UN meeting reveals a world filled with despondency and despair

The UN was founded on the notion that a cooperative body of countries could construct a brighter future by learning to get along

But at the moment, mitigating climate Armageddon and preventing some of its members’ attempts to undermine and destroy each other seems too much

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A speaker addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Photo: AP

Published: 9:05pm, 29 Sep 2019Updated: 9:05pm, 29 Sep 2019

The planet is heating. Island nations are slipping away. A Pakistan-India nuclear war could be a “bloodbath”. Governments aren’t working together like they used to. Polarisation is tearing us apart. Killing. Migration. Poverty. Corruption. Inequality. Sovereignty violations. Helplessness. Hopelessness.

“The problems of our times are extraordinary,” Ibraham Mohamed Solih, president of the Maldives, an Indian Ocean island nation threatened by the rising waters of climate change, said at the UN General Assembly a few days ago.

There are those mornings when you come into work and everyone seems cranky. That’s how it felt at the United Nations this past week during the annual gathering of world leaders. Speech after gloomy speech by leaders from all corners of the planet pointed toward one bleaker-than-thou conclusion: humanity clearly needs a spa day.

The UN was founded in an optimistic fervour after the devastation of world war two, on the notion that a cooperative body of countries could construct a brighter future by learning to get along. Though that hope remains a fundamental underpinning, the actual tenor these days seems to set a lower bar: try to mitigate climate Armageddon, and prevent some of its 193 member nations’ diligent attempts to undermine and sometimes destroy each other.

A hotter, drier world makes forest fires more likely. Photo: AFP

So words like “existential threat” were as much a part of the leader-speech landscape this past week as the usual references to “this august body”.