New York is becoming a stage for speeches, not decisions

The 81st United Nations General Assembly opened under the unusually self-aware theme of “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all”. Yet one of the week’s most revealing diplomatic images was not in New York at all. President Xi Jinping travelled to Washington for a state visit and direct talks with US president, Donald Trump, while China sent Vice President Han Zheng to the General Debate. Russia, meanwhile, sent foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, to New York. Only weeks earlier, Xi and Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had both attended the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summits in person.

It would be too simple to declare the UN irrelevant on the strength of leaders’ travel schedules, and there is no basis for claiming that Xi’s itinerary alone was intended as a snub to the organisation. Still, the contrast matters. Major powers continue to value the UN, but their leaders increasingly devote their own time to settings where bargaining can produce immediate bilateral or plurilateral results. The General Assembly remains a uniquely global platform, yet its resolutions generally carry political and moral weight rather than legally binding force. Meanwhile, the Security Council’s structure gives five permanent members a veto capable of stopping substantive action.

Gaza has exposed that structural weakness with painful clarity. In June 2025, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire, despite the other 14 Council members voting in favour.

Whatever Washington’s stated reasoning in any individual vote, the institutional effect is difficult to miss: a single permanent member can prevent collective Security Council action on a conflict involving one of its closest regional allies. The problem therefore reaches beyond one administration or one vote. The architecture itself allows national interests to frustrate an overwhelming Council majority.

This year’s dispute over Palestinian participation made the contradiction even harder to ignore. The United States denied visas to Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and other senior Palestinian officials for a second consecutive year. Washington argued that the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organisation had failed to meet previous commitments and objected, among other things, to Palestinian recourse to international legal institutions concerning Israel.

The General Assembly responded by voting 152 to three to permit high-level Palestinian participation virtually when US travel restrictions prevent attendance.

Palestinian representatives described the visa refusal as a violation of the host-country agreement, while the UN spokesperson had already stressed that the host country should fulfil its obligations to facilitate travel for officials conducting UN business.

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A video screen preserves a speech. It does not reproduce diplomacy. High-level week takes place as much in corridors, bilateral rooms, receptions and hurried meetings between delegations as it does behind the famous green marble rostrum. Restricting a delegation’s physical presence therefore affects more than its ability to deliver prepared remarks. It can reduce opportunities to negotiate, lobby, answer counterparts directly and assemble coalitions. A system built on the sovereign equality of participants looks considerably less equal when one state also controls the gateway through which other delegations must pass.

The contrast became sharper when Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the Assembly. Dozens of delegates walked out as he took the podium, turning an otherwise familiar UN speech into a visible diplomatic protest.

Netanyahu rejected accusations concerning Israel’s conduct in Gaza and defended his government’s military actions. The walkout settled no legal question and carried no binding force, but it illustrated the depth of the diplomatic rupture surrounding Israel’s conduct and Washington’s record of shielding Israeli policy through its Security Council veto.

Meanwhile, Beijing has spent several years developing another route for influence in West Asia: direct mediation backed by state-to-state diplomacy. China helped broker the 2023 agreement through which Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations. A year later, Beijing hosted representatives of 14 Palestinian factions who signed the Beijing Declaration on ending division and strengthening Palestinian national unity. Neither initiative proves that China can replace the UN, or that Chinese mediation will always succeed. They do, however, demonstrate why governments may seek forums in which the participants believe that those around the table possess the leverage to move negotiations.

None of this means that the United Nations has become useless. Reducing it to an organisation that delivers food, medicine and tents would dismiss work on which millions of people depend. The more serious criticism is almost the reverse: the UN often retains considerable capacity to respond to human suffering while lacking comparable political power to prevent the decisions that create it.

That gap is becoming the organisation’s credibility problem.

A system that can organise relief but struggles against veto paralysis, and that cannot reliably guarantee equal physical access to its own diplomatic gatherings, risks becoming better at administering crises than resolving them.

If the UN wants to restore trust, speeches about reform will not be enough. Equal access has to mean equal access, and collective diplomacy must carry consequences that powerful states cannot simply neutralise. Otherwise, more of the consequential bargaining will happen elsewhere — and New York will increasingly be left with the microphones.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.