The 81st UN General Assembly: my views

 DN Opinion

UN: Restoring trust and driving transformation

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published on: 18 Sep 2026, 02:10

The 81st United Nations General Assembly officially opened on 8 September. Its high-level segment, which gathers heads of state and government in New York between 22 and 28 September, takes place under the theme Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: a UN that delivers results for all. For an organization in crisis, albeit irreplaceable, the decisive test lies not in the vigour of its theme, but in the ability to translate current geopolitics into concrete decisions. At a time when the selection of António Guterres's successor is underway, the speeches should focus on three priorities, each measured by facts, not intentions: promoting peace, establishing multilateral governance of Artificial Intelligence, and placing human development back at the centre of international security.

The first priority is peace. The figures belie the narrative of normalization. In Gaza, the October 2025 ceasefire agreement provided for the entry of 600 aid lorries per day. We are very far from that figure. A substantial part of the little that does enter is commercial cargo rather than humanitarian aid channelled by the agencies. It is this gap between what was agreed and what is executed, not the existence of the ceasefire itself, that defines daily civilian suffering.

In South Sudan, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights documented, over a 17-day period in March, more than 160 civilians killed and approximately 99 water wells destroyed or poisoned. In Sudan—a distinct conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—the number of civilians killed since 2023 exceeds 59,000, with 14 million displaced and 33.7 million people in need of urgent assistance.

In the Russian aggression against Ukraine, in the Eastern Congo, in the Sahel, and in Myanmar, the patterns repeat themselves: high civilian mortality, mass displacement, and the denial of humanitarian access as an instrument of war.

The UN will not stop these wars from New York. But it can emerge from the high-level segment with a measurable commitment: to allocate a fixed percentage of the budget for special political missions and peacekeeping to the protection of civilians and the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. A peace process that fails to protect women and children from sexual violence, forced displacement, and starvation is not peace; it is hypocrisy.

The second priority stems from a remarkable convergence: within a few days in September, five voices that rarely agree expressed the same concern regarding Artificial Intelligence. On 12 September, Dario Amodei of Anthropic published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier—roughly 3,800 words—advocating a deliberate slowing of the pace of development in AI capabilities; Sam Altman of OpenAI endorsed the core of the appeal hours later, and Elon Musk did the same.

Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders—opposite extremes of the American political spectrum—joined former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon in a Declaration for Pro-Human AI. King Charles III gathered executives from Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic yesterday, 17 September, to ask them to adhere to common principles. And Pope Leo XIV, in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, released on 25 May, criticized the logic of the ongoing military, economic, and cognitive competition.

China has already responded institutionally: in July, it created WAICO (World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization), an intergovernmental AI cooperation organization that, as I have argued elsewhere, targets the Global South, but simultaneously functions as a Chinese instrument for defining technical standards and technological decoupling from the United States.

It is precisely because WAICO already exists, with its own architecture and interests, that the General Assembly cannot limit itself to "taking note": it must work to bring together the scattered forums—WAICO included—into a common multilateral framework, converting voluntary principles into verifiable commitments, with an independent review mechanism similar to what the American laboratories have just proposed among themselves.

The third priority should have dominated the headlines when the figures were revealed, but it was ignored: the UNDP Human Development Report, published in 2025, recorded the smallest increase in the Human Development Index (HDI) since 1990. The gap between low-HDI and very high-HDI countries widened for the fourth consecutive year, reversing a decades-long trend. The contrast is revealing: between 1990 and 2023, the Asia-Pacific region increased its HDI by more than 50%; the majority of low-HDI countries saw no equivalent growth. According to the then-UNDP Administrator, if the stagnation of recent years becomes "the new normal", the world could fall decades short of the development projected for 2030.

This is not abstract statistics. It is one of the fuels for the other crises. Persistent poverty feeds migration routes; territories without a functional state or economic prospects are where armed groups recruit most easily, leading to the expansion of banditry and terrorism.

Treating development, migration, and security as separate agendas is the mistake that produced this regression. The General Assembly must recognize that financing development means financing international security.

These three priorities share the same logic: peace without the effective protection of people is a precarious truce; Artificial Intelligence without binding multilateral governance is a race with neither rules nor a referee; and development is not a parallel agenda, but the foundation of common security. Trust is not restored with speeches at the New York podium. It is recovered when States show that solidarity exists.

Responding to a critique of my BRICS Summit text

My text about the BRICS Summit, available in this blog, was written the day before the meeting in New Delhi.

A preview is not a verdict smuggled in before the evidence. It is a thesis offered for the meeting to test. New Delhi was the test. 

The meeting happened. The record is public. It does not do the work you want it to do.Start with what you treat as refutation. Iran and the UAE held their highest-level contact since the war began. That is true, and it is not trivial. It is also not BRICS acting as a strategic unit. It is two members, sitting on opposite sides of a shooting war, using the host’s rooms to talk.

The same two members had already blocked a foreign ministers’ text in May.

The leaders’ declaration exists because Indian diplomats spent days sanding the language until nobody had to name the United States, Israel, Iran, or the strikes on Gulf territory. “Maximum restraint” and “deep concern,” with national positions recalled in a subordinate clause, is not the cure for tactical paralysis. It is paralysis transcribed into 140 paragraphs. Consensus by omission is still consensus. It is not capacity.

The same holds for the other bilaterals. Modi and Xi discussed border stability. Modi and Putin set a $100 billion trade target for 2030. Those meetings matter. They would have mattered in a hotel corridor without a BRICS logo on the backdrop. 

Present trade is in the region of $65 billion, and the Indian side has been explicit that most of that is Russian oil. A target weighted toward energy shipments is a bilateral energy relationship, not a new payments order. 

When the institution’s value is the corridor, the plenary is the spectacle.

You then enlarge the declaration into a programme. It covers tariffs, coercive measures, the Middle East, terrorism, AI, quantum, digital public infrastructure, a grain exchange, local-currency settlement, NDB lending in local currency, a startup fund under consideration. Listing topics is not the same as moving them. The approved text does not name Ukraine. It does not name the United States on tariffs. It condemns unilateral coercive measures in the abstract and then goes home. 

Whether any of the technical work proceeds is, as you say, a fair question. Calling a document that cannot mention the two largest wars involving its members a strategic coming of age is not.

On payments you accuse me of scoring a test nobody sat. Fine: nobody in New Delhi tabled the yuan as a global reserve currency. India and Brazil would not wear it, for the capital-control reason everyone in the room understands. The live project is interoperability — UPI, Pix, the digital renminbi — plus settlement in national currencies. That work is real, slow, and worth doing. It is also not what the political advertising of this grouping has been for years. The public claim has been an alternative to dollar dominance.

Measuring the summit against the claim its members make when they speak to their own audiences is not a trick. It is taking them at their word.The AIIB point is narrower, and here you land a hit. The bank has a shareholder list that includes Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia. London joined as a founder against Washington’s advice. That institution is not a BRICS vehicle, and folding it into the New Delhi story as if it were was a category error. I should not have done it. The error does not rescue the rest of the architecture argument. It simply means the AIIB should be debated as a China-led multilateral with Western capital in it, which is a different and more interesting fight than the one you want.

The NDB is the opposite of a gotcha. The bank halted new business in Russia because American secondary sanctions made the alternative too expensive to operate. You present this as proof that the institution is not Beijing’s political instrument. I presented it as proof that the instrument cannot do the job advertised for it: shelter a founding member from the system it was created to dilute. Both sentences can be true. Only one of them answers the question my column asked. If the “parallel” bank does what Washington requires when the choice is real, the parallelism is conditional. Fragility is the right word for that. Loyalty to Beijing is a separate accusation, and not the one that matters here.

Then the frame. Yes, the criticism of Bretton Woods is legitimate. Quota review has been stuck for a decade. The Fund’s leadership conventions are a Wester relic. An American blocking minority over major IMF decisions is a political fact. None of that converts every communiqué in New Delhi into a working substitute. You set up a closed circuit: reform is vetoed, therefore the alternative must be treated as architecture, and if the alternative is called thin, the critic has left the victims of the veto with “patience.” That is not an argument. It is a demand that disappointment with the IMF be honoured by inflating BRICS. 

States in that position have ordinary options: coalition-building inside the Fund, bilateral swap lines, payment links, commodity trade in local currency. They are already doing some of them. They do not become a new order by being stapled to a 45-page text that cannot say “Ukraine.”

As for the adjectives: they are judgments. The declaration’s silence on a war fought by a founding member is not “abyssal” because a columnist likes the word. It is the measurable gap between the group’s census — eleven members, a large share of population and output — and its ability to describe the world it inhabits. If that register reminds you of agitprop, the remedy is a counter-list: a named loan book that replaced sanctioned finance at scale, a settlement system that cleared Russian or Iranian trade without dollar reach, a Middle East paragraph that could survive contact with the members who were shooting at each other.

You have the talks, the target, and the text. Produce the rest.

Xi skipping the General Assembly is a minor exhibit and I will not lean on it. Leaders skip that General Assembly week. But Xi is a keyn speaker for multilateralism. He should be in New York to show its attachment to the top multilateral organisation. 

You might think that atttendance is a weak test of multilateral sincerity. The stronger test is whether a grouping built to contest the existing order can, when it meets, name the conflicts that divide it and fund the alternatives it announces. 

New Delhi named almost nothing and funded nothing new. That is not a prediction written in the future tense. It is in the minutes.

The human and the machine -- A.I.

 https://victorangelo1.substack.com/p/hyper-war-and-the-illusion-of-human?selectQuote=true

The BRICS New Delhi Summit

 A Dysfunctional Coalition in the Shadow of Beijing: The BRICS+

Victor Ângelo

International Security Advisor. Former UN Under-Secretary-General

Published: 11 Sept 2026, 02:34

The BRICS+ Summit, taking place in New Delhi on the 12th and 13th of September, will essentially be yet another spectacle of geopolitical illusions. The grouping, which began as a platform of financial convenience initiated by Vladimir Putin (with its inaugural summit in 2009), has been successively instrumentalised. Initially, it served Russia as a means to project power and circumvent its isolation; today, it is additionally the principal vehicle for China's hegemonic ambition in the so-called Global South.

Moscow originally viewed the BRICS as a further instrument to force the narrative of a multipolar world in which Russia would maintain the status of an indispensable superpower. Particularly following the escalation of tensions in Eastern Europe, the bloc was envisaged as a diplomatic shield and a financial alternative capable of neutralising Western sanctions. However, harsh economic reality and prolonged isolation have dictated new rules: the Russia of today, increasingly reliant on the export of hydrocarbons at discounted prices to Asia and the importation of critical technology, has been reduced to the status of a subaltern partner to Beijing's colossal economic machine.

It is China that now wields the baton and sets the strategic compass of the grouping. Xi Jinping has grasped that, to challenge the Euro-Atlantic order consolidated since 1945, Chinese economic and military might was insufficient; it was imperative to constitute and lead a coalition that would serve as a counterbalance to the Western bloc.

The 2024 expansion, with the entry of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, along with the integration of Indonesia in 2025, aimed to serve this ambition. Nevertheless, formidable obstacles remain. From the outset, the desire to promote the yuan as a reserve currency, replacing the US dollar, is hindered by a structural contradiction: Beijing refuses to relinquish its stringent capital controls. So long as these controls remain in place, the yuan will struggle to become a credible global reserve currency.

The bloc's discourse regarding the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, however, rests upon criticisms that ought not to be dismissed. For decades, the IMF and the World Bank have been legitimate targets of contestation: the quota review, ratified only in 2016, left China and India under-represented relative to their share of global GDP. The United States preserves a de facto veto over structural decisions, and Europe maintains a monopoly over the leadership of the IMF, reflecting an overarching governance still tethered to the geopolitics of 1944.

Although this Western inertia presents the BRICS+ with a genuine and unifying rallying cry, there is an abyssal difference between reforming multilateral institutions and constructing parallel architectures. China has unequivocally opted for the latter course. The New Development Bank (NDB) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) did not merely emerge to rectify systemic deficiencies for the sake of global equity. They were also conceived to allow Beijing to finance strategic projects, more or less aligned with the Belt and Road Initiative. These are political projects, not merely developmental ones. By failing to incorporate robust requirements for transparency, debt sustainability, and good governance, they frequently serve to establish a supremacy built upon fragile foundations.

The enlargement of the BRICS has exponentially increased its demographic weight, yet it has fatally diluted its cohesion. By housing democracies and autocracies under the same roof, alongside economies highly integrated into global markets and regimes asphyxiated by sanctions, the group has become chronically dysfunctional.

An organisation that attempts to harmonise the interests of Iran and the United Arab Emirates, or that harbours the border, technological, and military rivalry between India and China, is condemned to tactical paralysis. The NDB itself illustrates this fragility: with subscribed capital insufficient for the colossal needs of the Global South, the bank found itself compelled to suspend its operations in Russia, faced with the threat of American secondary sanctions.

In this landscape of precarious balances, Narendra Modi, the summit's host, will focus on immediate pragmatism, ensuring that India is not dragged into an anti-Western crusade. Modi will restrict the agenda to the realm of the possible: fostering intra-bloc trade (which continues to be eclipsed by these countries' exchanges with the G7); developing interoperable cross-border payment systems outside the SWIFT network; cooperating in the digital and Artificial Intelligence sectors; and promoting bilateral trade in local currencies (yuan, rupees, reais, roubles), albeit always with the underlying concern of averting the replacement of a dependence on the dollar with a new submission to the yuan.

India and Brazil draw the principal dividing line within the bloc here: both advocate for a reform of multilateral systems, but neither supports the radicalisation of the BRICS+. For India, the grouping is merely one of several options for its strategic autonomy. Modi plays simultaneously with Washington, Canberra, and Tokyo within the framework of the QUAD, well aware that the true threat to Indian sovereignty and territorial integrity emanates from across the Himalayan borders and from the naval hegemony of its neighbouring Asian superpower, rather than from Washington.

The final image that the New Delhi Summit will endeavour to project will be one of unity and cooperation. However, the true metric of global geopolitical priorities will reveal itself the following week, during the high-level segment of the UN General Assembly in New York.

Xi Jinping, who at the BRICS will mount his customary ideological defence of inclusive multilateralism, does not plan to travel to the United Nations headquarters to participate in the General Assembly. Instead, on the 24th, a stone's throw from New York, he has scheduled a bilateral meeting at the White House with Donald Trump. The choice exposes the chasm between Chinese rhetoric and its practical interests: political narratives may marshal followers, but the grand decisions concerning the world order continue to be negotiated, above all else, in the bilateral arena of the superpowers.

The 2026 rentrée: Europe in search of a seat at the table

September Rentrée 2026

 A year ago, in the August 29 edition of Diário de Notícias (Portugal), I wrote that the 2025-2026 rentrée appeared unpromising: paralysed multilateral institutions, diplomacy reduced to a spectacle, frequent violations of international norms, and protracted conflicts, all within the framework of a threatened, hesitant, and divided European Union. The subsequent 12 months have confirmed this diagnosis. This year's rentrée is even more challenging: instability and threats to global peace and security have increased considerably.

What makes this rentrée decisive is not merely the simultaneous gravity of these multiple crises and their unpredictability. It is the fact that they reveal, ever more clearly, that Europe will only be able to protect its interests, its citizens, and its values if it strengthens its political unity.

We face a continuum of progressively interconnected crises: the environmental crisis has worsened; the war against Ukraine has intensified, parallel to a crescendo of Russian threats against democratic Europe; in the Middle East, violence has no end in sight; in Sudan, the humanitarian collapse continues with an indifference and brutality that mirror the international disorder in which we live. Upon this web has now fallen a dangerous race to develop artificial intelligence, contested by Washington, Beijing, and a small number of corporate behemoths with inconceivable financial and political capabilities.

The clearest symptom of this disorder is the lack of respect for the political role of the UN, today held hostage by rivalries among the US, China, and Russia. António Guterres concludes his mandate this coming December 31. There is still no consensus on a candidate capable of breaching the wall of the great powers' veto. There is a risk of entering a carousel of uncertainty—a geopolitical death pit that will lead to the selection of a candidate who is convenient and obedient across the board. The United Nations, which we so desperately need, would in that case enter a new level of decadence.

It was within this vacuum that, at the end of August, the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, travelled to Moscow—not to speak with Putin, but with the heads of the SVR (foreign intelligence) and the FSB (internal security), to whom he went so far as to propose a trilateral summit between Trump, Putin, and Zelensky. Washington called this routine. In practice, it was an exercise in excluding European intelligence services and UN rules. It was also, on the Russian side, an example of their customary guile: discussing matters among spies, rather than with the Head of State, is the classic way to deny Kremlin involvement, buy time, and pursue the intent of fracturing NATO and the EU. Moscow's objective has little to do with peace in Ukraine or with inviolability and security in democratic Europe. Moscow seeks to gain time to achieve its ends. And it is precisely this episode that accurately measures the true weight of the European Union: as long as the timetable is defined by Washington and Moscow, without Brussels having a seat in the room, Europe will continue to be the object, the spectator, and a passive element in the global game.

There are those who draw a pessimistic conclusion from this and look to the near future with great concern—those who believe Europe is condemned to irrelevance. It is fundamental to combat this idea and to remember, with courage and concrete proposals, that it is necessary to advance towards a federation of European States. Where Europe has genuinely united—in the areas of trade, competition, the single market, and currency—it negotiates as a power. Where it has settled for intergovernmental coordination, subject to the veto of each member—in Defence, foreign relations, financial markets, and critical industries—the EU carries little to no weight against Washington, Moscow, or Beijing, as the Ratcliffe episode has just confirmed. Nor can it count on the support or respect of any leader from those capitals.

In realistic terms, the 2026-2027 political year should translate into a strengthening of integration among those States that grasp the scale of the risks we face. As Mario Draghi has argued, whoever wishes to join, joins; whoever wishes to block, can no longer impede the others. This is not merely about the economy. At stake are sovereignty, defence, our geopolitical choices, the dignity of citizens, and the protection of our humanistic values.

Yet this institutional federalism does not, by itself, resolve the other fracture crossing the European space: the worsening of social inequalities. There is an increasing concentration of wealth at the top of social pyramids, running parallel to the precarisation of the middle classes and the poorest. This results in an erosion of the material foundation of democracies, allowing the expansion of demagogic and populist movements. This applies to the Portuguese situation as to so many other European societies, where the mainstream governing parties convince citizens less and less, and social impatience grows. Many of our governments manage reality with the rhetoric of the last century.

The external strength of the EU must rest upon an internal social contract that promotes optimism, equality, and trust in political leaders. Without this foundation, any attempt at federation will be an architecture without foundations.

A year ago, I found it difficult to be optimistic. I continue to think so. But we cannot lose hope or fall into naivety. Now, in September 2026, the die is cast. Therefore, the challenge is to strengthen our union, without subordination and without having to ask permission from those who wish to make calculations without consulting us.

Vladimir Putin and today's Russia

 https://victorangelo1.substack.com/p/putins-grip-on-power-where-it-stands

A review of Vladimir Putin's absolute control of power.

Can we compare the CIA with the Russian Secret Services?

 https://victorangelo1.substack.com/p/the-illusion-of-deterrence-what-cias

The Illusion of Deterrence: What CIA’s Moscow Trip Has Achieved?

Please read the text in my Subsack