Navigating the G-Zero World

The UN General Assembly's High-Level Week in New York is still the world's main gathering of statecraft. This year it meets in a badly fragmented international system. In a wide-ranging conversation on the health and future of global governance, political scientist and Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer argued that the UN's crisis is not mainly a failure of the institution itself. In his view, it reflects a "G-Zero" world, where no single power or coalition is willing or able to lead.

A Humanist in a Paralyzed System

Secretary-General António Guterres is nearing the end of his two five-year terms. He leads an institution with severe structural limits at a time of rising global demand. Bremmer describes him as a principled humanist: honest and driven by values, free of personal corruption and uninterested in self-promotion. Leaders who show that kind of restraint are increasingly rare, and his integrity contrasts sharply with the transactional style of today's great-power leaders.

Integrity alone cannot overcome paralysis, however. The Security Council remains locked by the veto power of its permanent members, and Guterres openly acknowledges that his office has little independent authority.

Quiet diplomacy can still change outcomes. Russia's invasion of Ukraine cut off global supplies of wheat and fertilizer. In Bremmer's assessment, the resulting food insecurity across the Global South put more people at risk of hunger, across a wider area, than the crises in Sudan, Yemen or Gaza. Guterres worked directly with Moscow and Kyiv, alongside Türkiye, to broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative. He did not tour the media or claim political credit. He delivered what neither Washington nor Beijing was willing or able to negotiate, and the deal showed that impartial mediation can still save lives.

Setting Guardrails for Artificial Intelligence

The UN's ability to convene has also mattered on new technological frontiers, especially artificial intelligence. Bremmer served on the Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI. The body laid early groundwork for international AI oversight, before public debate was dominated by corporate disputes, biosecurity threats and AI-enabled cyberwarfare.

The advisory body brought together representatives from government, academia and technology companies in the United States, China, Europe and the developing world. The UN has neither the money nor the enforcement power to dictate corporate code or national policy. It is, however, the only neutral forum that can define shared terms, identify systemic risks and set baseline frameworks.

That work produced concrete results. At the 2024 Summit of the Future, member states adopted the Global Digital Compact over Russia's objections. The Compact committed them to create an international scientific panel on AI. The Panel was formally established by General Assembly resolution on 26 August 2025, its 40 members were appointed on 12 February 2026, and they elected Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa as Co-Chairs at their inaugural meeting on 3 March 2026. Bengio is a Turing Award-winning AI scientist. Ressa is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist and press-freedom advocate. ^[source]

The process also exposed geopolitical maneuvering behind the scenes. According to Bremmer, Beijing lobbied the advisory body and offered open-ended funding and staff to host a permanent UN AI governance center in Shanghai. Participants recognized that basing global digital governance in China would compromise the framework's neutrality, and they pushed back to keep the mechanism independent and distributed.

Geopolitical Realignment: U.S. Retreat, Chinese Ambition

The strain on the multilateral system is closely tied to U.S. domestic politics. The United States was the principal architect of the post-1945 order. It led the drafting of the UN Charter in San Francisco and championed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today Washington is increasingly turning away from what it built.

Unilateralism is on the rise. USAID has been dismantled and foreign humanitarian aid sharply cut. Parts of the American political leadership have grown openly resentful of bodies where smaller states and international civil servants hold great powers to universal human rights standards. Rather than accept multilateral scrutiny, they prefer to sideline the UN.

Unilateral alternatives have struggled to replace it. President Donald Trump launched his "Board of Peace" at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026. The charter grants Trump the authority to name his successor, veto most decisions, and issue directives to implement the board's mission. Some 35 countries signed up, including regional Middle East powers such as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but the UK opted out, joining a growing list of European refusals that includes France, Norway, Sweden and Slovenia. Canada also stayed out after a war of words between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump. The absence of most traditional U.S. allies left the board looking less like a UN alternative than a coalition of the willing. ^[source]

China sees Western retrenchment as a strategic opening. Beijing prefers a world that is multipolar but predictable. It pays its UN assessments on time and actively seeks senior posts across UN agencies, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It would welcome UN leadership that is receptive to its interests. But it also understands that a functioning, independent multilateral system is better than unchecked instability, and it is ready to fill any space the West gives up.

Middle powers have become a key line of defense. They include Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, along with much of the Global South. Their security depends on international law, the Sustainable Development Goals and shared human rights standards. In Africa especially, where multi-ethnic states inherited borders drawn during decolonization, international law and the UN Charter are essential guardrails against regional destabilization.

These tensions will come to a head in the selection of the next Secretary-General. Washington may prefer a compliant figure unlikely to challenge unilateral action. Allied democracies, the Global South and Beijing all have an interest in a credible, independent candidate.

The New Diplomatic Landscape: Asymmetric Power and Non-State Actors

Deterrence has been fundamentally redistributed. Great powers can no longer dictate outcomes or win clean military victories on their own. Smaller states and non-state actors have become far more capable of disrupting them. The Houthis are one example of asymmetric resistance, and the strategic constraints around Taiwan and Ukraine are others. Major powers that act without multilateral awareness take on serious risk.

At the same time, non-state actors now hold a kind of functional sovereignty in their own domains:

• Technology infrastructure: Multinational tech companies and commercial space operators have capabilities in communications, intelligence and computing that rival those of many governments.

• Capital and the energy transition: The shift from oil, gas and thermal coal toward electrification has been driven largely by institutional investors, pension funds and lenders pricing long-term climate risk into their valuations.

The General Assembly remains strictly a body of 193 member states. The wider UN system, however, has had to build formal channels to these non-state actors in order to stay effective.

The Indispensable Floor

Measured against its resources, the UN remains irreplaceable. It has no standing army, a tight budget and a complex international civil service. Yet if it did not exist, it would have to be invented.

New York itself levels the playing field. Washington and Beijing are dominated by bilateral relationships. New York's dense, transit-oriented layout forces diplomats to interact. Small and developing countries that cannot afford global diplomatic networks send their most capable envoys to their UN missions.

In the corridors of the General Assembly and on the sidelines of the Security Council, adversaries such as Washington, Moscow and Tehran keep talking, directly and indirectly, when few other channels exist. Meanwhile, frontline agencies such as the World Food Programme, the UN Refugee Agency and the World Health Organization continue to prevent famine and track cross-border disease, even as bilateral donors pull back.

The UN is messy, imperfect and often paralyzed. Its shortcomings, though, reflect the divisions among the governments that make it up. In a polarized G-Zero world, preserving this universal platform is not idealism. It is a strategic necessity.

For more on how international institutions can govern emerging technology, watch GZERO World: Can the UN Build a Global Framework for AI Safety? In it, Ian Bremmer and Secretary-General António Guterres discuss the findings of the High-Level Advisory Body on AI and the challenges of setting multilateral standards.