Guterres then posed a series of questions to his successor and to the 193 member nations: Will you uphold law before impunity becomes normalized? Will you end wars before they consume generations? Will you tackle inequality before societies fracture? Will you accelerate climate action before tipping points are crossed? Will you govern artificial intelligence before it governs us?

The next secretary-general will face what Kizito Byenkya, advocacy director at the Open Society Institute, calls "the most monumental task that the U.N. has faced in decades." The organization is undergoing a critical reform process it has not attempted in a long time. Hundreds of mandates ordering the Secretariat to take various actions and produce reports—many of which no one reads—are being eliminated. Programs are being consolidated. Agencies are being cut. The financial crisis is real and immediate. But the deeper problem is structural. The U.N. was built to prevent another World War II. It is still controlled by the five victors of that war: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. Each holds veto power in the Security Council, the organization's most powerful body. Africa, home to 1.5 billion people, has no permanent seat. Neither does Latin America. Neither do the island nations whose existence is threatened by rising seas.

Every leader who spoke during the U.N.'s annual gathering last week called for reform. But when the conversation turns to the Security Council, the differences become intractable. All nations want the council to reflect the twenty-first century world. No one can agree on how. Ghana's President John Mahama put it directly: "Security Council reform is not a favor to Africa. It is an imperative for the legitimacy, credibility, and survival of the United Nations." He also named what may be the hardest problem the next chief will confront—the world's "intense fragmentation, deepening inequality and eroded trust in our multilateral system." There is, he said, a "dangerous drift toward unilateralism."

The incoming secretary-general will also need to reclaim the role that Kofi Annan, a predecessor, once held. Annan was a skilled mediator and negotiator who placed himself at the center of major conflicts. When you look at Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and the others, Byenkya noted, you have to ask: Where has the United Nations been? In Annan's time, it was there. The new chief will need to be both a reformer and a diplomat—someone who can modernize an aging institution while also stepping into the vacuum left by the organization's absence from the world's most urgent crises. Whether one person can do both, and whether the five permanent members will allow it, remains unclear.