Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:

It's UNGA week, very unusual New York to have the United Nations General Assembly meetings. You know, the city is locked down. It's almost always locked down this week, but usually you can't get anywhere because you've got all these marshals with dozens of heads of state and well over a hundred foreign ministers and their delegations jamming literally everything, Midtown and branching out across the city. This time around, the security cordon for the United Nations itself is barely a block, and no one is flying in. I mean, the weather is gorgeous, and you can walk pretty much anywhere, but nothing's really locked down aside from, of course, the fact that the restaurants and the bars and the theaters and everything else is not happening given the pandemic. And it's not just in the US, it's all around the world.

So we're having an UNGA without world leaders, and they are mailing it in. And I would argue that in addition to mailing in virtually their speeches, in many cases, they're mailing in leadership. I just had a conversation with the Colombian president, Iván Duque, who said the first few months, there's been a lot of leadership individually, but nothing from a multilateralism perspective, not the G20, not the UN. That it's really been shocking to him that there was no coordination around personal protective equipment or ventilators in the early days when it was desperately needed. I hear this from António Guterres. I hear it from Christine Lagarde in the early days of the crisis. We need international coordination. These are all people whose jobs are truly global, truly multilateral, but they are also people who recognize that so far, at least this crisis, we have not been learning those lessons.

This is an environment where... I mean, we have COVAX for example, which is an effort to try to bring coordination on vaccine development and distribution to people all over the world, and the Europeans have signed up. Most of the developing world has signed up, but so far the United States and China have not, the world's two largest economies. And this is not to say that you can't spend other money developing other vaccines for yourself. It's just a promise to, in addition to that, provide that support and coordination. Not happening. I mean, I guess if there's good news here, good news at the multilateral level, the good news is that the institutions we have aren't falling apart. So... Give you an example. John Bolton was the National Security Advisor for President Trump. He's the guy that famously said that you could take off five floors of the UN main headquarters building, and no one would notice.

He can't stand the United Nations. But actually, the United States continues to pay their United Nations dues every year, and President Trump gave his plenary speech. Wasn't much to it, just seven minutes long, but he was there, kind of like US with NATO. People saying, "Oh, Trump was thinking about leaving NATO, threatened to leave NATO." He hasn't left NATO. Actually, the relationship is kind of the same. And even though Trump has said he's leaving the World Health Organization, he hasn't yet. He can't yet, and the day to day cooperation between the US and the WHO, including the sharing of data and the rest, continues to be as it has been. So at the multilateral level, at least we can say that the architecture we have, which is increasingly not aligned with the geopolitical order, and certainly not robust, but it's not broken.

Read the full transcript: https://www.gzeromedia.com/unga/videos/quick-take-a-un-general-assembly-without-world-leaders


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