For Maimouna Dieye, Senegal’s minister of family and solidarity, the annual gathering in New York of hundreds of world leaders and thousands of diplomats at the United Nations is all about cooperation, dialogue, and solving the world’s pressing challenges together.
“Like everyone else, I hear about the U.N.’s failures and diminishing relevance, but to me, that takes the attention away from the important work going on here,” she says.
Mrs. Dieye had just chaired a ministerial conference on women, family, and development Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, known simply as UNGA, before offering this reporter her thoughts.
Why We Wrote This
The annual United Nations General Assembly draws the usual grousing about the usefulness and focus of such a giant gathering. But a quick look behind the curtain finds cooperation, dialogue, and a commitment to “better lives for many.”
“At UNGA, we share ideas and practices that have improved people’s lives in our countries, and over time that exchange leads to better lives for many. It may not be what gets a lot of attention,” she adds, “but it’s cooperation and dialogue that have impact.”
Complaints about the U.N.’s relevance, the usefulness of a giant gathering like UNGA, and grousing about an inordinate focus on only a few leaders’ speeches – the more outlandish, the greater the attention – are common yearly observations about the world’s premier diplomatic gathering.
This year has been no different.
President Donald Trump’s extended stream-of-consciousness speech Tuesday, in which he derided multilateralism and skewered key issues on the global agenda from climate change to the plight of refugee populations, drew the spotlight away from other UNGA events.
Echoing his boss’s sentiments, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did little to nuance his disregard for UNGA when on Tuesday he outlined the U.S. role in the week’s activities on Fox News.
“It’s just a place [where] once a year, a bunch of people meet and give speeches, and write out a bunch of letters and statements, but not a lot of good, important action is happening,” he said.
And yet on Wednesday alone, Mr. Rubio’s UNGA agenda included nearly a dozen bilateral meetings with leaders and chief diplomats – including one with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – a ministerial meeting on Indo-Pacific maritime security (China, are you listening?), and a working dinner with transatlantic colleagues.
And that was just the U.S. secretary of state.
At a press conference last week previewing this year’s UNGA, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said 193 delegations, including 89 heads of state, 43 heads of government, one crown prince, and five vice presidents, were expected to attend. More than 1,640 bilateral meetings had been scheduled for the lobby of the General Assembly Building alone.
Indeed, sometimes so much is going on that otherwise remarkable moments go almost unnoticed.
One occurred Monday on the sidelines of UNGA when retired U.S. Gen. David Petraeus interviewed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa on the stage of the Concordia Summit, an annual high-level dialogue in midtown Manhattan.
What made the event so striking is that General Petraeus was commanding the U.S. forces in Iraq that imprisoned Mr. al-Sharaa when he was an Al Qaeda fighter there.
“We went from war to discourse,” Mr. al-Sharaa told General Petraeus.
The first Syrian president to attend the U.N. gathering in six decades, Mr. al-Sharaa took his case for sanctions relief for his country to the UNGA stage.
And he had one of those “not a lot of good, important” bilateral meetings with Secretary Rubio.
Syrian presidency press office/AP
It’s easy to scoff at UNGA – although New York certainly does not, the event reportedly boosting the city’s economy by $5 billion – with the endless speechifying and myriad conferences like the one Mrs. Dieye chaired.
President Trump lambastes the U.N. for no longer fulfilling one of its core missions, that of solving international conflicts. But perhaps one of UNGA’s attributes is that at its best, it has the ability to spark serendipitous moments that reveal common ground between world leaders who otherwise seem to have little use for each other.
Mr. Trump acknowledged experiencing such a moment when he amended his UNGA speech to tell his audience that he had just crossed paths backstage with Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – and he had instantly liked the guy.
U.S.-Brazil relations have sharply deteriorated during Mr. Trump’s second term and in the wake of the conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump friend and ideological soulmate, of attempting to foment a military coup. The U.S. has slapped punitive tariffs on Brazilian products and imposed sanctions on the judge in the Bolsonaro case and his family.
“At least for 39 seconds, we had excellent chemistry,” Mr. Trump said of meeting the Brazilian president, known popularly as Lula, adding that the encounter included an embrace. “It’s a good sign.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump said the half-minute encounter had included an agreement by the two ideological opposites to meet soon – a bit of news Lula confirmed at a press conference Wednesday.
“What seemed impossible, now it’s possible,” the Brazilian leader said, adding that a meeting could happen as soon as next week.
Noting he sensed an opening to dialogue when Mr. Trump appeared before him looking “friendly, very pleasant,” Lula continued, “I said to President Trump, ‘We have a lot to talk about, and a lot of common interests. … There are no limits on our conversation.’”
It was common ground, found courtesy of UNGA.
