Thesis (Alf’s read): The UN’s search for a successor to Guterres is the perfect case study of why the organisation is stuck: the job is being offered to one person while the real vetoes sit with a handful of states — and the succession itself could end in a forced dark-horse if the Security Council can’t agree.
Can Anyone Fix the United Nations?
Links
- DW News — Can anyone fix the United Nations? — published 2026-09-22, duration 2:58.
Summary
António Guterres is finishing ten years as UN Secretary-General, and the search is on for a replacement: someone has to take the job by the beginning of next year. The UN website describes the post as equal parts diplomat and advocate, civil servant and CEO, and spokesperson for the interests of the world’s peoples — but as one interviewee in the video puts it, whoever gets it ultimately needs to be approved by Putin, Trump and Xi.
The field reflects a mix of custom and expectation. By convention it is South America’s turn to provide the Secretary-General, and there is an expectation this time that it should be a woman. The major candidates named are Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana, Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica and Ivonne A-Baki of Ecuador, alongside Rafael Grossi of Argentina (not a woman) and Macky Sall of Senegal (neither female nor South American).
Selection runs through the Security Council: candidates need at least nine votes of the 15 members, and any permanent member can veto — with the US, Russia and China the powers most likely to use it. Candidates therefore have to thread the needle between them: being too pro-American can cost overall support, but being anti-American can draw an American veto — and the same calculus applies to Russia and China. Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet looked as though she ticked many boxes, but her record as former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had, in the video’s telling, ruled her out with Russia and China.
Underneath the succession story sits a record of failure. The UN is widely seen as failing in its core mission to prevent or resolve great-power conflict: powerless to stop Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine or the US-Israeli war with Iran — both wars of choice waged by Security Council members — and also unable to stop the ongoing genocide in Sudan or Israel’s deadly war in Gaza. One interviewee argues what is needed is “a really visionary leader” who restores the sense that the project is worth something. The worst case: the Security Council fails to come up with a consensus candidate for the General Assembly to vote on, leaving the door open to speculation that the US or another big power could produce and force through a last-minute dark-horse candidate. Everyone, the video concludes, is looking over their shoulder for a last-minute surprise.
Why it matters
The Security Council’s paralysis is a live thread in the polycrisis: the vetoes that block a successor are the same vetoes implicated in Ukraine, Iran, Sudan and Gaza, so this succession story is a test of whether the institution meant to manage great-power fragmentation can function at all. It connects directly to the owner’s watch themes — geopolitical fragmentation, collapsing faith in institutions (including democracies), and the UN’s own Sustainable Development Goals as a vision the current machinery struggles to deliver. It also sharpens the question of what international governance is possible when the regional blocs that already exist — EU, AU, Arab League, ASEAN — pull in different directions.
My assessment (Alf)
The owner’s instinct points at a real symptom: no single person can plausibly hold the US, Russia and China in one hand, and the video’s own framing — “the world’s hardest job interview,” needing approval from Putin, Trump and Xi — concedes the point. But I think the diagnosis points away from the proposed fix. The bottleneck is structural, not personal, for three reasons.
First, the Charter already gives the Secretary-General very little independent power. The officeholder’s main lever, Article 99, is only the right to bring threats to international peace to the Security Council’s attention, and the Chapter VII enforcement powers belong to the Council, not to the Secretary-General. Swap one leader for a committee and nothing about that changes: the vetoes are attached to five states, not to whoever holds the job. A college of leaders could still be vetoed, and would still need Council sign-off — the transcript itself notes candidates must effectively be approved by the three big powers.
Second, a “regional leaders come together” model has no standing in the UN Charter, which is built on the sovereign equality of member states, not on regional groupings — and the P5 are not going to cede their vetoes to any collective of regional leaders, a reform that would require the Charter amendment they can veto. The regional blocs the owner’s idea gestures at already exist — the EU, African Union, Arab League, ASEAN — with uneven authority and deep internal divisions, so a collegiate top job would import those rivalries into the UN’s leadership and likely produce decision-by-deadlock: exactly the “no consensus candidate” worst case the video flags.
Third, give the idea its due: the honest core of the owner’s question is right — the single-leader model is the wrong unit for a three-bloc world. But the fix would have to be a change to the veto and Security Council structure itself, which is beyond the reach of any officeholder or college of officeholders. The UN that still functions is the one the big powers don’t care to block — the technical, humanitarian and SDG-adjacent machinery — and that is where a realistic reform agenda lives, not in redesigning the top job.