UN brings leaders together for a week of speeches and negotiations - critical summary review

The United Nations General Assembly is the one week a year when heads of state and government from the organisation's 193 member countries take turns at the same podium in New York. It is not a body that decides much: the votes that bind are taken in the Security Council, where five countries hold a veto. What the General Assembly offers is the microphone, and the guarantee that the rest of the world is in the room.

That is what makes attendance itself a message. Showing up says the forum is worth your time; sending a foreign minister instead says it is not. And this year, the 81st session, which ran from 22 to 28 September in New York, the absences said a great deal.

A ritual that opens by admitting its own crisis

The session's chosen theme was "restoring trust, managing transformation". As an opinion piece in Estadão noted, the formulation carries an unusual admission: if trust has to be restored, it has been lost. The question the speeches leave open is trust in what. In the UN? In the great powers? In the idea that shared problems can be met with shared diagnoses?

António Guterres, the secretary-general, opened his last General Assembly before leaving office at the end of December after ten years, and said the world is darker than when he took the job. He described an "unprecedented convergence of threats", condemned the war in Ukraine, called for an end to hostilities in the Middle East and said the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank raises "the spectre of ethnic cleansing". He also called for Security Council reform, pointing to Africa's lack of any permanent seat. It is still unclear who will succeed him.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, opening the general debate as Brazil has done by tradition since 1955, was blunter: "Since I first occupied this podium, in 2003, this is the most critical moment for the United Nations." He said its credibility has never been lower and that everyone is hostage to a paralysed Security Council. Spain's Pedro Sánchez called for reform and the abolition of the permanent members' veto; Panama's José Raúl Mulino asked for a permanent seat for Latin America and the Caribbean.

The absences that weighed more than the speeches

China's Xi Jinping did not come. During the high-level week he was in Washington, roughly 300 kilometres away, on a state visit with a White House dinner and a military parade, meeting Donald Trump on the Thursday. China was represented in New York by vice-president Han Zheng. According to a report in Valor, Beijing had explored a New York stop in late July, then dropped the plan in mid-August, prioritising the message that China stands as Washington's equal. Xi last spoke in person at UN headquarters in 2015.

Scott Kennedy, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Xi appears to have matched the length of Trump's May trip to China, and that speculation points partly to the difficulty of assembling an agenda with more concrete results. Volodymyr Zelensky said from the podium he regretted not being able to speak with Xi, who "can influence Russia more than many others can".

Vladimir Putin last appeared at the General Assembly in 2015; Sergei Lavrov spoke for Russia. German chancellor Friedrich Merz stayed home for the second year running, this time managing the fallout from his party's defeats in three regional elections, sending foreign minister Johann Wadephul. Giorgia Meloni, Cyril Ramaphosa, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Bola Tinubu and Narendra Modi also sent deputies. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was denied a US visa for the second consecutive year and addressed the hall by video.

The podium in New York, the audience back home

Lula spoke twelve days before Brazil's presidential first round on 4 October, running against senator Flávio Bolsonaro. His speech mixed the expected defence of multilateralism with campaign material: criticism of the betting industry, a defence of ending the six-days-on, one-day-off work schedule, a promise not to privatise Pix, Brazil's free public payments system. "Brazil does not fit in anyone's backyard," he said, without naming the United States, and warned against "external interference in electoral processes". He closed by framing the election as a choice "between democracy and denialism".

Trump followed him. Much of his speech was about the war against Iran, which US and Israeli strikes began in February, but he also listed employment records, foreign investment and progress against illegal immigration. The BBC described a speech that appeared aimed at voters in November's midterm elections. He said he faces a "big decision" on Iran: a deal, or to "annihilate the Islamic Republic". He added that he believes a deal will come "right after the elections". Cuba's delegation walked out while he was speaking, after he said the communist government is "a failed state" and "will fall".

The US delegation did not applaud Lula. Trump was not in the hall. There was no handshake between the two, unlike the previous year. Brazil's TSE, the electoral court, already has a complaint filed by Flávio Bolsonaro over Lula's speech: in 2022 the same court found electoral intent in Jair Bolsonaro's UN address, though not serious enough to be an abuse of power.

Venezuela promises elections without a date

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela's acting president since US forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on 3 January, addressed the Assembly the day after meeting Trump in New York. "There will be elections in Venezuela," she said, without saying when or under what conditions, adding that Venezuelans "will determine when the right moment is". She thanked Trump for his "willingness to resume the path of diplomatic relations", praised the oil agreement giving the United States majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves, and never mentioned Maduro, who is held in Brooklyn. Venezuela's constitution sets a 180-day deadline for an acting president to call elections.

The plenary as a battleground

Benjamin Netanyahu spoke on Thursday to a room that emptied as he began. Dozens of delegations walked out, including Brazil's; the Palestinian delegation had circulated a note asking others to join. "If there are any other moral cowards who have not yet left this hall, please do so now," he said. He defended the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, rejected the genocide accusation over Gaza as "the biggest lie of the century", and attacked the United Kingdom and France over colonialism.

Before arriving, he had posted a video accusing New York mayor Zohran Mamdani of supporting Hamas. Mamdani, who had promised during his campaign to arrest Netanyahu, acknowledged he has no authority to enforce the International Criminal Court warrant issued in 2024; the United States is not a member of the court. No meeting with Trump was scheduled.

AI at the Security Council, and no agreement

France, holding the council presidency, convened a meeting on AI risks. Anthropic's Dario Amodei said badly managed AI "could pose a risk to humanity as a whole". OpenAI's Sam Altman argued the most important decisions "cannot be made only by labs in San Francisco". Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN scientific panel on AI, called the dangers "real and imminent".

Michael Kratsios, of the White House, said the UN should focus on sharing best practices rather than "establishing a global regulatory scheme", echoing Trump's rejection the day before of "any globalist scheme to control" AI. China's ambassador Fu Cong called for continuous improvement of regulatory frameworks and international cooperation. The two leading AI powers left as they arrived.

What to watch from here

Whether Venezuela sets an election date inside the constitutional window Rodríguez avoided naming is the clearest test of whether the promise was substance or staging. Watch, too, the US-Iran channel: foreign minister Abbas Araghchi met Trump envoy Steve Witkoff for at least two hours in New York, and secretary of state Marco Rubio said afterwards the talks produced no significant progress and that the earlier memorandum of understanding is off the table. Iran's security council chief Mohsen Rezaei said Tehran will require Washington to move first.

The Xi-Trump meeting is the third thread. Analysts quoted by Valor expected it to focus on stabilising the relationship through trade, with little chance of changes carrying major economic or social impact. If nothing concrete emerges, the trip will have been the gesture itself: choosing Washington over New York.

And the AI meeting leaves an open question of whether it becomes any international rule or stays a record of alarm. What these four threads have in common is that none of them will be settled in the plenary. They will be settled in bilateral rooms, which is the pattern this week made visible.

Which of the decisions you are watching this year is being made in a room where only two countries are present?