To hear President Joe Biden’s team tell it, the United Nations General Assembly this week will be a pretty big deal.
“The president recognizes that the world faces enormous challenges that no one country can solve alone,” a senior administration official told reporters. “So, here at the U.N., the one place where the world comes together, the president will lift up [his] vision and rally the world and rally countries to do more to make our world safer, and more just, and more prosperous.”
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It’s certainly an opportunity for officials across the federal government to have a lot of meetings with foreign officials who might not often get face time with their American counterparts. Yet it remains true that this year’s high-level gathering, often dubbed the Super Bowl of international diplomacy, lacks the star power of previous years. Of the five states that wield a veto at the United Nations Security Council — the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and China — only the United States will send its head of state to New York.
“I think countries are in governments and world leaders are realizing that perhaps the U.N. is not the place to answer the call on tough questions,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Brett Schaefer told the Washington Examiner.
Neither Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping nor Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend. The Kremlin chief, of course, remains preoccupied with an invasion of Ukraine that has earned him an indictment on war crimes, charges that prevented him from attending the BRICS summit in South Africa. And Xi has proven averse to foreign travel since the pandemic, and in recent months, his schedule seems governed by the tandem ambitions to manage internal problems and offer an alternative to the U.S.-led international order.
“The week is an opportunity for smaller countries for the world to lay out their priorities in front of us,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who leads the U.S. mission to the U.N., told CNN last week. “I don’t see the week as being a competition between big powers.
Even the leaders of the closest U.S. allies, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, are making themselves scarce. Macron is hosting British King Charles III in Paris. Sunak reportedly was warned that United Nations General Secretary Antonio Guterres might exclude him from a climate summit on the grounds that the United Kingdom has shown insufficient ambition to reduce greenhouse gases.
“It is a one-of-a-kind moment each year for leaders from every corner of the globe to not only assess the state of the world but to act for the common good,” Guterres said last week. “And action is what the world needs now.”
That is a message that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at least, can get behind. The wartime leader is making a rare trip abroad to attend the general assembly, in a diplomatic swing through the United States to shore up international (and especially conservative Republican) support for continued aid to Ukraine. Zelensky, who was elected in 2019 on a platform of ending the war and fighting Ukrainian corruption, can protect international aid from dishonest officials and use it to defeat Russia — without inducing Putin to use nuclear weapons or expand the war.
“[Putin] is waiting for the United States to become less stable. He thinks that's going to happen during the U.S. election," Zelensky said. "He will be looking for instability in Europe and the United States of America. He will use the risk of using nuclear weapons to fuel that [instability]. He will keep on threatening.”
That interview, which aired Sunday evening, kicked off a week of events in New York and Washington, including a Wednesday trip to Washington for meetings with Biden and congressional leaders.
“We stopped the Russian offensive, and we moved into a counteroffensive,” Zelensky said in the Sunday broadcast. "[But] despite that, it's not very fast. It is important that we are moving forward every day and liberating territory.”
It’s not Biden’s only high-profile meeting of the week.
“President Biden will sit down with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to discuss a range of bilateral and regional issues focused on the shared democratic values between the United States and Israel and a vision for a more stable and prosperous and integrated region, as well as to compare notes on effectively countering and deterring Iran,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Friday.
That will be the first meeting between the two heads of state, whose frosty relationship dates back to Netanyahu’s voluble attempt to throw a wrench in the finalization of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was the signature second-term foreign policy priority for Barack Obama and his vice president.
Their long-awaited encounter comes at a fraught moment for the nuclear deal, as the three European powers that tried to preserve the nuclear pact despite Trump’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018 announced last week that they will not lift a variety of restrictions next month, as scheduled in the original agreement, due to Iran’s “severe non-compliance” with its obligations.
“Our commitment to finding a diplomatic solution remains,” France, Germany, and the United Kingdom said Thursday in a joint statement. “This decision does not amount to imposing additional sanctions nor to triggering the snapback mechanism. We stand ready to reverse our decision, should Iran fully implement its [nuclear deal] commitments.”
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And yet, of the governments that participated in or brokered the 2015 deal, only the United States and Iran will send their leaders to New York. That could clear the way, in theory, for Biden and other U.S. officials to make their pitch to the world’s geopolitical swing voters — the developing nations that China and Russia have targeted as diplomatic and geoeconomic priorities.
“Unfortunately, he’s only going to be there for a couple of days,” said Schaefer, the Heritage Foundation senior research fellow. “And his schedule is limited by, I think, his age and capacity. And we've seen that he's not in a position to pull these early morning to late night schedules anymore.”