The search is on for a leader to save the United Nations.

In the middle of the front page of the New York Times of October 20, 1959, there was a small text under the headline: “Stalemate at the UN.” It was a story that could have been published almost any day that year.

The UN Security Council was in such a deadlock that throughout 1959 it adopted only one resolution, which could hardly be called historically significant, establishing a subcommittee to investigate the alleged cross-border incursion into Laos.

Such memories of the Cold War are a useful reminder that the current sense of siege at the UN is by no means new. But as the organization steps up its search for a new leader, the outlook looks unusually bleak.

Whoever takes over from Antonio Guterres, who served two terms as Secretary-General, on January 1, will face a fight not only to keep the UN relevant but, ultimately, for its survival. The very idea of ​​a global organization that shapes the rules by which the world operates, from peace and security to the fight against climate change, is at stake.

“That’s the paradox of the UN. The UN has never been so marginalized in managing global crises. But it still has this hidden superpower, the ability of the secretary-general to mediate on behalf of the only universal organization in the world,” says Tan Min-U, a former senior UN official whose grandfather U Tan succeeded the charming Swede Dag Hammarskjöld as secretary-general in 1961.

The UN is facing a series of crises. The most dangerous concerns its authority. Russia and the US are increasingly ignoring it. Many other countries are also questioning its role, given that its structures still reflect the power relations of 1945, when the organization was founded, rather than the world as it exists today.

The Security Council is the world's most important body for establishing international law, but it has remained blocked since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and a series of major power conflicts over the past decade. While the number of resolutions it adopts increased sharply in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, it has declined significantly in recent years, reflecting the weakening of the international legal order.

The UN’s problems have been further exacerbated by Donald Trump, the US president, who has established a rival organization of sorts, the Board of Peace, with ambitions that extend to Gaza and beyond. While Trump’s initiative has achieved little so far, a host of global groupings are now competing for the time of world leaders, with the Group of 20 (G20), which brings together the world’s largest economies, perhaps a more effective forum for making important decisions than the UN General Assembly.

The very idea of ​​multilateralism, a fundamental principle of the UN, is in steep decline. The UN's reputation as a mediator has declined so much that its voice is almost completely absent in the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran.

There is also a lack of money. After three decades of expanding its ambitions, the UN faces a huge financial hole as the US and other countries reduce their financial contributions. The organization's demoralized bureaucracy, like many of its agencies, officials admit, require comprehensive reform.

“I don’t see the UN in imminent danger of disappearing. It seems more like a kind of slow withering away. The UN is increasingly slipping into irrelevance... without making a significant contribution to resolving recent crises or wars between states,” says Rafael Grossi, the Argentine head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a prominent candidate to be the new secretary-general.

He notes “a sense of frustration about the UN's poor performance in other areas it should have been addressing: social issues, climate change.”

Rebecca Greenspan, the former vice president of Costa Rica and currently the leading candidate to succeed Guterres, says one of the priorities must be to prevent the debate on the future of the UN from turning "from skepticism to fatalism."

“A lot of the criticism comes from people who want the UN to succeed and who are genuinely concerned about its future,” he adds.

Save the world from hell

In the eight decades since the UN was founded at the end of World War II, its nine secretaries-general have had to find a way to maneuver between the interests of the P5, the five permanent members of the Security Council with veto power - the United States, China, Russia (the former Soviet Union), the United Kingdom and France. Too often, the task has proved beyond their capabilities, as is the case today.

Defenders of the UN point out that the organization has fulfilled its primary purpose - to prevent another world war - but that in recent years its role as a mediator has been relegated to the background. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has virtually ignored Guterres.

“The old Hammarskjöld maxim was that the UN is not there to take us to heaven, but to save us from hell,” recalls Lord Malloch-Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Programme and UN Deputy Secretary-General in 2006, the last year of Kofi Annan's ten-year term.

“There was a brief, sunny period after the Cold War when everyone thought the UN could be the engine of change in the world. But the organization has returned to a much more pragmatic approach, the one to which it has been committed for most of its existence,” he adds.

However, even this “pragmatic approach” is difficult to implement or sustain today. Over the past two decades, the UN has formally rested on three “pillars”: security, development, and human rights; all three are now faltering.

Senior UN officials see Russia as the main obstacle in the Security Council. But the United States also bypasses the body whenever it suits it; it did not even attempt to formally request a UN resolution before attacking Venezuela in January and Iran in February. China, the UN’s second-largest funder after the US, publicly supports the multilateral order, but it often sides with Russia and blocks resolutions proposed by Western countries.

When it comes to development and human rights, the Trump administration has slashed US funding and stopped supporting many agencies, leading to a budget crisis and the elimination of thousands of jobs. “Morale is almost non-existent,” says one UN official, although many true UN advocates also accept critics’ arguments that the organization’s programs and agencies overlap and need radical change.

"Many of the US's demands for reform are not unreasonable. We have to be honest: it is harmful for us to argue about how to save parts of the UN that we know should not exist. Some of Trump's criticism is justified," points out one UN aid worker.

Guterres launched a detailed plan to reform the organization last year to mark the UN's 80th anniversary, but he faced institutional resistance. Staff say many of the austerity measures have ultimately hit people on precarious contracts, rather than long-term employees who have underperformed.

Into this chaos now come seven candidates seeking to take over the UN leadership. Former UN officials see this as much out of hope as anticipation, as an opportunity to fundamentally reexamine the organization's operations and renew its momentum.

The great ones wonder

Tan Min-U hopes that a streamlined UN could rekindle the spirit of his grandfather's time, who took office after Hammarskjöld died in a mysterious plane crash over southern Africa while mediating the Congolese civil war.

However, he acknowledges that the new Secretary-General's potential for mediation is significantly lower today than it was during U Thant's time.

“Take, for example, the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. It took my grandfather almost two days to reach the front line and meet Ayub Khan (the then military leader of Pakistan),” he recalls.

Referring to the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom at the time, he adds: “In today’s world, he (Khan) and Indian leader Lal Bahadur Shastri would be simultaneously exchanging messages on WhatsApp with Brezhnev, Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson.”

Before any of them can take on such tasks, they must go through a complex and intricate selection process.

Ultimately, the decision will be made by a vote in the 15-member Security Council. However, only the votes of the P5 actually count. Each of the five permanent members has a veto, adding to frustration among the 193 UN member states, which are calling for a review of the Security Council's composition to reflect the current balance of power in the world.

In preliminary “straw polls” and then in the official vote in the fall, Security Council members declare their support for specific candidates by stating that they “support,” “do not support,” or “have no opinion.” The results of the first such vote indicate that the new secretary-general will likely be from Latin America, in line with an informal agreement within the UN that it is now the region’s turn.

Greenspan, a 70-year-old economist whose Jewish parents fled Europe after the Holocaust, came in first with ten “yes” votes. She is widely seen as the General Assembly’s preferred candidate and, if elected, would be the first woman to hold the position of Secretary-General.

Caroline Rodriguez Birkett, the 52-year-old ambassador to the UN of Guyana who entered the race late, came in second place but led in a quick poll of fellow UN diplomats after the candidates were publicly introduced. Grossi, 65, was third in a test vote.

The remaining four candidates are now considered outsiders: María Fernanda Espinosa, the former foreign minister of Ecuador, who came in fourth; former Senegalese President Macky Sall; experienced Ugandan UN official Olara Otunu; and Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile.

When the process moves to the voting stage, P5 members use red ballots to distinguish their votes from the white ballots of other members. One red ballot marked “I do not support” is enough to end the candidacy. However, two things could completely change the course of the election: the emergence of a strong candidate late in the process and the position of the United States, which traditionally has the decisive say.

Who is the American candidate?

Malloch-Brown recalls that for much of 1996, it was assumed that then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali would be re-elected for a second term.

“It seemed like everyone was ready to award it to him, except Madeleine Albright,” he recalled.

Behind the scenes, the then US ambassador to the UN supported Kofi Annan, who only won at the end of the year.

A decade later, the US again played a crucial role. In his memoirs, John Bolton, then US ambassador to the UN, describes Washington's carefully planned lobbying in favour of South Korea's Ban Ki-moon.

Grossi was considered a likely “American candidate” among UN diplomats earlier this year, with a security-focused agenda and less emphasis on development. However, his perceived closeness to Trump would not endear him to member states or UN staff. “It would be difficult for him to gain internal support,” warns one UN official.

Last month, the New York Post reported that Trump favored Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, as his running mate. But even before the outcry over Infantino's failed attempt to sell parts of FIFA to the private sector, diplomats considered the idea unrealistic.

For the US, the key question is how to reconcile the usual desire to have an obedient Secretary-General at the head of the UN with the desire for that person to implement reforms and take responsibility for global crises that Washington has no interest in dealing with.

“There are certain things that are consistent with the president's foreign policy that we want the UN to do,” Mike Walz, the US ambassador to the UN, said recently, citing the crises in Haiti and Gaza.

“That’s what I’m focused on… and the rest needs to be cut,” he told The Alex Marlowe Show, a podcast dedicated to “America First” politics.

His proposal hits at the very heart of the dilemma that the new Secretary-General will face - what issues to focus attention on to ensure that the UN remains relevant and viable.

Focus on mediation or reforms?

The role of the UN chief has always been a balancing act, implicit in the title: between the “secretary,” whose primary role is to run the organization, and the “general,” whose focus is on the world. Most current and former officials believe that the next leader of the organization must prioritize the latter, among other things to demonstrate that the UN remains a relevant actor.

For Tan Min-U, author of a new biography of his grandfather, it is about returning to basics from the early years of the UN.

“The essential role is to be the chief mediator. When the Secretary-General successfully mediated in the 1950s and 1960s, the political cabinet never had more than a dozen people, a small fraction of the number of staff today. We need someone who can fall on their face with dignity and get up and try again. You have to assume that the Secretary-General will fail nine times out of ten; the key is perseverance, personal commitment and maintaining the ability of the UN to contribute to ending the war,” he assures.

A frustrated senior UN official says the new secretary-general must try to broker peace deals in wars that are out of the public eye, such as the one in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The official echoes criticisms of Guterres by former UN officials that he spends too much time at the organization's headquarters in New York. His supporters say that mediation has become impossible because the UN is ignored by major powers.

There seems little doubt that Guterres' successor will seek to make a major leap forward immediately.

Greenspan, who heads UNCTAD, the UN trade and development body, speaks of the need for cold-blooded diplomacy. She cites as an example her involvement in overseeing the 2022 Black Sea Grain Export Agreement, a deal between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN that allowed grain exports through a maritime corridor.

"The UN needs better governance. We are trying to do everything possible. We need to cooperate more with others," she believes.

Grossi likes to point to his meeting with Vladimir Putin after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as evidence of his determination to mediate at all costs.

"If I become secretary-general, you will see me shaking hands with people who may be doing very bad things," he points out.

Developing countries and smaller states fear that the new secretary-general will cut programs aimed at combating climate change and poverty. The debate, says Malloch-Brown, is reminiscent of the divisions that existed in the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, “between universalists, who believed it should reshape the world according to their own ideas, and realists, who saw it as a useful forum for resolving conflicts.”

He calls for a rethinking of the way development is financed, namely, abandoning the traditional model that depends on donors and is based on direct grants, while giving a greater role to multilateral development banks.

The new secretary-general, he adds, must initially set aside internal restructuring and instead “build authority and momentum” by prioritizing mediation.

"The reform program has encountered great difficulties. Such efforts could swallow up the entire mandate of the new Secretary-General," Malloch-Brown assessed.

Many acknowledge that the idea of ​​Security Council reform is unfeasible in the medium term, as the P5 retains veto power while potential new members compete with each other. The new Secretary-General is likely to be more focused on how to reshape relations with the US.

One possible area of ​​cooperation is humanitarian aid, which is the responsibility of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The agency's head, former British diplomat Tom Fletcher, has been praised for finding a way to work with the Trump administration to ensure the United States does not cut off humanitarian aid. The administration closed its own agency for international development, USAID, after taking office in January 2025, but last December granted OCHA $2 billion, albeit with conditions.

“There is a recognition that when it comes to the most dangerous humanitarian operations, we are in places where they don’t want to be and where they need someone. They (the Trump administration) have come a long way. This time last year, the funding situation was pretty bleak. We now have over $4 billion in direct funding for humanitarian assistance,” Fletcher says.

"Many are writing off the next two years as a story of the slow decline of the UN. But if we find the energy and patience to end some wars and save millions of lives, that picture can be turned around," he is convinced.

As the race for a successor nears its conclusion, anticipation is growing at the UN about what a new approach might bring.

“The new secretary-general needs to think differently. Guterres became a leader at a time when the UN depended on strong multilateral policies. The world has changed,” says Esther Judah, a former UN aid worker.

But the UN has had false starts before. Faint optimism that it could make headlines again is tempered by an awareness of its limitations.

"We are as strong as our member states allow us to be. And above all, as strong as the powerful states allow us to be," one official noted resignedly.

Translated by: S. Strugar