Next UN Secretary-General Faces Daunting Task Reforming Sidelined Institution

On New Year's Day, the United Nations will hand its leadership to someone tasked with reviving an institution that has become largely irrelevant to the world's most pressing conflicts. The organization is 81 years old, still structured around the power arrangements of 1945, and it has been pushed to the margins while wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have unfolded without meaningful UN involvement. The financial crisis is just as severe. The United States owes the organization billions of dollars, a debt that has forced the UN to slash its humanitarian and development programs—the very work where it still maintains real influence and presence on the ground.

The challenge facing the incoming secretary-general became clearer during last week's annual gathering of world leaders at the UN. The organization's legitimacy is eroding, and its ability to act is constrained by the same five permanent Security Council members who have held veto power since the organization's founding. These nations—the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain—can block any significant action, and neither the US nor Russia has shown willingness to yield that control. The structural problem runs deeper than money or personality. The UN was designed to prevent another world war between major powers, not to solve the conflicts that actually dominate the current era.

Outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres has been direct about what needs to happen. He told world leaders that the next chief will need to be determined enough to build the UN into something stronger, and that the organization must convince every nation that it can help forge a shared future. But Guterres also acknowledged the scale of the obstacle: the successor will inherit a role that has grown more difficult with each passing decade. The institution faces pressure on nearly every front—inequality, climate change, artificial intelligence, the breakdown of international law, the normalization of impunity, and the fracturing of societies themselves. These are not problems the UN created, but they are problems it is expected to address.

Reform sounds straightforward in theory but becomes nearly impossible in practice. The Security Council was expanded once, decades ago, but the five permanent members have resisted any change that would dilute their power. During World War II, when the UN was founded, this arrangement made sense. Today, it means that a council designed to manage great-power conflict cannot effectively respond to humanitarian catastrophe, regional wars, or transnational crises. Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama put it plainly: the Security Council's legitimacy is no longer assured, and without it, the UN's credibility suffers.

Mahama also named the deeper problem. The world is fragmenting, trust in multilateral systems is eroding, and the next secretary-general will confront an international order drifting toward breakdown. The UN's founding charter, written in the aftermath of two world wars, was built on a doctrine that might seem quaint now: that nations could be bound together by shared rules and institutions. The new leader must somehow hold that vision intact while navigating a world that has largely abandoned it. The task is not to reform the UN in some modest way. It is to prevent the organization from becoming entirely irrelevant while the five nations that control it remain unwilling to share power. That tension—between what the world needs and what the permanent members will allow—is the real inheritance waiting on January 1.