World Leaders Converge on UN as Wars, AI Fears and Climate Shocks Dominate Agenda

World leaders are gathering at the United Nations this week under the shadow of multiple wars, deepening geopolitical divisions and mounting anxiety over artificial intelligence, even as climate shocks and rising prices continue to strain hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The annual high-level session of the UN General Assembly will be dominated by the conflicts in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar, with a persistent question hanging over the proceedings: whether the assembled leaders can do anything to halt them.

Also pressing are the relentless advance of global warming, widening inequality within and between nations, and economic shocks driven by blocked shipping routes and disrupted supply chains that are pushing up the cost of living and slowing growth.

The future of the UN itself is firmly on the agenda. At 81, the organization's power structure still reflects the victorious nations of World War II rather than the major global players of the 21st century. Its 193 member states have agreed to a broad reform package that includes updating key institutions such as the Security Council, where the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France wield outsized influence through their veto power. Implementation, however, remains a distant prospect.

Behind the scenes, speculation is building over who will lead the UN next. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's second five-year term ends on December 31, and no clear successor has emerged.

What is not in question is the UN's status as the preeminent gathering place for its members. Around 130 heads of state and government are expected to address the General Assembly from Tuesday, along with dozens of ministers.

Among the headline speakers will be US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, both scheduled to speak Tuesday after Guterres delivers his opening "state of the world" address. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian are set to speak Wednesday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the assembly on Thursday. For a second consecutive year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will not attend in person because the United States has refused him a visa; he will speak by video the same day. Under its host-country agreement with the UN, the United States is required to allow diplomats from all member nations to attend meetings.

Equally notable is who is staying away. China's President Xi Jinping is meeting Trump in Washington on Wednesday but is skipping the UN gathering, sending a vice president instead — a move some diplomats describe as a snub. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also absent, as is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

France's UN ambassador, Jerome Bonnafont, said it is "extremely critical" for world leaders this week to support the UN as the forum where nations meet, particularly at a time of such polarization. "We believe in multilateralism," he said, "and we believe that the high-level week is the occasion for countries in the world to reaffirm that they prefer cooperation and dialogue to confrontation."

It has been a difficult year for the world body. It has been pushed to the sidelines on its core responsibility of ensuring international peace and security and ending major conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. The US failure to pay billions of dollars in outstanding arrears has left the organization's finances in precarious shape.

Veteran UN watcher Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group's global issues and institutions program director, said 2025 was even worse. A year ago, he noted, people were contemplating that Trump would use his UN speech to announce a US withdrawal. Trump did not announce a pullout last September, and the UN muddled through the past 12 months with financial troubles that forced cutbacks to peacekeeping operations and humanitarian aid.

In recent days, the US paid $725 million of its dues to the UN's regular operating budget for this year — enough to keep the Trump administration from losing its vote in the General Assembly. The payment was a strong indication Trump will keep the US in the United Nations.

The UN is no longer "in freefall," Gowan said, but it "is stuck in an open-ended or permanent crisis." Put more graphically, he said, "The UN may not be in emergency care like it was last year, but it does seem to be trapped in a trauma center for the foreseeable future."

Former UN deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch-Brown, a United Nations Foundation board member, said, "While the world still trusts the UN, the global public is eager for change."

Artificial intelligence has surged to the forefront of global concerns, with its rapid advances and the growing recognition that there are no industry controls, let alone global guardrails, for a technology that offers many benefits alongside many drawbacks and unknowns. Days before the gathering, leaders of three major AI companies warned about the technology slipping out of human control and called for a pause, but Trump dismissed their concerns as "a hoax" and urged continued advances to keep the US ahead of China.

The UN Security Council has added a high-level meeting on AI to its agenda for Wednesday afternoon, a sign of mounting apprehension. It was already scheduled to hold a high-level meeting on Ukraine with Zelenskyy on Wednesday morning.

For Guterres, this will be his last assembly meeting with global leaders. He previewed his speech last week, telling UN reporters that power is shifting in "an era of deep uncertainty." "At a time when the world faces three existential threats," he said, "international cooperation is more necessary than ever."

Others will vie for the spotlight on issues ranging from rising sea levels and education funding to gender equality. Hundreds of private meetings will also convene in UN cubicles, hotels, diplomatic missions and restaurants.

Esther Brimmer, a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former US assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs in the Obama administration, said in-person meetings can help countries hash out ideas that get implemented months later. She called the situation in 2026 "much more serious and complex than in decades past." "With that said, I'm also not without hope as well," Brimmer said. "Over the past decades we've learned a lot about international cooperation."