(The article was originally published in Indian Express as a part of Dr Ram Madhav’s column titled Ram Rajya on September 26, 2026. Views expressed are personal.)
In Delhi to attend the BRICS summit earlier this month, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, made some startling admissions about the multilateral organisation that he was heading. “As the superpowers are divided, the Security Council is paralyzed. There is no way to put order in the world”, he said, adding that the Council “does not correspond anymore to the world of today. It creates a problem of legitimacy, and it creates a problem of effectiveness”, he confessed. He described the “need to readjust the power systems and mechanisms of governance in the world to the reality of today’s world instead of the reality of 1945” as a “hard battle” and insisted that what the UN needs was not a simple reform but “an overhaul”.
These were extraordinary confessions. Last year, at the 80th UN General Assembly session, Guterres was combative describing the UN as “a moral compass, a force for peace… a guardian of international law”. His statements in Delhi a year later were not just the farewell sentiments out of frustration of an official demitting office on January 1, 2027, but the dawning of the reality that the system created after the Second World War was no longer working. No better illustration of this reality is required than the fact that the Chinese President Xi Jinping, who travelled 7000 miles to be at the White House in Washington DC, refused to travel another 200 miles to reach the prestigious annual congregation of world leaders. China pundits interpret it as Xi’s way of presenting his country as an equal to the US by spending exactly as much duration in US as Donald Trump had done in May this year during his visit to Beijing. But the fact is that Xi found spending time in DC more useful for his country than a visit to the UNGA81. Not just the Chinese supremo, but many prominent world leaders chose to stay away from the session this year. They included German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italy’s prime minister Georgia Meloni, South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa, Egypt’s president al-Sisi, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Indonesian president Prabovo and several others. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi too is not attending the session for the successive second year.
None of these leaders was against global multilateralism. But they all feel that the current structure is unsuitable for present times. Modi said it two years ago cautioning the 79th UNGA session in 2024 that the global institutions are losing relevance, adding that “reform is key to relevance”. Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, was more forthright at the 80th session last year, pointedly asking if the UN had “lived up to expectations”. In the past, it was only the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who used to criticise the UN for its role in the West Asia conflict. But voices of criticism can be heard from all corners of the world today.
President Trump, who opened the session on September 22 with his customary address, too came down heavily on various bodies of the UN like the International Criminal Court, UNESCO etc calling them as “rogue institutions”.“There is no global government”, he insisted and warned that the UN must “stop imposing the far-left agenda of globalist bureaucrats who nobody ever elected”. That the US no longer sees present multilateralism relevant became clear when the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio said on the sidelines of the UNGA, that the present international system had broken down and it is unable to deliver. The US, “at least as long as President Trump is in office”, will always act in the interest of its own, “not in the interest of the international order”, he declared, categorically stating that “We will never put the international order above the interests of the United States”.
Reform at the UN is long overdue. But the problem is that, as pointed out by Jaishankar last year, the process for reform itself is an obstacle for it. John Bolton, former NSA of the US was more candid in saying that any move to amend the UN Charter itself would face a veto roadblock. That brings us back to the outgoing Secretary General’s comment: not reform, but overhaul.
In the middle of the Second World War, when the League of Nations had completely become dysfunctional, two Western leaders, FDR of the US and Winston Churchill of Great Britain came together to proclaim the Atlantic Charter in 1941. That served as the foundational document for the creation of a new multilateralism under the UN four years later. At a time when that West-dominated system is weltering, we need the statesmen from Global South to come forward to build a new system – an Indo-Pacific Charter – the basis for which should be the recognition of multipolarity.
