UN assembly shadowed by clouds of chaos

When the new UN General Assembly session opens next Tuesday, world leaders and diplomats will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the global organisation established in the wake of World War II to “maintain international peace and security” for future generations.

- John J. Metzler

But at headquarters here oin New York, delegates and staff will be doing far less celebrating than previously planned.

Instead, the membership will be confronted by a spate of crises ranging from the Ukraine war, to the unending Palestinian clashes and now fighting in Gaza, to at least a dozen perilous humanitarian crises in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East.

Tragically, all these situations converge at a time when the US itself is running on empty due to a continuing budget crisis from its members’ late dues payments as well as the organisation's overstretched mandates.

A kind of perfect storm plagues the global body, which has grown from the ashes of World War II, expanding from an original 51 member states to 193 today. And its newest member may be Palestine!

First, there are the hot wars. Ukraine: Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the central European country was immersed in battle and chaos on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II. Though the Russians had been systematically dismembering Ukraine's territory since seizing the strategic Crimean peninsula in 2014, the wider conflict exploded in February 2022.