A quick reminder of how these straw polls work: All 15 members of the Council are given identical ballots to indicate whether they “encourage,” “discourage,” or have “no opinion” of each candidate. The ballots in this straw poll did not distinguish between the veto-wielding members of the Council and the other ten members, so we don’t know where these votes are coming from. But they do give an good indication of the strength of a candidate — the more “discourage” votes a candidate receives, the higher the likelihood that at least one of those comes from a veto-wielding member. And, on the other…

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Lana Nusseibeh is officially a candidate for UN Secretary-General. Her late entry into the race had been rumored for some time, and on Wednesday afternoon, the United Arab Emirates formally submitted her nomination.

Nusseibeh is well known in diplomatic circles and, by most accounts, well-liked and respected around the United Nations as a highly capable diplomat. She served as the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the UN for more than a decade, from 2013 to 2024, including a stint on the Security Council from 2022 to 2023. Since 2024, she has served as a senior foreign affairs official for the UAE.

In announcing her candidacy, Nusseibeh emphasized that she would engage in “quiet diplomacy” and prioritize smaller, localized mediation efforts that could be nurtured into broader peace deals. From her vision statement:

Lasting peace is rarely made in a single stroke. More often, it is assembled f…

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The veto-wielding members were given identical red ballots, while the other ten members were given different colored ballots. On each ballot, members indicated whether they encouraged, discouraged, or had no opinion on each candidate.

The result: we now have a very close three-way race.

Rebeca Grynspan, Rafael Grossi, and Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett are now the three leading contenders. To be sure, each faces opposition from two veto-wielding members, but compared to the other candidates, who face even steeper opposition from the P5, their odds look considerably better.

Of these three, only Costa Rica’s …

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In these ballots, all 15 members of the Security Council are asked to indicate whether they “encourage,” “discourage,” or have “no opinion” on each candidate. The ballots do not distinguish between the five veto-wielding permanent members and the other ten members.

As in all previous straw polls, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan remains in the lead. But her lead narrowed considerably since the last straw poll on September 29.

Following that poll, she was the clear frontrunner, with 10 “encourage” votes, three “discourage” votes, and two “no opinions.” This time, she received nine “encourage” votes and six “discourage” votes. In second place was IAEA chief Rafael Grossi, who received six “encourage” votes and seven “discourage” votes. The other five candidates fared poorly.

Here are the full results.

So Where Does The Race for UN Secretary General Actually Stand?

This ballot did not distinguish between the preferences of the veto-wielding members and the rest of the Security Council, but the next straw poll — tentatively scheduled for next week — probably will. At that point, we will see the extent to which the P5 are supporting or opposing each candidate, including the frontrunner, Rebeca Grynspan.

But discouraging the advancement of a candidate right now does not necessarily mean that a P5 member is unwilling to compromise. What really matters is how strongly a P5 member may oppose a candidate. It could be that a member of the P5 would prefer someone else but could still live with the consensus of the rest of the Council. Here, for example, is how one analyst at the right-wing Washington, D.C., Think Tank described the situation:

Ben Cohen, who focuses on international organizations at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Ms. Grynspan was unlikely to be Washington’s first choice. But she could emerge as a compromise candidate if the five permanent members of the Security Council reject the other leading contenders and agree that they could accept her, he said.

That sounds right to me. But another, entirely different scenario is that Grynspan is strongly opposed by one or more members of the P5 and that none of the current crop of seven candidates is a viable contender. If that is the case, we are likely to see new candidates emerge after the next straw poll.

So, bottom line: Rebeca Grynspan is still very much in the lead. But her fate will come down to whether she is opposed by a veto-wielding member — and how firmly that opposition is held.

We will know more next week, and I’ll be back to update you all.

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Rebeca Grynspan is one step closer to becoming the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. The Security Council held its fourth informal straw poll to test the viability of the seven candidates for Secretary-General — and this is now the fourth time in a row that Grynspan has been in the lead.

Each of the 15 members of the Security Council was given a ballot and asked to indicate whether they “encourage,” “discourage,” or have “no opinion” on each candidate. To win, a candidate needs the support of at least nine members and must not face opposition from any of the five veto-wielding powers: the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom.

Grynspan emerged decisively on top in this vote, with 10 votes in favor, three “discourages,” and two “no opinions.” The other candidates were far behind. In a distant second place was Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, who secured eight votes in favor but six “discourage” votes. At this point, she and the other candidates, including IAEA chief Rafael Grossi, probably face insurmountable opposition.

Adding to Grynspan’s tailwinds is the fact that her numbers are improving. In the last straw poll, taken earlier this month, she received five “discourage” votes, compared with three today.

But her improving prospects — and her rivals’ declining ones — do not mean that Grynspan is a shoo-in.

The ballots in this round did not differentiate between the votes of the five veto-wielding members and those of the other 10, so we do not know whether her opposition comes from the P5. And if one or more of those “discourage” votes does come from the P5, we don’t know whether that position is firmly held or whether it’s just posturing. (More on that below the fold!)

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Who, exactly, is Rebeca Grynspan?

Grynspan is well known around the UN. She’s an economist and former Costa Rican politician who has risen through the ranks of the UN system to become head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, a Geneva-based UN body focused on helping developing countries use trade, investment, finance, and technology to support economic development.

It was from this position, in 2022, that she emerged as a prominent international negotiator.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year, food prices around the world soared. Ukraine is a global breadbasket, but its agricultural exports were effectively trapped. Grynspan became a key player in the UN-led negotiations that produced the Black Sea Grain Initiative and a parallel agreement aimed at facilitating Russian food and fertilizer exports. The resulting arrangements enabled Ukrainian grain to once again reach global markets. She has touted this experience as an example of how the UN can mediate even in the midst of a devastating conflict.

Grynspan, notably, is also of Jewish descent. Her parents were Jewish refugees from Poland who settled in Costa Rica. Grynspan, who is 70, often invokes her parents’ experience by calling herself a “daughter of peace.” This spring, she told the General Assembly: “Peace is what made it possible for my parents, two refugees from the Second World War, to find respect and dignity in a small country, Costa Rica. And they rebuilt their lives. I am the daughter of this peace, a demonstration of what peace makes possible and the principles which underpin that.”

So can she actually survive the cauldron of the Security Council and become the first woman to serve as UN Secretary-General?

Below the paywall, I look at where her opposition may be coming from, what the P5 may be bargaining for — and why the eventual winner may not even be in the race yet.

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It’s that time of year again! For the 20th time in 21 years,* I’ve secured my press pass and will be headed to the United Nations for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly, better known in diplomatic circles simply as “UNGA.”

This is always the single largest diplomatic gathering of the year. Hundreds of presidents and prime ministers come to New York, along with their sizable entourages, to deliver speeches from the General Assembly dais and attend any number of bilateral meetings, side events, receptions, and the like. It can be a logistical nightmare for participants and press alike, but honestly, I love it. It’s the one time of year when people outside the UN bubble really pay attention to the United Nations, which gives me the opportunity to explain why this week matters.

I’ll have plenty of coverage of UNGA in the coming weeks. But for now, I wanted to give my paying subscribers a sneak preview of the stories I’ll be following, as well as the key meetings, events, and speeches I think will drive the agenda at UNGA this year.

So, for paying subscribers, here are four storylines I’ll be following in UNGA 2026

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*I missed 2015, which was a big one — the year the SDGs were adopted. But not worth missing the birth of my son!

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In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali Dayal and I dissect the results of the latest Security Council straw poll, which tested the viability of the eight candidates seeking to succeed António Guterres when his term expires at the end of the year. We discuss who’s up, who’s down, and what comes next in the race to lead the United Nations.

We also discuss news that Xi Jinping is apparently skipping UNGA, despite already being in the United States for a scheduled meeting with Donald Trump in Washington! Plus, there’s some welcome news on the UN funding crisis, and António Guterres says the UN has a plan in place to help open the Strait of Hormuz.

The full episode is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers. We hope you’ll support the only independent podcast covering all things United Nations with a paid subscription. Here are some options:

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Here’s what happened: Danon was delivering a formal response to a report by a different UN official, Pramila Patten, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. In that report, Patten found that Israeli security forces could be credibly suspected of engaging in a pattern of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. Danon took exception to this and, in his response, impugned the motives of Patten, who was not in the room.

Vanessa Frazier, however, was in the room, and she intervened in defense of her colleague.

What followed was this wild scene.

Needless to say, things like this do not happen at the UN, where protocol and diplomatic niceties typically restrain this kind of outburst. To be sure, diplomats often “trade barbs,” but that rarely includes actual shouting matches like this. Not long after this heated exchange, Danon and Frazier took their beef to social media — and that’s when things took an even uglier turn.

Danny Danon is now on a mission to get Vanessa Frazier fired.

In today’s episode of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali Dayal and I discuss what is driving this beef. (There’s much more to this story than what has already been reported.) We also discuss whether Israel is simply trying to deflect attention from the substance of reports containing credible accusations of violations of human rights and international law by alleging bias on the part of the authors of those reports.

The full episode is available below the fold for our paying subscribers.

Also in this episode: what we learned from the first public hearing of the newest entrant in the Secretary-General race, Guyana’s UN Ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, and how the UN managed to stave off a financial apocalypse in July.

This is exactly the kind of conversation we created To Save Us From Hell to have: informed, unscripted, well sourced, and focused on what is actually happening inside the UN system — beyond the diplomatic theater.

You can listen to the full episode immediately by becoming a paying subscriber at any level. Your support keeps this work independent and helps make it possible for us to keep bringing you the sharp, insider UN analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

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Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett could become the first United Nations Secretary-General of Indigenous descent. Guyana’s ambassador to the United Nations was nominated as a Secretary-General candidate this week, bringing the grand total of candidates to six as we enter the final stretch of the campaign before the first Security Council straw polls.

Anjali knows Rodrigues-Birkett! They had lunch together not long ago, and in this episode of To Save Us From Hell she explains what Guyana’s UN ambassador brings to this race. We also discuss what we learned from the three-hour General Assembly forum with another candidate, Maria Espinosa.

Remember: We watch these marathon forums so you don’t have to! (Another reason to subscribe to Global Dispatches, which gets you all episodes of To Save Us From Hell)

Finally, we discuss Antonio Guterres’ visit this week to Haiti, and what it suggests about international efforts to support security and stability as Haiti seeks to emerge from crisis.

All those segments are for our paying subscribers only.

But up first: we discuss the UN’s role in the Iran ceasefire — and what this moment means for the UN’s ability to mediate conflicts around the world.

The full episode is available immediately below the fold for our paying subscribers. Please support our unique coverage of the United Nations with a subscription, full price our discount—it all helps!

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There was a remarkable scene at the United Nations yesterday as the President of the General Assembly and former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock read out the results of a hotly contested race for a Security Council seat.

For months, Portugal, Austria, and Germany had been duking it out behind the scenes at the General Assembly. These three EU allies were competing for just two seats on the Security Council, where they would serve for two years as non-permanent members. They needed the votes of two-thirds of the Assembly to secure those seats, and one country would be the odd European out.

As Baerbock read the results, she sat stone-faced while the General Assembly erupted in raucous applause: Portugal and Austria would be joining the Security Council in 2027. Germany was snubbed.

This was the first time that Germany sought a Security Council seat and lost. What’s more, it was the first time that any of the so-called “G4” countries — India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — were denied a seat on the Council. Adding insult to injury in Berlin is the fact that, ever since the United States sharply cut foreign aid, Germany has been the largest bilateral donor in the world, according to OECD figures.

So what happened here? Why couldn’t Germany get itself elected to the Security Council this time around? In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, our podcast about the United Nations, we break down the likely reason that Germany fell from a shoo-in for the Council to losing an election to much smaller European countries. But first, we discuss the “hustings” in the race for UN Secretary-General, hosted in London by the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom. Four of the five declared candidates for UN Secretary-General took rapid-fire questions before a live audience in London. We break down what we learned about the candidates — and what their answers suggest about who might become the next UN Secretary-General.

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A whole lot of multilateralism goes into stopping an Ebola outbreak. Vaccines are developed and deployed by Gavi—the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations. Disease surveillance is often conducted by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has developed sophisticated networks for tracking diseases of all sorts. The World Health Organization coordinates it all, including between national health authorities and international experts and aid workers who are trained in taking the kind of action required to contain an outbreak before it spreads internationally.

You may have seen our recent three-part series, Before the Outbreak, which describes how disease surveillance and outbreak prevention work. The upshot is that when local and international health officials, experts, and responders work together in a coordinated way, an uncontrolled outbreak can be prevented.

And when it works, it works!

It did not get much media attention at the time, but back in December I wrote about the remarkable speed with which the previous Ebola outbreak in the DRC was brought under control. But that piece ended with a warning: unless these platforms are adequately supported, their ability to repeat this kind of success is far from assured.

We are now seeing the consequences of the Trump administration’s decision to pull away from the systems that prevent deadly outbreaks like Ebola.

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Today begins a key inflection point for one of the major decisions facing the UN this year: who will be the next Secretary-General?

Antonio Guterres’ second and final term comes to an end on December 31. By January 1, 2027, a new Secretary-General will be leading the UN. Today and tomorrow, we will hear directly from the four declared candidates for the first time as they take questions from member states and civil society at a public forum held at the General Assembly. I will be following the hours of hearings, posting updates to our new WhatsApp group. Later this week, I will publish a free episode of Global Dispatches and To Save Us From Hell about the key takeaways from these hearings.

But for now, I wanted to take a particularly deep dive into the selection process for the next Secretary-General. Warning: what follows is an insider, process-heavy discussion of international bureaucracy and multilateral diplomacy, for those of you who crave insider-y conversations about UN rules of procedure for picking the Secretary-General.

So, with that throat clearing…Here’s what to expect in the race for the next UN Secretary General.

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At the moment, there seems to be no way out. The United States and Israel are continuing their relentless bombing campaigns. Iran is retaliating against countries in the region and summoning the best geopolitical lever it has: preventing oil tankers from crossing the strait. As a result, the cost of food around the world is poised to go up—which, for millions of people, can mean not eating.

Believe it or not, this is familiar territory for the United Nations.

Back in early 2022, the world was faced with a similar dilemma following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which all but halted Ukrainian agricultural exports. That had a huge impact on global food supplies. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine accounted for roughly half of global sunflower oil exports and about 10–17% of global exports of wheat and maize. The shock to those supplies hit import-dependent regions especially hard, particularly the Middle East and parts of Africa, helping drive a global food price spike.

At issue was the inability of civilian cargo ships to collect Ukraine’s vast agricultural exports and deliver them to the rest of the world without fear of attack. In the early spring, the UN began to work behind the scenes to find a solution: what would become known as the Black Sea Grain Initiative.

Under this agreement, merchant ships intending to pick up or offload Ukrainian grain would first transit to Turkey, where a team of Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish inspectors would examine the ship under the watchful eye of UN officials. Once cleared, the ships could travel along an agreed maritime corridor without threat. The agreement worked: sufficient Ukrainian agricultural exports re-entered the world market, reducing a major strain on global food supplies. And Russia got what it wanted, too, with the lifting of restrictions on its own fertilizer and agricultural exports.

The context of the Black Sea in 2022 and the Strait of Hormuz in 2026 is different, but the outline the Black Sea Grain Initiative provides may show a path forward on Hormuz—and some key international diplomats are starting to take notice.

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Donald J. Trump’s Board of Peace, on which Donald J. Trump serves as chair-for-life, will hold its inaugural meeting today at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump United States Institute for Peace. On hand will be leaders of about two dozen countries not typically associated with foreign policies that prioritize international humanitarian law and peaceful conduct in international affairs.

The major outcome of this meeting was announced ahead of time: in a social media post last week, Trump claimed he has received $5 billion in pledges for Gaza reconstruction. If true, that would be a massive sum. In all of 2025, donors committed about $4.2 billion in aid to the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

I say “if true” because we’ve not seen any actual documentation of these pledges made through the Board of Peace. This is unlike the UN system, which assiduously documents pledges and then compares those pledges against actual committed funds. The UN does this because donors sometimes make a big show of promising money to a humanitarian crisis, only to never commit those funds. So, until we have clarification about whether this $5 billion actually exists as committed funds, it’s reasonable to be skeptical. Also, until we know how these funds will be spent—for example, on supporting local Gaza initiatives or as financing for real estate projects run by family members of the Chairman-for-Life of the Board of Peace—it is probably worth withholding judgment on the propriety of this kind of fundraising.

What we can judge right now is the notion that this Board of Peace will somehow challenge—even supplant—the United Nations and the Security Council.

It won’t. And it can’t.

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I think it is important to understand Trump’s actions in Venezuela as a singularly consequential historical inflection point—one that future historians may point to as marking the transition from one era to another. Think of the 1956 Suez Crisis, which exposed the fecklessness of the British and French empires and sparked a period of rapid decolonization; the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union; or the September 11 attacks, the response to which hastened the end of America’s unipolar moment and made way for China’s rise.

Trump’s moves in Venezuela, combined with the way in which his administration is justifying these actions, are likely as consequential. This time, however, the casualty of the transition may be the rules-based world order — potentially to include the United Nations itself.

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Claiming dominion over an entire hemisphere — and then acting on it by deposing a foreign head of state to secure access to natural resources — is about as imperialist as foreign policy gets. It is also exactly the kind of behavior that the United Nations and the (formerly) U.S.-backed, post–World War II rules-based international order were created to guard against. There is now an open clash in geopolitics between the very foundation of the current international system, in place for the last 80 years, and a hegemonic power indifferent to that system.

A nakedly imperialist United States and a United Nations created to uphold a liberal international order cannot exist side by side. Something is going to have to give.

If I sound alarmist here, it’s because what’s happening is truly alarming.

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It’s hard to imagine a time before Giving Tuesday. By now, it’s locked into America’s holiday season calendar. But Giving Tuesday didn’t just come from nowhere. Rather, you can draw a straight line from the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York every September to the ubiquity of Giving Tuesday today.

It may sound odd… but trust me. I was there!

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To understand the origins of Giving Tuesday, you need to temporarily suspend everything you know about the pernicious influence of social media on politics and society in 2025.

Fifteen years ago, the social media landscape was much, much different. Twitter was a new and exciting platform — many users in less developed countries flocked to it because it primarily used an SMS-based interface, requiring neither a smartphone nor expensive data. Instagram was still an independent company, not yet bought by Facebook. (Meta didn’t even exist!) Meanwhile, Facebook users would mostly just see updates from their friends. The newsfeed algorithm had not yet been rolled out — let alone designed in such a way to spark maximum outrage. The “surveillance capitalism” that sustains today’s social media giants had not yet firmly taken hold.

It seems like a quaint, bygone era. And it was.

Back then, people of good conscience who were genuinely concerned about social and political progress could believe that social media may be leveraged for good. It was in this context that a partnership was born between the United Nations Foundation, the 92Y in New York, and Mashable — then an upstart media company covering web culture and technology — around a conference called the Social Good Summit.

The first Social Good Summit was in September 2010, held at the 92Y, a cultural institution on the Upper East Side of New York. I was there (and I might have even moderated a panel or two). The Social Good Summit was designed as a kind of counter-programming to the United Nations General Assembly underway fifty blocks south. Just as social media was opening up new space for political and social debate, the three day event at the 92Y would serve as a kind of “People’s UNGA” to discuss how this emerging technology could be harnessed to advance social and economic development and human rights.

The programming in those early years was a cross between diplomats, presidents, and prime ministers in town for UNGA — who gave talks about using social media for social progress — and extremely earnest users of social media who believed in the collective power of networks to do good in the world. (This was before the advent of “influencers” as a distinct métier, but that’s basically what they were.)

In 2012, some of the key drivers behind the Social Good Summit — including Henry Timms and Asha Curran of 92Y, and Kathy Calvin and Aaron Sherinian of the United Nations Foundation — held a meeting in which the idea of a “Giving Tuesday” was conceived. As Henry Timms told me later that year, “You have Black Friday and Cyber Monday — so why not Giving Tuesday?”

And so, the idea was born. The conveners of the Social Good Summit tapped the networks of the influencers they had brought together the previous two Septembers, and voilà — it quickly went viral, to the point where we can hardly remember a time before Giving Tuesday. And the world is better off for it.

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Social media is a darker place today, to be sure. But I haven’t personally lost my belief that it can still be harnessed to do some good in the world. To that end, I’ve teamed up with some other Substackers this holiday season to raise money for GiveDirectly.

In short: GiveDirectly facilitates unconditional cash transfers to communities in the developing world as a tool to fight extreme poverty. Regular listeners to the Global Dispatches podcast may recall this episode from August about a GiveDirectly program that offered cash transfers to pregnant women in rural Kenya, resulting in huge declines in infant and under-five mortality. Unconditional cash transfers are genuinely effective, but they are also politically fraught, so government aid agencies have not yet coalesced around them. This makes it an area where philanthropy — i.e., your contributions — can make a real difference.

Here’s how you can help. Go here. It’s special link just for my audience. Once there, make a contribution and post about it — you guessed it — on social media.

Pretty much everything about social media is terrible today. But just maybe we can still harness it to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

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For the past several weeks, the United States has been circulating drafts of a Security Council resolution meant to put into action a key part of President Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan: the deployment of an International Stabilization Force for Gaza.

The idea goes like this: troops from Arab or Muslim-majority countries would deploy to Gaza as Israeli forces pull back. In theory, the proposal makes sense. There’s a long history of international troops successfully stepping in after a conflict to help stabilize the peace. But in Gaza, there’s very little reason to think this force will actually deploy anytime soon — if ever.

Here’s why.

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One of my favorite UNGA pastimes is watching the UN TV livestream as world leaders enter the building and ride the escalators up to the General Assembly. Nerdy, I know — but I like to see how many presidents and prime ministers I can recognize on sight.

On Tuesday morning, I was busy watching Antonio Guterres’s speech and missed the now-infamous escalator mishap. So I was perplexed when, during Trump’s speech, he started complaining about the escalator breaking down on him — and also about the teleprompter not working.

Here’s the full excerpt from his UNGA speech on these two apparent mishaps.

Thank you very much, very much appreciated. And I don’t mind making this 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. I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble

…

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 have fallen, but she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape, we’re both still. 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. And by the way, it’s working now, just went on. Thank you. I think I should just do it the other way; it’s easier. Thank you very much.

My first instinct wasn’t that this was some conspiracy to force Donald Trump to walk a flight of stairs, but rather an ill-timed outage. For the last several months, the UN has been intermittently shutting off escalators to save money amid a major liquidity crisis — largely caused by the United States not paying its member dues. I initially chalked it up to cosmic coincidence that the escalator would shut down for the one world leader most responsible for the UN’s funding woes.

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But that turned out not to be the case. Apparently, a member of the American delegation inadvertently tripped a safety mechanism, causing the escalator to stop. Here’s the full explanation of what happened from UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric:

In answer to the many questions received about the escalator incident this morning involving the President of the United States and the First Lady, I have the following information to share: President Trump, accompanied by the First Lady and delegation, arrived at the UNHQ building this morning, and entered through the Delegate's entrance. After passing through the security gates, President Trump and the First Lady approached the escalator. In an effort to document their arrival, a videographer from the US delegation stepped on to the escalator ahead of the President and First Lady. As the videographer, who was traveling backwards up the escalator reached the top , the First Lady, followed by President Trump, each mounted the steps at the bottom. At that moment (9:50am), the escalator came to a stop. Our technician, who was at the location, reset the escalator as soon as the delegation had climbed up to the second floor. A subsequent investigation, including a readout of the machine's central processing unit, indicated that the escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator. The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing. The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function described above.”

So that’s what happened with the escalators. What about the teleprompter?

The AP’s Edith Lederer is a legendary reporter who has been covering the UN for decades. This is far from one of the most important stories she’s broken in her storied career, but she does cite a UN source saying that — like the escalator — the teleprompter mishap was not the UN’s doing. Instead, the White House was responsible for the teleprompter during Trump’s speech.

I initially thought this would be a one-day story. Trump seemed to take the mishaps in stride. His line about the teleprompter operator being in “big trouble” was clearly a joke. And he’s apparently very pleased with how his speech went. Here’s his social media post shortly following the speech.

All in all—pretty positive!

Then, later in the day, when Trump met with Antonio Guterres, he didn’t even mention the mishaps in his remarks to reporters. Instead, he offered some encouraging words about the UN as an institution, saying Americans are “100% behind the UN.”

So I thought we could move on and discuss weightier matters. But no.

Something happened in the next 24 hours that caused Trump to suddenly change his tune. I can’t speculate on what shifted, but in a Truth Social post yesterday afternoon, Trump raged over the escalator outage and teleprompter mishap. He demanded an investigation, said the Secret Service was involved, and even called for the arrest of UN staff he alleges stopped the escalator. He also leveled a third accusation: that his microphone had been turned down so low people in the General Assembly Hall couldn’t hear him.

Here’s that post.

On the audio levels — I think this one is easily explained. Unlike a conventional auditorium, where a speaker system projects audio loud enough for everyone to hear, the General Assembly keeps the sound relatively low. It’s not silent — just lower than you’d expect. That’s to benefit the translators and the people listening to the simultaneous interpretation in six different languages. They need to hear the translation clearly over the ambient noise in the room, so the main speaker system isn’t cranked up.

Granted, I’ve only ever sat in the back of the General Assembly Hall, where the press is usually placed, but it can sometimes be difficult — though not impossible — to hear. Even when the speaker is using English, I almost always use the earpiece provided on the back of the chairs to catch everything they’re saying.

Still, Donald Trump thinks this is a big deal. So, along with the escalator outage stopping and teleprompter mishap, it suddenly is a big deal!

How much of a problem is this going to be for the UN? Alas, I fear more than you’d might expect.

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The showcase of every UNGA is what is formally known around the UN as the “General Debate.” This is the parade of presidents and prime ministers who take the dais before the UN General Assembly, delivering sometimes fiery speeches to a global audience.

The General Debate always follows a familiar pattern. On a Tuesday, the new President of the General Assembly speaks first, followed by the Secretary-General. By tradition, Brazil is the first country to speak, and then comes the United States. After that, the schedule changes year by year, with speaking slots earlier in the week reserved for Heads of State (HS in the schedule) and Heads of Government (HG). Only after all the heads of state and government have spoken are lower-level officials, like foreign ministers, given their time.

Some speeches are more high-profile than others. This year, there are nine world leaders whose speeches I’ll be following particularly closely. The first (of course) is Trump. While Trump is always somewhat unpredictable, there are a few global issues we can reasonably expect in his speech: the Gaza conflict, Ukraine — and, of course, he’ll likely tout his tariffs.

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Outside the obvious themes, I’ll be zeroing in on three specific aspects of Trump’s speech.

Will he fillet the SDGs? The Sustainable Development Goals are very much the beating heart of the UN. All member states adopted them back in 2015 and today, the SDGs provide a framework for pretty much everything the UN does around ending extreme poverty, and promoting public health and environmental protection. But earlier this year, the Trump administration stunned the UN by declaring that it “rejects and denounces” the SDGs. This is an extremely unpopular position—the rest if the UN’s 192 member states very much support them. I’ll be watching to see if Trump himself invokes the “rejects and denounces” paradigm, and what, if anything, he’ll say about the SDGs.

How deep will he lean into culture war issues? The Trump administration’s animous towards the SDGs stems from a perception that they are used to advance cultural causes like gender equality, reproductive health and LGBTQ rights in ways that contravene cultural conservatism. (Though here it should be noted that deeply conservative countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia have not directed animous towards the SDGs as a whole in the same way as the United States under Trump). In various UN bodies, the United States has objected to erstwhile routine affirmations of women’s and human rights, arguing that these affirmations advance a cultural agenda to which the US now objects. In the context of a growing fervor in some quarters of American politics, I’m watching to see the extent to which he leans into these culture war issues in his speech.

Will he take credit for peace deals? Trump raised eyebrows over the summer when he claimed credit for six peace deals in his first six months in office. (Here’s an apparent list.) Notably, his claiming credit for ending the India-Pakistan conflict this spring seems to have caused a severe rupture of American-Indian relations. Meanwhile, the DRC-Rwanda conflict which Trump claims to have ended is very much still hot, with Reuters reporting just last week that the killing is ongoing, with both sides digging in amid missed ceasefire deadlines. Some countries seem more welcoming of President Trump’s public interventions (like Armenia and Azerbaijan) while others, like India, are not. I’m watching to see the extent to which Trump leans into his self-described peacemaker role, and if he leverages that to make any bold statements on Gaza and Ukraine.

But UNGA is about much more than Trump! Here are 8 other speeches I’m Most Anticipating

Below the fold for paying subscribers is something of a cheat sheet for 8 other world leaders whose speeches I think will be particularly resonant this year, including Brazil, South Korea, Qatar, Ukraine, Iran, Syria, Palestine and Israel. To understand why I think these remarks in particular may shape the debate at UNGA this year, please purchase a subscription. You’d be supporting my work and help cover the costs associated with my UNGA coverage.

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Read on for my UNGA cheat sheet!

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Last Friday, the UN General Assembly set the stage for high drama during High-Level Week next week.

In a packed chamber, UN Member States voted 142–10 to back “tangible, time-bound and irreversible steps” toward a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, endorsing a French and Saudi-led initiative called the “New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution.”

The New York Declaration is a set of principles, backed in July by about a dozen countries along with the European Union and the Arab League, that seeks to create a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel in the context of ending the war in Gaza. The Declaration acknowledges that there is no ongoing peace process between the parties but nonetheless aims to demonstrate broad international support for a two-state solution. (It is significant to note that Saudi Arabia and most of the Arab League—who do not formally recognize Israel—backed a document implying they would do so upon the implementation of a two-state solution.)

The Declaration includes denunciations of the killing of civilians by all sides in the Gaza war, but goes much further than any UN statement to date in calling for the abolition of Hamas. The Declaration explicitly condemns Hamas’ terror attack on October 7, calls for the immediate release of Israeli hostages, and demands that Hamas disarm and hand over control in Gaza. “In the context of ending the war in Gaza, Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objective of a sovereign and independent Palestinian State,” reads a key portion of the Declaration

Still, the New York Declaration, now formally endorsed by 142 countries, contains several provisions Israel is likely to oppose, including ending settlement activity, allowing unfettered humanitarian access to Gaza, reaffirming Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and calling for full admission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations. “The only beneficiary is Hamas,” said Israel’s UN ambassador of the resolution (despite its call for Hamas to turn over its guns and end its rule in Gaza.)

Israel, the United States, Hungary, Argentina, and a smattering of mostly small Pacific island states that vote with the US in the General Assembly as a matter of routine opposed the resolution. But this vote was about as lopsided as a vote can be at the UN. And the timing of the vote is consequential. On Monday the 22, Presidents and Prime Ministers from around the world will gather in General Assembly Hall for a highly anticipated meeting dedicated to Palestinian statehood.

With this vote, all signs point to this gathering at the start of UN Week as being the defining geopolitical moment of this year’s UNGA.

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