Next UN Chief Faces Daunting Reform Task as Organization Struggles for Relevance

In less than three months, the United Nations will hand its leadership to someone tasked with saving an institution that has largely stopped mattering. On January 1st, the new secretary-general will inherit an 81-year-old organization whose structure was built to prevent another world war and whose power still flows through the hands of the nations that won the last one. The question hanging over the selection process is whether anyone can actually fix it.

The organization's irrelevance has become impossible to ignore. Over the past few years, when the world faced wars in Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza—precisely the kind of crises the United Nations was designed to prevent—the institution found itself sidelined. The Security Council, meant to be the world's conflict-resolution engine, could not act. Meanwhile, the U.N.'s financial situation has deteriorated so badly that it has been forced to cut humanitarian and development programs, the areas where it still holds real influence. The United States alone owes billions in arrears, a debt that has cascaded through the organization's budget like a structural failure.

Outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres, who has led the organization for a decade, made his position clear in his farewell address last week. "The world does not need a weaker United Nations," he told the General Assembly. "It needs a U.N. strong enough to face the world as it is, and determined enough to build the world as it should." But he also posed a series of questions to his successor and to the 193 member nations: Will you uphold law before impunity spreads? Will you end wars before they consume generations? Will you address inequality before societies fracture? Will you act on climate change before tipping points pass? Will you govern artificial intelligence before it governs us? The questions were rhetorical only in form; they represent the actual mandate.

The core problem is structural. The Security Council—the U.N.'s most powerful body—remains controlled by the five permanent members from World War II: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France. Each holds veto power. Africa, home to 1.5 billion people, has no permanent seat. Neither does Latin America. Neither do the island nations whose survival is threatened by rising seas. Every leader who spoke during the U.N.'s annual gathering last week called for reform. Ghana's President John Mahama was direct: "Security Council reform is not a favor to Africa. It is an imperative for the legitimacy, credibility, and survival of the United Nations." Yet despite decades of talk, nothing has changed. The differences between nations on how to expand the council are too deep, and the five permanent members have little incentive to dilute their own power.

Kizito Byenkya, advocacy director at the Open Society Institute, described the challenge facing the incoming secretary-general as "the most monumental task that the U.N. has faced in decades." The organization is simultaneously undergoing a critical reform process it has not attempted in a long time—consolidating programs, cutting mandates, eliminating reports that no one reads—while facing intense pressure to act like a general on the world stage, to mediate conflicts and negotiate settlements. Byenkya pointed to Kofi Annan, a former secretary-general who became directly involved in major conflicts and earned respect as a skilled negotiator. "In the time of Kofi Annan, he was center to all," Byenkya said. "If you look at the conflicts we've been facing in the last few years, let's say from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine and more, you often have to ask yourself: Where has the role of the United Nations been?"

The deeper crisis, though, is one of global fragmentation itself. Mahama named it directly: the world is experiencing "intense fragmentation, deepening inequality and eroded trust in our multilateral system." There is a "dangerous drift toward unilateralism," he said, a movement away from the idea that nations should solve problems together and toward the doctrine that power alone determines outcomes. The U.N. Charter opens with a commitment to prevent another world war. That principle, Mahama argued, "must reign supreme over the cynical doctrine that 'might makes right.'" But cynicism is winning. The next secretary-general will inherit not just an aging bureaucracy in need of modernization, but a world that is losing faith in the very idea of multilateral cooperation. Whether reform is even possible depends less on the person taking the job than on whether the nations that created the institution are willing to let it change.