Emmanuel Macron will not be attending, nor will the Chinese, Russian or British leaders – Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Rishi Sunak. The presidents and prime ministers of the member states of the Security Council will be conspicuously absent at this week's United Nations General Assembly being held in New York. Only the American President, Joe Biden, is due to attend this major forum for diplomacy on Tuesday, September 19, alongside his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, a meeting which once again will be dominated by the war in Ukraine.
Such notable absences reflect the crisis affecting UN bodies, against a backdrop of an international stage that is crumbling. Former diplomat Gérard Araud, a one-time French ambassador to the United Nations, said, "Multilateralism is seriously compromised in an increasingly multipolar world. The absence of Security Council leaders is yet another symptom, but not the only one, of a powerless UN, caused by the war in Ukraine and the rivalry between the United States and China."
That Xi and Putin are absent comes as no surprise. The former has never attended the General Assembly, preferring to speak remotely, while the latter has made countless appearances. The Kremlin boss risks being arrested in the US because of a warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes related to the deportation of Ukrainian children. The two leaders are even more reluctant to appear at the UN, as they contest the international body which, in their view, is dominated by the West, and they denounce the "hegemony" of the US. In August, Xi preferred to travel to Johannesburg for the BRICS summit, which was successfully enlarged to include six new countries (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and Argentina).
What is more surprising is that the two European leaders on the Security Council are not attending, given that Europe, and predominantly France and the United Kingdom, is struggling to salvage what it can of multilateralism. The Security Council, the expansion of which Paris and London are vainly calling for against the wishes of Beijing and Moscow, has definitely been rendered powerless by the behavior of Russia, a permanent member in violation of the UN Charter that has a veto power to block any condemnation made against it in this forum. This situation reinforces the importance of the General Assembly, where member states vote on an equal footing. But this body is itself divided: Like China and India, some 30 member states have refrained from condemning Moscow since the start of the war in Ukraine.
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