UN General Assembly 2025: Global Theater of the Absurd Plays On

**The 2025 UN General Assembly: A Global Gathering of the Usual Suspects and Their Pocketbooks**

The United Nations General Assembly’s 80th session convenes this September amid the familiar choreography of diplomatic theater—where grandstanding meets gridlock, and the champagne flows more freely than meaningful resolutions. Delegates from 193 member states will descend upon New York’s Turtle Bay for what critics call “the world’s most expensive talking shop” and supporters defend as humanity’s last best hope for not annihilating itself.

This year’s agenda reads like a dystopian bingo card: climate catastrophe, AI governance, pandemic preparedness, and the small matter of preventing World War III. The irony isn’t lost on seasoned observers that the organization founded to prevent conflict now serves primarily as a venue for its members to explain why they’re absolutely justified in starting one.

The assembly arrives at a particularly auspicious moment—if one considers global dysfunction auspicious. The war in Ukraine drags into its fourth year with the enthusiasm of a bad marriage neither side can afford to leave. China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea continue expanding faster than its artificial islands. Meanwhile, the United States, fresh from an election that proved democracy and TikTok can indeed coexist, arrives with its usual blend of exceptionalism and selective memory about international law.

Developing nations, representing roughly 85% of humanity but 0% of permanent Security Council seats, will once again politely request that the global order established when their grandparents were colonies perhaps needs updating. Western delegates will nod sympathetically while checking their Rolexes, a ritual as old as decolonization itself.

The climate discussions promise particular entertainment value. Small island nations will explain—again—that they’re literally drowning while major emitters explain—again—that economic growth is incompatible with survival. The circular logic would impress M.C. Escher: we need growth to fund climate adaptation, but growth causes the climate change requiring adaptation. Somewhere, a Pacific atoll sinks beneath the waves as delegates debate the semantics of “loss and damage.”

This year’s wildcard is the Artificial Intelligence governance debate, where humanity attempts to regulate technology it barely understands, created by companies it can’t control, with implications it can’t predict. The UN’s track record on regulating emerging technologies inspires about as much confidence as a chocolate teapot, but hope springs eternal—or perhaps desperation does.

The real action, as always, happens in the corridors, where bilateral meetings determine the fate of nations over canapés and passive-aggressive compliments. The General Assembly Hall itself serves as the world’s largest stage for what diplomats call “constructive engagement” and everyone else calls “lying with a straight face.”

Yet for all its flaws, the UN remains the only venue where Iran and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan (the latter carefully labeled “Chinese Taipei” in the seating chart) occupy the same building without actual bloodshed. This alone qualifies as a diplomatic achievement in our current era of zero-sum nationalism.

The assembly will conclude with the customary declarations and commitments, most of which will be violated before the delegates reach JFK Airport. But the alternative—not talking—is worse, though only marginally. In a world where cooperation seems increasingly quaint, the UN’s stubborn persistence represents either humanity’s optimism or its capacity for self-delusion.

As the circus packs up for another year, leaving behind empty promises and full expense accounts, one truth emerges: the United Nations may not prevent the apocalypse, but it ensures we’ll have excellent catering while discussing it. In an age of collapsing norms and rising temperatures, perhaps that’s the most we can expect from an organization representing a species that invented both the Geneva Conventions and cluster munitions.