'Humanity needs a spa day': UN meeting reveals a world in a really bad mood
The following analysis is by Ted Anthony, who covered the aftermath of 9/11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has written about international affairs for The Associated Press since 1995.
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 United Nations was founded in an optimistic fervor after World War II’s devastation, 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.
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”.
“We are living in times when the magnitude and number of lasting crises is constantly increasing,” said Igor Dodon, Moldova’s president. “We have had enough wars. We don’t want new wars,” said Iraqi President Barham Salih, who would certainly know. And from Roch Marc Christian Kabore, president of Burkina Faso, came this understatement: “International news has been marked by tension.”