“The greatest power is not the power to dominate. It is the power to build a future that works for everyone,” the UN Secretary-General added.

General Assembly coverage

22 September 2026

UN Affairs

Humanity faces four defining “tests of power” – around war or peace, inequality, climate change and AI – that will determine whether the world moves towards a new era of cooperation or deeper division, the UN chief warned the General Assembly on Tuesday.

Key points

• UN chief urges binding international cooperation on AI governance, warning that life-and-death decisions must never be handed to machines
• Calls for Security Council reform, highlighting the continued “indefensible” absence of permanent African representation
• For the first time in its history, UN has achieved full gender parity across senior leadership and staff 

With roughly 100 days remaining in his term as UN Secretary-General, António Guterres delivered a wide-ranging speech that framed the world’s most pressing crises not as isolated problems, but as different expressions of the same underlying struggle over how power is exercised and by whom.

“The greatest power is not the power to dominate. It is the power to build a future that works for everyone,” he said, presenting his annual report of the Organization.

Describing a decade of eroding international norms – from civilians targeted in war, and humanitarian workers killed, to international law “cast aside” and fraying trust between nations – he said power itself is being fundamentally reshaped in three ways:

• Emergence of new State powers
• Significant transfer of authority from governments to private corporations and individuals
• Growing role of AI and autonomous weapons in decisions once reserved for humans

“The faultlines in our world are widening,” he said. “Cracks have become canyons.”

Rather than accepting fragmentation as inevitable, he called for galvanizing cooperation and a truly global network built on interdependence and shared rules while warning against sliding into rival blocs with separate economic and security systems, a scenario he has termed in recent years the Great Fracture.

No real ceasefire in sight

Pointing to cascading crises across the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar, Mr. Guterres argued that so-called ceasefires have often amounted to little more than “lesser fires”, with civilians continuing to pay the price.

He renewed calls for compliance with International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders regarding Gaza and warned that settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatens to extinguish the two-State solution.

He also condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a clear violation of the UN Charter.

Renewing longstanding calls for Security Council reform, he singled out the continued absence of permanent African representation as “unjust and indefensible” given the 15-member organ’s founding in a starkly different geopolitical era.

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