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But I know this city! The fluorescent-lit caverns trains heaving like great beasts within, this elaborately grimed escalator, yes, the confused tourists getting in the way with their jewel-tone roller suitcases, jabbering quietly among themselves in the dialects of Fujian, Uttar Pradesh, and Ohio, and then let’s instead of going through the tunnel the gray labyrinth with the smudgy pillars and travellers milling with impassive faces like refugees the tunnel that goes direct to the subway what I’d like is some air so let’s go up up up quick I think this stair lets out at the back of the Garden, yes, there’s the doors, bam! and out into the tender morning sun of Eighth Avenue. I know this city! And now I’m in the light and I can think.

I am supposed to be interviewing the foreign minister of a Central European nation with an outsized and annoying American influence operation. (If you find yourself in charge of a foreign lobby, do not have your people send multiple articles with identical angles to a single publication within the space of hours; it gives the game away.) Still, a European foreign minister is an important person. I have been awake since 3:45am, so that I could make the very early, very expensive train that would get me to New York in time for my interview slot. Upon arriving, I get an email from the nation’s UN mission. The schedule has changed, and could they get back to me with a reschedule? I say that’s fine and sit in Greeley Square for an hour frantically to tap out my weekly column, which I was not yet awake enough to write on the train. A bum sits down at the table behind me, attempts to light a roach, and promptly falls asleep.

Manhattan has a very green smell to it these days. The implementation of legal recreational dope (passed in 2021 during the final days of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty) is one of the few ways in which the city has gotten worse since Eric Adams took over. Hizzoner has been a successful mayor by New York standards; the city has remained solvent, the streets are safer, the subway is basically functional, the schools are good again. The catastrophic policies of the hateful, heinous de Blasio are a dark but not yet distant memory; New Yorkers broadly agree that things are better. Hizzoner has problems, though; a mild corruption scandal in which he expedited permitting for the Turkish UN mission’s splendid new digs in exchange for cheap flights to Istanbul provided an opening for the savage cannibals of New York’s Democratic Party to exploit. Adams was hounded out of the party, which vomited up the off-putting self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani  as its candidate in his stead; Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor, placed second in the primary and then launched an independent bid. A week after the UNGA, the mayor, trailing at a distant third through the general election campaign, will end his independent run to stay in Gracie Mansion.

But for now, the Adams show is still running, and New York is still great, and the UNGA is afoot. The official theme of this year’s orgy of world brotherhood is “Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights.” This year is the 80th anniversary of the official formation of the United Nations as an international diplomatic organ at San Francisco in 1945, after many months of bickering and logrolling among the professional diplomats and political leadership of the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. (China was also technically invited to be part of the bickering and logrolling, but her diplomats were under no illusions about who had the real power, and mostly stayed out of the way.) The upshot was that, after much agonized waffling, the Big Three decided that nobody should be able to make them do anything, ever. That is to say, the Great Powers should have a wide-ranging veto over the enforcement actions of the United Nations—a veto dressed up with tinsel and bunting, sure, so the thing doesn’t seem too tyrannical, too law-of-the-jungle, but a veto nonetheless. This might seem unfair or in some way to defeat the point of the organization that was supposed to usher in a new era of transnational cooperation, but when you consider how often Americans have ticked people off in these eight decades since, it’s hard to say it’s not for the best. 

We ultimately have Stalin to thank for this state of affairs; during the planning conferences at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta, he had been intransigent on the point of the veto and Great Power unanimity in enforcement actions. He knew that the Americans and the Brits were eyeing his position in Eastern Europe with significant dismay and even, astonishing to say, some hostility. Not that this observation in itself required much by way of powers of perception. The British were desperately trying to broker a deal between the Polish government in exile, for whose benefit they had notionally gone to war, the Soviets, and the Soviets’ Polish puppet, the Lublin Committee; during the Dumbarton Oaks conference, Roosevelt had with remarkable and very American tactlessness shot off a telegraph explicitly referring to These States’ taking a postwar interest in Eastern Europe. Had Joe not been a canny statesman protecting his own power to commit wickedness with impunity in his own sphere, God only knows what sort of consequences we’d have faced for our own little adventures these last 80 years. Thanks, Stalin.

In his memoirs, the Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko grouses (among many, many other grievances against Americans, some more compelling than others) about having to pay for his delegation’s lodgings at the 1945 San Francisco conference. That dead commie has a point. It’s impossible to book a room in Manhattan for much less than a grand a night. It’s the world’s feeding-frenzy—not just diplomats and heads of state and their entourages, but journalists, think-tankers, activists, businessmen, coke-dealers, pimps. I finish my column, bid silent farewell to the cannabis-addled bum, eat a hot dog, and hie my way to nearer Brooklyn, with the lesser think-tankers and the usual New York tourists, to a hotel that appears to be vaguely wellness-themed—the room, in addition to having the usual accouterments of bed, lamp, TV, towels, and cheap shampoo, also has a yoga mat, one of those weird foam yoga blocks I don’t know the use for, and some sort of rope with handles that I don’t know the purpose of exactly but is certainly calisthenically suggestive. I send an email to the Central European country’s liaison asking about the schedule; I do not yet know that I will never hear from her again. I go to another hotel’s empty bar (my own hotel’s bar is not open, more health consciousness perhaps) and order a highball to steady myself before venturing back to the city. The bar is paneled with brass tiles, which somehow give it a not unappealing Second-World atmosphere. All is quiet, save the bored bartender listening to videos in Spanish on his phone.

Yes, Brooklyn is tame and homey. But the highball is done and it’s time to set out again. Manalive! In Manhattan, the East Side is nearly unnavigable; it’s hard to imagine that a bomb going off would make more of a mess than the security measures. It’s all very splendid. The teeming hordes have overrun the sidewalks of the East Side. It’s something out of Fellini. The Falun Gong crowd passersby, shaking big vinyl signs, trying to push pamphlets, and generally being in the way. People who usually live inside the TV are milling about; Mehdi Hassan passes by, glowering. The lesser heads of state are strolling around, too—Mark Carney follows soon after with his permanent smirk. Clumps of pro-Palestine protestors, waving flags and their own big vinyl signs, congregate on street corners and in designated protest pens. The motorcade for the president of Indonesia noses up Second Avenue, the black Maybachs looking like so many fat wood-beetles. 

Elsewhere, the leader of the free world is causing mass chaos on the streets. Unlike the lesser heads of state, the American president gets his routes cleared for him before making his stately way to the next location on his agenda. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is an hour late for his next engagement, to be held at that beautiful Turkish UN mission building that caused Hizzoner so many difficulties in its construction. France’s Emmanuel Macron makes the best of the situation, getting out of his car and snapping selfies, ostentatiously calling Trump to tell him he’s making it impossible to get anywhere. 

So what is all this shoddy pageantry for? “Peace, development and human rights,” and a man’s dose of it. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a vaguely bag-like elderly Portuguese, delivers an uninspiring but representative serving of UN-ese rhetoric. “We have entered an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering,” he says. (That may be, although it’s hard to say how that distinguishes our own time from any prior age.) Guterres is not just worried about wars; he lavishes attention on “climate justice” in terms that now seem like quaint relics of the Obama era. Of course, as is the case with most invocations of crisis and calls for uplift, the real upshot is passing the hat:

To meet all these goals, we must choose to strengthen the United Nations for the 21st century. The forces shaking our world are also testing the foundations of the United Nations system. We are being hit by rising geopolitical tensions and divisions, chronic uncertainty, and mounting financial strain. But those who depend on the United Nations must not be made to bear the cost. Especially now—when for every dollar invested to support our core work to build peace, the world spends $750 on weapons of war. This is not only unsustainable—it is indefensible. In this moment of crisis, the United Nations has never been more essential. The world needs our unique legitimacy. Our convening power. Our vision to unite nations, bridge divides, and confront the challenges before us.

In case the message weren’t clear enough, the UN’s official press release on Guterres’s remarks summarized: “With crises multiplying, Mr. Guterres said the UN must adapt and Member States must fund it properly. He criticized the imbalance where ‘for every dollar invested in building peace, the world spends $750 on weapons of war.’” (For whatever it’s worth, in 2023 the UN system’s total revenue was $67.6 billion.) What will Guterres do with all that aspirational extra dosh? Good question. In a superb Harper’s feature on the aspirations and failures of the UN, Amanda Chicago Lewis lists various ideas: 

A proposed overhaul of a digital platform that cost $100 million and failed. An expensive, yearlong contract with a top consulting firm to analyze how U.N. offices across the world were tracking resources like vehicles and flashlights, and how those inventory systems might be consolidated, that ultimately resulted in nothing. All the business-class tickets to conferences. The reimbursed tuition costs for employees’ children. The salary multipliers necessary for U.N. Headquarters to be located in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Then again, examining every dollar spent could be its own waste of time and money: lawyers and accountants demand high salaries, after all.

Guterres’s fundraising pitch is not exactly the highlight of the powwow. The defining drama for the 2025 UNGA is the war in Gaza. Shortly before the meeting, the UN reaffirmed its support for the two-state solution, and a UN commission issued a report that said that Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza could be considered a “genocide.” Several leaders, notably Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto and Turkey’s Erdoğan, took their moment at the big lectern to condemn Israel.

Erdoğan’s speech, although marred by technical difficulties (more on which anon), is particularly strident. Holding a picture of an emaciated child, he thunders, “What conscience can endure, what conscience can remain silent on this? Can there be peace in the world where children die from hunger, lack of medicine?”

Of course, as with so many Middle Eastern leaders, the real concern seems perhaps to be about national security rather than humanitarianism. “Israel is not limiting itself to Gaza and West Bank; by carrying out attacks on Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon, it is also threatening regional peace,” he says. Erdoğan is a hard man, an anti-leftist cadre in his youth, a man who was imprisoned by the generals’ junta for reciting a nationalist poem in public. He is unsentimental; Turkish foreign relations in his two decades of rule have been a bewildering chronicle of temporary alignments and recombinations, hostilities and rapprochements and more hostilities, bombing the militias that Turkish arms will support in 18 months. He’s a survivor, and he knows how to play the UN’s fundamental parlor game: dressing up national interest in humanitarianism.

He also knows where real power lies. After the UNGA, he will travel to Washington, where he will meet with President Donald Trump and pull off a diplomatic tour de force: a lifting of sanctions against Turkey’s defense industry, a deal on military materiel, and a memorandum of understanding for the development of a Turkish civilian nuclear program.

Speaking of the U.S. president, his own speech gets off to a rough start with the sort of technical failure that plagues the summit. “I don’t mind making the speech without a teleprompter, because the teleprompter is not working. I feel very happy to be up here with you nevertheless, and that way you speak more from the heart,” he says. “I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.”

What follows is the usual farrago: criticism of foreign nations’ immigration policies, tariff-boosting, stumping for the Nobel, criticizing anti-Israel rhetoric. He announces that there’s a forthcoming 20-point peace plan for Gaza. But somehow it is the UN’s shoddiness that becomes thematic—the question of what we’re all doing here.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle. If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape,” Trump mused. “We’re both in good shape, we both stood. And then a teleprompter that didn't work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

A little later, he reiterates the point in still blunter terms: 

What is the purpose of the United Nations? The UN has such tremendous potential. I’ve always said it. It has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it's not even coming close to living up to that potential. For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up.

Well put, if not entirely literally true—the UN does lay economic sanctions, such as those on Iran, which, while they rarely work as intended, do in fact cause a great deal of misery in their target countries. Still, the UN doesn’t seem to do much. But herein the contradiction: It frustrates us that the UN is weak, but would we particularly want the UN to be more powerful?

A few days later, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the chamber, defending his government’s conduct of foreign policy and especially the war in Gaza. Somewhere between 75 and 100 diplomats will not show up or walk out on the speech. But, like Erdoğan, Netanyahu is a survivor and knows how the game is played. He also will make his own trip to Washington shortly after the UNGA, where he will extract what goodies he can from the White House—notably significant and favorable changes to the language of the 20-point Gaza peace deal. 

Bilateralism, wheeling and dealing, power politics: That’s how things get actually done. By the time Netanyahu visits the imperial capital, I will be home, Central European foreign minister uninterviewed. (Such is life. It seems I have still produced something like a full-length feature. Have I done it well?) In the end, it will be fair to say that the most productive aspect of the whole UNGA scene, by my lights, was in fact a highly productive instance of bilateralism—dinner with Taki, who is in rude health and can host with the best of them.

Strange to say, the Catholic Church was very big on the United Nations at the outset. In an address to the 1965 UNGA, Pope Paul VI praised the vision of the organization:

Your Charter goes even farther, and our message moves ahead with it. You are in existence and you are working in order to unite nations, to associate States. Let us use the formula: to bring them together with each other. You are an association, a bridge between peoples, a network of relations between States. We are tempted to say that in a way this characteristic of yours reflects in the temporal order what our Catholic Church intends to be in the spiritual order: one and universal. Nothing loftier can be imagined on the natural level, as far as the ideological structure of mankind is concerned. Your vocation is to bring not just some peoples but all peoples together as brothers. A difficult undertaking? Without a doubt. But this is the nature of your very noble undertaking. Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a world authority capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political planes?

The Church hoped for a secularized Holy Roman Empire, a universal jurisdiction for the liberal age. The execution has in fact been broken escalators and strongly worded letters. “We are badly enmeshed in our own unsound slogans,” commented George Kennan, then a State Department apparatchik, shortly before the 1945 San Francisco conference. Frustrations about the UN largely miss the basic structural issue: Everyone wants the UN to be able to do something, but never to do something against us (whoever “we” may be, Americans, British, Israelis, Brazilians, or old Uncle Joe Stalin and the boys.) International law, transnational cooperation, and the rest has a real charm to it—a world at peace. But the world is not a garden but a jungle; the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. The nation-state remains the basic unit for power in the international system. And the nation-state will ever want that to be the case; it is dialectically opposed to universal jurisdictions, to external sovereignty. Just as the nation-state bucked against Pope and Emperor, it will buck against the United Nations—always and always. That is what the nation state is essentially built to do.

So let’s return to the question: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Propaganda for the Great Powers? Nelson Rockefeller’s real-estate speculation racket? Welfare for IR students? A bare forum for diplomacy and negotiation, a parley between governments and peoples? 

Perhaps the last is the only realistic and positive vision. (Although in its optimal form it would require the officials of various states to keep their appointments with gentlemen of the press, an ideal that as of writing seems sadly distant.) But do the nations of the world need to shell out $70 billion a year for that?