UNITED NATIONS, September 24 — With roughly a hundred days left in his term, António Guterres used the opening of the General Debate of the UN General Assembly’s 81st session to frame the world’s crises as four defining “tests of power” — war or peace, inequality, climate change and artificial intelligence — that will decide whether nations move toward cooperation or deeper division.
The Secretary-General delivered his annual report of the Organization on Tuesday, describing a decade of eroding international norms: civilians targeted in war, humanitarian workers killed, international law “cast aside,” and trust between nations fraying. “The faultlines in our world are widening,” he said.
“Cracks have become canyons.”
Four Tests, One Warning
Guterres argued that power itself is being reshaped in three ways, and warned against sliding into rival blocs with separate economic and security systems — a scenario he has termed in recent years the Great Fracture. Rather than accept fragmentation as inevitable, he called for galvanizing cooperation and a global network built on interdependence and shared rules. “The greatest power is not the power to dominate,” he said.
“It is the power to build a future that works for everyone.” On war, he pointed to cascading crises across the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, arguing that so-called ceasefires have often amounted to little more than “lesser fires,” with civilians continuing to pay the price. He renewed calls for compliance with International Court of Justice orders regarding Gaza and warned that settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatens to extinguish the two-State solution.
He condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a clear violation of the UN Charter. He also renewed longstanding calls for Security Council reform, singling out the continued absence of permanent African representation as “unjust and indefensible,” given that the 15-member organ was founded in a starkly different geopolitical era.
Inequality, Climate and the Gender Milestone
Highlighting the gap between record global wealth and the billions still lacking access to food, clean water, education and healthcare, Guterres said inequality is not merely an economic issue but a question of power over opportunity, resources and self-determination. He reiterated his long-held view that the international financial system leaves developing nations crushed by debt while facing climate disasters they did little to cause, and called for faster debt relief, bolder multilateral development banks and fairer access to Special Drawing Rights created by the International Monetary Fund.
He devoted particular attention to gender inequality, announcing that the UN has achieved full gender parity across senior leadership, headquarters staff and professional roles for the first time in its history. “Equality is not a dream; it is a decision,” he said, citing progress at the UN as proof that entrenched power structures can change.
On climate, he called the crisis the “most profound intergenerational power imbalance,” warning of a near-certain breach of the 1.5°C threshold. He called for polluters to “pay” and for developed nations to triple adaptation funding, noting that major oil companies are reaping substantial profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while global adaptation finance for developing countries remains a fraction of that sum.
The Machine Question
Turning to artificial intelligence, Guterres warned that power is increasingly concentrated in data, computing capacity and algorithms, advancing faster than humanity’s capacity to govern it. “The danger is not technology,” he said. “The danger is technology without accountability.” He called for a multilateral AI risk management framework with independent oversight, stating firmly that children must never become test subjects for unregulated systems and that life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines.
“Killer robots must have no place in our future,” he warned. Guterres reaffirmed that peace, development and human rights are inseparable pillars of the UN Charter, rejecting any notion that dignity and rights can be divorced from security and opportunity.
He recalled that in the face of global catastrophe more than 80 years ago on the battlefields of the Second World War, the United Nations was created as an act of defiance of hope — of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear, and of countries that know their futures are bound together. Pledging to carry the “spirit of resolve” through his remaining time in office, he vowed to continue championing the Charter’s values even after leaving his post.
“The world does not need a weaker United Nations,” he said. “It needs a UN strong enough to face the world as it is and determined enough to build the world as it should be.” What comes next is the question delegates will carry into the debate’s remaining days: whether the four tests he named produce the cooperation he urged, or the fracture he fears — and who, after his departure, inherits the argument.
