The United Nations stands at an inflection point. The international system is under strain—beset by war, inequality, and eroding trust. And yet, 80 years after its founding, no one has abandoned belief in the United Nations’ mission. Despite profound divisions, Member States and people around the world continue to turn to the United Nations because they know what it represents: peace through cooperation, dignity through dialogue, and solutions through solidarity and collective responsibility.
That enduring belief is both the UN’s greatest asset and its most pressing obligation. It is an asset because it means the Organization retains a legitimacy no other institution can claim—a universal forum in which the largest and smallest states interact, and in which the norms that govern international life are negotiated, affirmed, and upheld. It is an obligation because belief without delivery eventually becomes disillusionment. The world needs a United Nations, but it needs a United Nations that works.
An institution with legitimacy but without effectiveness risks becoming irrelevant. The gap between what the United Nations promises and what it delivers has widened to the point where it can no longer be managed with procedural adjustments or papered over with further declarations. An honest and courageous approach is urgently needed—one that looks at the Organization as it is and asks, with genuine rigor, what must change for it to meet the real demands of our time, with impartiality and a results-oriented approach grounded in facts.
More than 40 years of service in diplomacy and international organizations have instilled in me an unshakable faith in multilateralism and in the UN family. I am a realist and a pragmatic optimist, and I believe that the primary job of the UN Secretary General is to show up and deliver—including as an honest broker.
Since 2019, I have served as Director General of the IAEA, leading a global organization that operates at the intersection of international peace and security, energy, science, and development. I have mediated in moments of international crisis and delivered tangible support where it is needed most. These experiences have confirmed a conviction I hold deeply: even in times of division, multilateral institutions can deliver real, positive impact—provided they remain accountable, focused, credible, and deeply committed to engaging those they serve.
The United Nations requires that same focused and credible approach. It must adapt to today’s realities and needs, rid itself of overlapping and wasteful activities, and deliver on its core mission. With this in mind, I believe the next Secretary General must pursue five interlinked priorities, each reinforcing the others, and each demanding the discipline to translate ambition into measurable results that address the priorities and needs of those the United Nations serves.
Return to Peace
The United Nations must return to its founding promise: to save humanity from the scourge of war. International peace and security remains the first pillar of our shared architecture, the essential condition upon which our coexistence is built and upon which human dignity can be fully realized. Everything else the Organization does—development, human rights, humanitarian action—depends on this foundation. Where it is absent, the rest becomes relief work rather than progress.
The United Nations must regain this central mission through early and credible engagement. In an increasingly complex world, this means being active rather than passive in the face of conflict and humanitarian crisis. It means moving from platitudes to active diplomacy and the deployment of impartial expertise. It means being present where decisions are being shaped—in regions where tensions are rising before they become crises, and in the spaces between adversaries where misunderstanding can harden into dangerous miscalculation. Credible engagement requires credible information: decisions that earn the trust of all parties must be informed by timely, evidence-based assessments and communicated with transparency and clarity.
The Secretary General has the responsibility to work closely with the Security Council and to maintain sustained dialogue with all Member States, in particular those at opposite ends of a conflict. This is not always a comfortable position. It requires engaging the parties, remaining impartial, and sustaining contact when others have walked away. It is precisely in those moments that the presence of a credible, honest interlocutor matters most. In a divided world, this role must be exercised with clarity and care, and with enlightened and prudent optimism—recognizing that even the most entrenched conflicts contain within them the possibility of a different outcome, if the right conditions are created. It must be guided always by the Charter, and by the goal of peace through diplomacy.
I have seen time and time again, on multiple continents, that honest, fact-based, and continuous dialogue—even between parties with no appetite for agreement—can reduce the risk of political division and even catastrophic error. It can preserve the channels through which practical measures are pursued and misunderstandings corrected before they escalate. That lesson is directly relevant to the political and security work of the United Nations, and it is one I intend to apply. I will bring with me the relationships and trust built with heads of state and key stakeholders over my six years as head of the IAEA, and across the decades before—at other international organizations, and as a diplomat for Argentina.
Peace and security are not only ends in themselves. They are crucial enablers of development, creating the conditions for economic growth, innovation, and investment, while sustaining human dignity and making effective humanitarian action possible. This relationship runs in both directions. Without the stability that peace provides, development gains are fragile and reversible; without the legitimacy and social cohesion that development sustains, the conditions for conflict tend to persist and deepen. The two agendas are inseparable, and the next Secretary General must treat them as such.
Development That Delivers
Peace creates the conditions for development, but development must then be made to happen—and here the United Nations faces its widest gap between ambition and result. The 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals offer a framework, a set of priorities, and a global reference point for problems that demand solutions. They represent ambitious expressions of collective intent. But with only eighteen percent of their targets currently on track, the SDGs remain largely unfulfilled aspirations. This must prompt us to reflect seriously: are we still on the right course? Will doing more of the same deliver different results? The answer is clear—the approach must change for the outcomes to change.
What is needed is a grounded, sectoral approach focused on achievable outcomes, measurable progress, and practical coordination—one that replaces today’s proliferation of commitments that outpace the UN’s capacity to honor them. This means asking harder questions about what works, concentrating resources where impact is demonstrable, and resisting the institutional temptation to measure success by the volume of activity rather than the quality of results. It means being willing to make choices about where the UN adds unique value and where others are better placed to lead. This is indispensable, especially as the development budgets of Member States shrink even as the need for development support continues to grow.
This approach must also include building more constructive partnerships with civil society, the private sector, and the scientific community. These actors bring resources, knowledge, and implementation capacity that the UN system alone cannot match. Engaging them effectively requires genuine co-investment in shared objectives. It also requires recognizing that blanket condemnations and polarizing rhetoric only widen the divides that development cooperation is meant to bridge—alienating indispensable stakeholders and weakening the implementation of agreed goals.
At the same time, the United Nations must fundamentally strengthen its engagement with the international financial institutions, whose goals and missions are complementary and mutually reinforcing. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the regional development banks possess financing capacity and expertise that the UN cannot replicate. The UN’s comparative advantage lies elsewhere: in its universality, its political legitimacy, and its ability to place development within a broader human and political context, ensuring that the countries most exposed to economic exclusion have a voice in shaping the response. Working together, enhancing dialogue, and aligning priorities through a coherent and coordinated approach is how these complementary strengths are made to serve a common purpose.
Development cooperation must deliver tangible benefit. Energy security is a key foundation of economic and social progress, and the only basis on which the transition can be made sustainable. The priorities of Member States include access to healthcare, food, water, a sustainable environment, education, and real opportunities for a better quality of life—especially in the countries facing the greatest challenges. These are not aspirations. They are the concrete outcomes against which any development agenda must ultimately be judged. Development outcomes depend on roads, energy networks, schools, hospitals, and the institutions capable of managing and maintaining them. They depend on financing that reaches where it is needed, on policies that unlock domestic potential, and on partnerships that build capacity rather than create dependency. Words must lead to action, and action must lead to impact. That sequence cannot afford to be interrupted by institutional inefficiency, duplicated effort, or the misalignment of resources with real needs on the ground.
Human Rights and Human Dignity
The pursuit of peace, security, and development is inseparable from the defense of human dignity. This is not a rhetorical claim but a structural one. The foundational instruments of human rights—including the Universal Declaration and the core international treaties—remain as relevant today as when they were first adopted. They are not outdated ideals inherited from a more optimistic era, nor are they constraints on political pragmatism; they are part of the normative architecture within which effective multilateralism must operate. They are an essential guide for responsible and peaceful global engagement, and they should be treated as such by the next Secretary General.
The United Nations must reaffirm its commitment to human rights through more than declarations—through its presence on the ground, through mechanisms that enable more effective responses, and through the active support of civic space. Where young people cannot see a credible future within legitimate institutions, the conditions for instability multiply. Upholding human dignity is not an abstraction. It is the foundation for lasting peace. The relationship is circular: human dignity requires peace, and peace requires human dignity.
Firmly anchored in the UN Charter, human rights must be integrated into broader efforts for peace and development while remaining responsive to today’s realities. Durable protection requires states capable of delivering services reliably, upholding the rule of law, and sustaining institutions resilient and inclusive enough to hold together under pressure. The defense of human rights therefore cannot rely on declarations and reporting mechanisms alone. It must be anchored in the practical conditions that make rights livable—and that requires the same integrated approach to peace, development, and governance that runs through all five of these priorities.
Human rights are particularly vulnerable in moments of crisis and conflict, when respect for international norms becomes both most essential and most endangered. In such contexts, the United Nations has a central role to play, working in a coordinated manner to provide neutral, impartial, and independent assistance to Member States and affected populations. That role must be exercised with professionalism and without political instrumentalization. And it must be grounded in a clear sense of priority: the strongest contribution the United Nations can make to human rights is not the management of their violation but the prevention of the conditions that produce it.
Institutional Renewal
A stronger United Nations requires a reform process guided by clear purpose. Over the years, the Organization has accumulated overlapping mandates and fragmented functions, limiting its ability to deliver solutions to global challenges. The consequence is an institution that consumes significant energy in coordination, reporting, and process, while producing impact that is harder to demonstrate than the activity surrounding it. Reform is necessary—but not for its own sake. Too often, reform efforts become trapped in self-serving bureaucratic loops that consume the very energy they were meant to release. The United Nations, and its reforms, must serve humanity, not a deliberative machinery.
The UN80 initiative is an indispensable point of departure, and it must be followed by implementation through a wider process of rightsizing that is sustainable, purposeful, and grounded in the priorities Member States have agreed. That process must ask, consistently: does this structure, this mandate, this reporting cycle make the United Nations more effective at delivering for the people it exists to serve? Where the answer is no, change must follow—grounded in institutional discipline and accountability.
A purposeful, performance-driven renewal is needed across the system. This means improving coordination between agencies whose mandates overlap, and eliminating the duplication—the triplication, quadruplication, even quintuplication—that exists today and wastes limited resources. It means embracing digital tools that reduce administrative burden and improve the quality of information available to decision-makers, and aligning organizational structures with clearly defined goals rather than historical legacy. Efficiency, in this context, is not a bureaucratic virtue but a moral one: every resource saved through better management is a resource made available to the populations the UN exists to serve.
Institutional renewal of this kind requires trust and a shared understanding between Member States and the Secretariat. It requires determination from the Secretary General to guide the process with a genuine sense of urgency, to make decisions that may be uncomfortable, and to hold the system accountable for results rather than process. It also requires the meaningful engagement of staff at all levels—as agents of reform who possess the knowledge and experience to identify where change is needed, and the commitment to carry it through.
Principled Pragmatism
By strengthening its commitment to its founding vision, the United Nations can respond to today’s realities rather than retreat from them. In times of fragmentation and insecurity, impartiality and effective dialogue are not soft virtues. They are strategic requirements. A Secretary General who engages with all sides, speaks with clarity, and acts with purpose—particularly in moments of disagreement—provides something no bilateral relationship and no regional arrangement can replicate: a legitimate, universal interlocutor whose authority derives from principle rather than power.
Real leadership does not retreat from complexity; it deals with it. It does not offer comfort in place of honesty, or process in place of decision. Effective leaders in this role listen carefully to understand what is genuinely at stake for the parties they engage. They act decisively when the moment demands it, with restraint when restraint preserves future options, and with a consistency that builds the trust on which everything else depends.
The international community faces challenges that no state, however powerful, can manage alone: the prevention of conflict and containment of nuclear risk; the energy transition and the disruptions of new technology; the threat of pandemics; and the widening gap between development ambition and development reality. These are precisely the challenges the United Nations was designed to address. The question is not whether multilateral cooperation is needed. It is whether the United Nations can provide the kind of multilateralism the world actually needs—credible, results-oriented, grounded in facts, and accountable to the people it serves.
I believe it can. But it requires leadership willing to pursue that goal with conviction and without illusion—someone clear-eyed about the constraints, realistic about what is achievable, and unwilling to substitute declarations for results or presence for impact.
Eight decades after its founding, the United Nations must renew itself, and its next Secretary General must be the embodiment of that renewal. The challenges are great, but the mission endures: to prevent war, to protect people, and to promote the dignity of all. I am ready to lead this next chapter—with conviction, with realism, and with an unshakable belief in the value of principled, pragmatic multilateralism. The world still needs the United Nations. But it must be a United Nations that works—not one that speaks of working, not one that reforms in preparation for working, but one that delivers. It must deliver for the governments that sustain it and the populations that depend on it. And it must deliver for the enduring idea at its heart: that cooperation, pursued with honesty and discipline, remains humanity’s most reliable path through its most difficult and dangerous shared challenges.
