Facing a swirl of conflicts and crises across a fragmented world, leaders attending this week’s annual U.N. gathering are being challenged: Work together — not only on front-burner issues but on modernizing the international institutions born after World War II so they can tackle the threats and problems of the future. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued the challenge a year ago after sounding a global alarm about the survival of humanity and the planet: Come to a “Summit of the Future” and make a new commitment to multilateralism – the foundation of the United Nations and many other global bodies – and start fixing the aging global architecture to meet the rapidly changing world. The U.N. chief told reporters last week that the summit “was born out of a cold, hard fact: international challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them.” He pointed to “out-of-control geopolitical divisions” and “runaway” conflicts, climate change, inequalities, debt and new technologies like artificial intelligence which have no guardrails. The two-day summit starts Sunday, two days before the high-level meeting of world leaders begins at the sprawling U.N. compound in New York City. Whether it takes even a first step toward the future remains to be seen. There was no final agreement Saturday on its main outcome document – a lengthy pact that requires support from all 193 U.N. member nations to be adopted. Diplomats said Russia and a few others still had objections to the final text. “Leaders must ask themselves whether this will be yet another meeting where they simply talk about greater cooperation and consensus, or whether they will show the imagination and conviction to actually forge it,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International. “If they miss this opportunity, I shudder to think of the consequences. Our collective future is at stake.” This is the UN’s biggest week of the year The summit is the prelude to this year’s high-level meeting, held every September. More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues at the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider Mideast war. “There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation, and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.” One notable moment at Tuesday’s opening assembly meeting: U.S. President Joe Biden’s likely final major appearance on the world stage, a platform he has tread upon and reveled in for decades. At the upcoming meetings, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters this week: “The most vulnerable around the world are counting on us to make progress, to make change, to bring about a sense of hope for them.” To meet the many global challenges, she said, the U.S. focus at the U.N. meetings will be on ending “the scourge of war.” Roughly 2 billion people live in conflict-affected areas, she said. Last September, the war in Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, took center stage at […]