UN Secretary-General António Guterres didn’t mince words opening the General Assembly’s 81st general debate. “The fault lines in our world are widening. Cracks have become canyons,” he said, framing today’s wars, inequality, climate shocks and technological upheaval not as separate crises but as one story — a story about power.
He pointed to three seismic shifts: new economic and political players rising on the world stage, power slipping from governments into the hands of corporations and billionaires, and increasingly, power moving from humans to machines through AI. The institutions meant to manage all this, he warned, still reflect “power realities of a largely bygone age.”
His prescription: a world built on interdependence and shared rules rather than rival blocs — what he called “networked multipolarity.” That starts, he said, with superpowers admitting “their power isn’t so super.”
Guterres singled out Security Council reform, calling the absence of permanent African representation “unjust and indefensible.” He also touted a UN milestone — gender parity across senior leadership for the first time — while pushing nations toward the 1.5-degree climate target and warning that AI’s real danger isn’t the technology itself, but accountability’s absence.
With 100 days left in his term, he vowed to keep fighting for peace, insisting “the power of law must prevail over the law of power.”