On July 30, the Security Council will begin its secret selection of a new Secretary-General. What is at stake is not a prestigious post, but control of an organization burdened by billions of dollars in debt, a paralyzed Security Council, and an infrastructure without which the global order will begin to unravel even faster.
The next United Nations Secretary-General is being chosen at a moment when, for the first time in decades, the organization itself is being forced to discuss not expanding its mission, but whether it can simply pay for work that has already been approved. This is not an ordinary personnel contest or a competition among diplomatic resumes. It is the selection of a manager for an institution that must simultaneously stop wars, feed refugees, monitor nuclear facilities, coordinate aviation and maritime navigation, and yet has no certainty that it will receive the money already promised by its member states.
The first closed-door straw poll in the Security Council is scheduled for July 30. By July 28, seven candidates were already in the race. At the last moment, Olara Otunnu, a former United Nations Under-Secretary-General and former Ugandan foreign minister, joined the six participants in the public debates. His nomination is especially symbolic: it was Otunnu, while serving as president of the Security Council in 1981, who devised the straw-poll mechanism that will now be used to evaluate his own candidacy.
He is entering the race after the televised debates on July 23 and only days before the first vote, a vivid reminder that transparency ends where real great-power diplomacy begins.
Not an Election, but a Closed Auction Among Five Powers
Formally, the Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly. In practice, the choice is made by the Security Council, or more precisely by the United States, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom.
Article 97 of the United Nations Charter gives the General Assembly the right to approve the candidate recommended by the Security Council, but does not allow it to draw up an alternative list. During the straw polls, all 15 Council members mark one of three options beside each name: encourage, discourage, or express no opinion. To reach the final stage, a candidate needs at least nine votes and no blocking signal from any permanent member. The General Assembly then almost always turns a decision already made into a ceremony of legitimization.
That is why the candidates’ public platforms matter less than how politically toxic they appear to the five capitals. The winner is not the most impressive, the most principled, or even the most competent. The winner is the person whom Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and London are all prepared to tolerate. In a system where any one of the five powers can stop a candidate, the principal advantage is not strength, but the absence of mortal enemies.
This arrangement creates a paradox. The United Nations expects its future Secretary-General to demonstrate independence, moral authority, and the ability to defend the Charter publicly. Yet the selection process rewards caution, ambiguity, and the ability to avoid irritating in advance the very powers that most frequently violate the principles the new leader will be expected to defend.
The more seriously a candidate approaches human rights, aggression, occupation, sanctions, or great-power accountability, the greater the risk that one of those powers will cast a red ballot.
This explains the candidates’ evasiveness on the most dangerous issues. Russia’s war against Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the confrontation surrounding Iran, and the crisis of international humanitarian law were all discussed far more cautiously than administrative reform, conflict early warning, or the climate agenda.
The candidates understand that a Secretary-General is not chosen for correctly assessing what has already happened, but for remaining an acceptable mediator after permanent members of the Security Council take yet another action that others describe as a violation of the Charter.
Seven Candidates and Seven Different Ways Not to Become Secretary-General
Five of the seven candidates come from Latin America and the Caribbean. Four are women. Both factors appear logical: the region has long believed that its turn has come, while no woman has ever led the organization in the United Nations’ 80-year history.
Yet regional rotation is not enshrined in the Charter, and the gender argument carries no veto power. In the final stage, symbolic justice will be subordinated to political compatibility. The list of candidates and their principal policy positions took shape during dialogues held in April and June, and six candidates appeared together on a common platform on July 23.
Grossi: The Favorite Who Suits Everyone but Is Close to No One
Rafael Grossi remains the system’s most obvious candidate. The Argentine diplomat has led the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2019, works regularly with the United States, Russia, China, and the European powers, conducts negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, and secured the establishment of a permanent agency presence at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
His principal strength is the predictability of a technocrat. Grossi is not proposing a politically revolutionary United Nations. He is proposing a manageable United Nations. For the permanent members, that may prove to be a decisive advantage.
Yet the same record also creates vulnerabilities. The IAEA stands at the center of the world’s most politicized conflicts. Every decision involving Iran, Ukraine, or nuclear safeguards is interpreted by one side or another as a concession to its adversary.
Grossi is known to all five permanent members, but familiarity is not the same as trust. His candidacy will be assessed not only in terms of professionalism, but also on whether his reputation has become too closely associated with one of the competing coalitions. Diplomats describe him as the favorite, but no durable consensus has yet formed around him.
Grynspan: An Economist for an Age of Debt Wars
Rebeca Grynspan offers a different kind of leadership: economic leadership. A former vice president of Costa Rica, head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and participant in negotiations on the Black Sea Grain Initiative, she has built her campaign around management reform, mediation, and the ability to turn political crises into matters for concrete negotiation.
In a world where debt burdens, trade fragmentation, food security, and technological inequality are becoming sources of conflict, her economic expertise appears to be a powerful argument in her favor.
Her problem is that economic pragmatism does not eliminate geopolitical suspicion. Moscow tends to remember her involvement in the grain agreement positively. Washington and Israel may examine UNCTAD’s position on the Palestinian economy more closely. For China, the crucial question is how willing the future Secretary-General will be to discuss developing countries’ debt dependence and the rules of international trade.
Grynspan is trying to present herself as a candidate capable of listening to everyone, but such contenders often become the focus of contradictory expectations. Every capital assumes that, after the election, its voice will be heard first.
Bachelet: Too Independent for the Five Powers
Michelle Bachelet is the most politically recognizable and, at the same time, one of the most vulnerable candidates. A two-time president of Chile, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and former head of UN Women, she could symbolize the organization’s moral return to its human rights mission.
Yet her record has created several potential lines of opposition. Moscow has not forgotten her assessments of the war against Ukraine and the human rights situation in Russia. Beijing remembers the report on Xinjiang. In the United States, Republican politicians have criticized her positions on China, abortion, and Israel.
Another blow came when Chile’s new leadership declined to support her nomination, although Brazil and Mexico maintained their backing.
Bachelet could be a strong Secretary-General precisely because she carries political weight of her own. Yet the selection system generally prefers candidates whose independence does not appear threatening.
Her campaign will test a simple question: is the United Nations prepared to choose a woman for the first time if the price may be a confrontation with several permanent members of the Security Council at once?
Espinosa: A Strong Platform Without a Powerful Patron
María Fernanda Espinosa is emphasizing crisis prevention, early warning, and institutional discipline. A former Ecuadorian minister of foreign affairs and defense and a former president of the General Assembly, she has an intimate understanding of the organization’s internal machinery.
Her proposal for a round-the-clock conflict prevention center is more substantive than the usual promises to strengthen preventive diplomacy. Yet bureaucratic competence does not automatically generate political patronage. Espinosa has experience and a program, but there is no clear sign that any permanent Security Council member is prepared to make her candidacy a priority.
Rodrigues-Birkett: The Compromise That May Be Needed After a Deadlock
Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett represents Guyana and a Caribbean perspective on international security. For small states, climate, debt, food, and access to capital are not secondary concerns but direct threats to sovereignty.
Rodrigues-Birkett could become the first woman and the first Caribbean representative to lead the United Nations. Her strength is the absence of heavy geopolitical baggage. Her weakness is the absence of an obvious great power that would regard her victory as a strategic investment of its own.
In a closed ballot, neutrality helps a candidate survive the first round but rarely delivers victory without a supporting coalition. Yet if Grossi, Grynspan, and Bachelet face mutual opposition, a candidacy of this kind could move from the periphery to become the compromise choice.
Sall: Africa’s Voice Against the Architecture of 1945
Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal, offers the United Nations the language of the Global South: Security Council reform, relief from debt pressure, a redistribution of influence, and a rejection of the architecture of 1945 as a permanent norm.
This approach responds directly to sentiment in Africa, which holds 54 votes in the General Assembly but not a single permanent seat on the Security Council.
Sall himself, however, faces a double barrier. The logic of regional rotation currently favors the Americas, while his human rights record raises questions among Western governments and parts of the African elite. He may use the campaign to advance the African agenda, but victory would require him to break several unwritten rules at once.
Otunnu: The Architect of the Mechanism Enters His Own Trap
Olara Otunnu is the late and most unpredictable entrant. He has served as Uganda’s permanent representative to the United Nations, foreign minister, Under-Secretary-General, and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.
His platform combines immediate diplomatic intervention in major wars, continued institutional reform, the creation of a coordinating body for artificial intelligence, and a climate policy that does not obstruct the development of poorer countries.
Yet his real advantage lies not in his platform. Otunnu understands the procedure from within better than most of his rivals because he created its basic mechanism 45 years ago. His late nomination may prove to be either a carefully calculated maneuver or a symbolic gesture by Africa.
The Financial Abyss: Mandates Without Money
Whichever candidate wins, on the morning of January 1, 2027, that person will inherit more than an office on the 38th floor of United Nations Headquarters in New York. The new Secretary-General will inherit a system facing an acute liquidity crisis.
The United Nations regular budget for 2026 was approved at $3.45 billion, approximately 7 percent below the previous year’s budget. By comparison, that sum is smaller than the annual budget of a major American city and bears no comparison to the military spending of even a single middle power. Yet the organization does not receive even this money on time.
As of April 30, unpaid regular-budget assessments had reached approximately $2.8 billion, while arrears for peacekeeping operations stood at $3.5 billion. The combined shortfall amounted to about $6.3 billion.
The United Nations entered 2026 without adequate liquidity reserves, and in the spring the Secretariat warned that available funds might last only until mid-August. Delays are already shifting the financial burden onto troop- and police-contributing countries. Outstanding payments for contingent-owned equipment were estimated at $443 million.
In other words, states of the Global South not only send personnel into dangerous missions but also effectively extend credit to an organization that the world’s largest economies fail to finance on time.
On June 30, the General Assembly temporarily postponed an immediate collapse. It changed an absurd rule that had forced the United Nations to return unspent balances to countries even when the corresponding assessed contributions had never actually been paid.
The new arrangement, introduced on July 1 for a four-year trial period, allowed the organization to retain more than $900 million in peacekeeping funds and approximately $400 million from the regular budget. This spared Headquarters from a partial shutdown in 2027 and reduced the risk of even more drastic operational cuts.
But this is an accounting measure, not a new funding model. It created no money. It merely prohibited the organization from returning a fictitious surplus while facing a real deficit.
By mid-July, 120 of the 193 member states had paid their regular-budget assessments in full. Yet the number of disciplined contributors conceals the underlying structure of dependence.
The United States’ maximum assessment rate for the regular budget is 22 percent, while China’s share has approached 20 percent. In the peacekeeping budget, the American share reaches 26.95 percent and China’s 18.69 percent.
When either of these powers delays payment, savings on paper become reductions in patrols, medical evacuations, transport flights, political missions, and reimbursements to troop-contributing countries.
Washington Pays Not for the United Nations, but for the Right to Remake It
For decades, the United States has used the financing of international organizations as an instrument of political control.
In 2024, Washington provided the United Nations system with approximately $3.2 billion in assessed contributions and about $11 billion in voluntary funding. In the same year, China paid approximately $2.2 billion in assessed contributions but only $265 million in voluntary funds.
The distinction is fundamental. An assessed contribution sustains the institution. A voluntary contribution allows the donor to choose the agency, program, region, and political priority. The greater the share of earmarked funding, the more a universal organization becomes a collection of projects dependent on decisions made by individual capitals.
President Trump turned this practice into a form of overt pressure. On January 7, 2026, the White House announced the termination of participation in or funding for 66 international bodies: 31 entities within the United Nations system and 35 organizations outside it.
The official formula is perfectly clear: bodies deemed contrary to the national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty of the United States should not receive American money.
This is no longer a dispute over the size of contributions. It is a doctrine of conditional multilateralism: an international institution exists only to the extent that it serves the current American strategy.
For the next Secretary-General, this will be the central political challenge. The new leader must persuade the Trump administration to pay without turning the United Nations into a White House contractor. At the same time, the Secretary-General must prevent China from using the emerging financial and staffing vacuum to rewrite institutional norms according to Beijing’s own model.
The new Secretary-General must explain to Europeans and wealthy Asian states that supporting the multilateral order requires not declarations, but additional billions of dollars. This must be done under conditions in which every expansion of the donor base alters the balance of influence within the organization.
Washington understands this arithmetic perfectly well. A complete American withdrawal would give China an opportunity to become the principal financier and the main source of personnel, institutional norms, and political priorities.
The American strategy is therefore likely to focus not on abolishing the United Nations, but on subjecting it to rigorous selection: preserving the Security Council, sanctions mechanisms, humanitarian instruments, and agencies useful to the United States, while cutting, merging, or defunding bodies regarded as politically hostile or ideologically unnecessary.
China Is No Savior: Beijing Is Buying Institutional Time
At first glance, America’s financial retreat offers China an ideal opportunity. Beijing is already the second-largest contributor to the regular budget, is expanding its staffing presence, works actively with developing countries, and consistently promotes the language of sovereignty, noninterference, and the right to development.
But China is in no hurry to replace America’s billions in voluntary funding. Its model of influence is more economical: pay the assessed share, occupy key administrative positions, build voting coalitions, and use infrastructure, trade, and lending relationships outside the United Nations.
Beijing benefits from a United Nations in which the United States loses its moral monopoly while retaining part of the financial burden. China is interested not in the organization’s bankruptcy, but in gradually shifting its normative center.
A weak, dependent, and cautious United Nations suits Beijing better than a strong and autonomous one. It gives China international legitimacy, a platform for defending the principle of territorial integrity when convenient, a mechanism for blocking unwanted decisions, and an opportunity to present the Chinese model as an alternative to Western pressure.
That is why the choice of Secretary-General will serve as a test for China of how manageable each candidate may be. Beijing will assess more than positions on Taiwan, Xinjiang, or human rights.
More important will be the extent to which the future leader is prepared to defend the Secretariat’s autonomy, appoint independent experts, publish inconvenient reports, and allow economic projects to be scrutinized through human rights criteria.
Security Council Reform: An Idea No One Will Allow to Become Reality
Nearly every candidate speaks of the need to make the Security Council more representative. Macky Sall is calling for influence to be redistributed in favor of Africa and developing countries. Bachelet, Grynspan, and Espinosa are proposing different forms of institutional renewal.
Yet Security Council reform remains a diplomatic genre in which maximum rhetorical support is combined with a minimal probability of results.
The reason lies in the Charter itself. Any change to the composition or powers of the permanent members requires not only approval by a qualified majority of states, but also ratification by every current permanent member.
In other words, reform is possible only if the five holders of this privilege voluntarily agree to share or weaken their own power. The history of international institutions offers no reason to regard such a scenario as likely.
Even more modest attempts to restrict the use of the veto have failed. General Assembly Resolution 76/262, adopted in 2022, requires a meeting to be convened after a veto is cast, but it neither overturns nor suspends the decision of the permanent member.
The French-Mexican initiative calling for voluntary restraint in the use of the veto in cases of genocide and mass atrocities received broad support but failed to change the behavior of the major powers.
In 2024, eight vetoes blocked seven draft resolutions, the highest figure since 1986. In 2025, another four vetoes followed over Gaza and Ukraine.
The future Secretary-General will not reform the Security Council. At best, the officeholder will be able to create alternative diplomatic channels by using good offices, special missions, closed-door negotiations, regional organizations, the General Assembly, and coalitions of states.
The Secretary-General’s real strength will emerge not when the Council is united, but when it is deadlocked. Yet this requires political capital, while the selection process itself filters out candidates capable of using such capital too independently.
Peacekeeping Is Cut First, While the Consequences Arrive Last
The financial crisis is especially dangerous for peacekeeping operations. Their budget is separate from the regular budget, but it depends on the same states and is affected by the same payment delays.
Reducing a mission does not look dramatic from New York: fewer helicopter hours, fewer patrols, frozen vacancies, postponed rotations, and reduced logistics.
On the ground, however, it means longer intervals between patrols, slower responses to attacks, limited evacuation of the wounded, and a reduced presence in areas where the mere appearance of an international contingent deters armed groups.
The United Nations is already being forced to operate with reduced resources in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other missions.
At the same time, peacekeeping is often criticized both for being too expensive and for failing to fulfill its mandate. Yet a state that demands that a mission protect civilians, uphold a ceasefire, monitor borders, and support a political process, and then fails to pay its approved contribution, is effectively creating the failure it will later cite as proof of United Nations inefficiency.
This is the political mechanism of financial strangulation. First, the organization is deprived of resources. Its performance then deteriorates. The donor subsequently declares that it refuses to finance an ineffective institution.
The new Secretary-General will have to break this cycle, but without guaranteed funding, even the best management reform quickly becomes little more than a redistribution of scarcity.
Bankruptcy as a Historical Instrument of Blackmail
The United Nations financial crisis is not unprecedented. In 1964 and 1965, the organization came close to paralysis because of debts owed by the Soviet Union and several other countries that refused to recognize expenses related to operations in the Congo and the Middle East.
The United States threatened to invoke Article 19 of the Charter and deprive the nonpaying states of their voting rights in the General Assembly. Moscow responded by threatening a political rupture with the organization. Washington backed down because a legal victory could have destroyed the institution itself.
By the late 1990s, it was the United States that was using accumulated arrears as leverage in negotiations. The Helms-Biden agreement linked payment of American debts to reforms and a reduction in the United States’ share of United Nations budgets.
The precedent was established: the largest debtor could not only escape punishment, but also extract concessions in exchange for fulfilling an obligation that already existed.
Article 19 theoretically allows a state to be deprived of its vote in the General Assembly if its arrears equal or exceed the contributions due from it for two full years. But even if this provision were applied to the United States, the American veto in the Security Council would remain untouched.
The result is institutional asymmetry. The United Nations can punish a small state by taking away its vote, but it cannot effectively pressure a power that controls decisions on war, sanctions, and the appointment of the Secretary-General.
Why the United Nations Will Not Be Dissolved, Even by Those Who Despise It
The claim that the United Nations is ineffective is only half true. The Security Council is indeed frequently paralyzed, and its public meetings often deteriorate into exchanges of accusations.
But the political theater in New York is only the visible part of the system. Behind it lies the infrastructure of everyday international life: standards for civil aviation and maritime transport, epidemic control, refugee assistance, childhood vaccination, food programs, telecommunications, meteorology, intellectual property protection, coordination of humanitarian operations, election monitoring, migration data, statistics, technical regulation, and dozens of other functions.
These mechanisms do not make the news precisely because they work. Their disappearance would not be noticed when another office closes, but when states discover that they lack a common standard, a neutral mediator, a data-sharing system, an aid delivery channel, or a recognized international procedure.
The United Nations can be dissolved by political decision. Rebuilding the network of standards, specialists, archives, agreements, and trust accumulated over eight decades would be incomparably more expensive.
That is why neither the United States, China, nor Russia is interested in the organization’s complete disappearance. Each power wants to preserve the functions it finds useful and restrict those that obstruct its interests.
Washington needs sanctions coalitions, humanitarian logistics, and international legitimization for selected initiatives. Beijing needs a forum where the principle of sovereignty and the numerical majority of the Global South weaken Western dominance. Moscow needs a Security Council with veto power and a universal forum in which it retains great-power status regardless of the condition of its economy or its relations with the West.
Europe depends on a rules-based system more than anyone else because its influence rests more heavily on norms than on military superiority.
The United Nations will not be dissolved. It will be slowly divided into useful and undesirable functions, funded and financially starved agencies, and politically protected missions and missions abandoned without resources.
The principal threat is not formal abolition, but fragmentation: the transformation of a universal organization into a collection of dependent platforms, each serving a separate coalition of donors.
The Secretary-General They Are Really Looking For
In public, candidates are asked to present a vision. In closed consultations, they will be asked to provide guarantees.
The United States will seek a leader prepared to cut costs, merge institutions, and restrict programs that the Trump administration considers hostile to American interests.
China will seek a leader who will not turn human rights into an instrument of pressure and will not obstruct the expansion of Chinese influence over staffing and institutional norms.
Russia will seek a leader who preserves channels of communication, recognizes the central role of the Security Council, and avoids turning the Secretariat into an extension of Western policy.
France and the United Kingdom will defend their own status, multilateralism, and European influence, while fearing both an American dismantling of the system and a Chinese takeover of its institutions.
Developing countries want something different: fairer access to financing, reform of the global debt architecture, greater representation, protection for climate-vulnerable states, and an end to the practice under which the United Nations agenda is determined by conflicts that matter primarily to the major powers.
But the Global South has votes in the General Assembly and no veto in the room where the decisive choice is made.
The ideal candidate for the current system is therefore not a world leader, but a politically cautious crisis manager: visible enough to raise money and open doors; neutral enough to avoid a veto; tough enough to cut spending; flexible enough not to call financial pressure blackmail; moral enough for public speeches, but not so independent as to seriously threaten the interests of the five permanent members.
This is where the dividing line runs between Grossi and the other candidates. His technocratic profile best matches the demand for manageability. Grynspan offers the strongest economic expertise for an era of debt and trade wars. Bachelet embodies moral authority but carries the greatest veto risk.
Espinosa and Rodrigues-Birkett may emerge as compromise figures if the early front-runners face blocking votes. Sall and Otunnu could turn the selection into a debate over Africa’s right to influence, but they are running against the regional expectation that favors Latin America.
The Choice Between a Weak United Nations and No United Nations
The next Secretary-General will not stop the collapse of the international order through a package of reforms. The officeholder will not abolish the veto, force the United States and China to pay on time, end wars waged or supported by permanent members of the Security Council, or turn 193 states into a single political will.
To expect this would be to demand powers that the Charter never granted to the office.
Something else, however, depends on the outcome of the race: whether the United Nations remains a single universal framework or begins to disintegrate irreversibly into geopolitical sectors.
A strong Secretary-General can preserve space for negotiations where states no longer speak directly to one another, protect the professional autonomy of agencies, prevent budget cuts from destroying critical infrastructure, force donors to answer publicly for the gap between the mandates they approve and the money they fail to provide, and use moral authority not as an ornament in speeches, but as a means of increasing the political cost of inaction.
On July 30, the Security Council will begin choosing not a person who will lead humanity toward a better world. It will choose the person entrusted with preventing the destruction of the last universal institution in a world already divided into hostile blocs.
The main question is not whether the world needs a new Secretary-General.
The main question is whether that person will be allowed to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations, or merely appointed chief executive of an organization that the great powers finance just enough to keep it from dying, but never enough to let it become independent.