U.N. Faces Wide-Open Race to Replace Guterres as Secretary General

As António Guterres prepares to leave the United Nations secretary general's office in December after two full terms, the world's foremost diplomatic institution finds itself at a crossroads without an obvious heir. The absence of a frontrunner is itself a signal — that the informal choreography of great-power consensus has not yet produced its answer, leaving the selection genuinely open in a way that is rare for this office. In a moment of geopolitical fracture and compounding global crises, the question of who will next carry the UN's moral and administrative weight is one the international