Last year was among the darkest in the history of the United Nations. Gripped by a budgetary crisis and unable to respond to catastrophic wars in Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza, the U.N. spent much of 2025 focused on internal reform. The UN80 process to revamp and revitalize the organization generated endless commentary—including some of my own—on budgetary discipline, governance reforms and institutional streamlining.
For 2026, the priority should shift: The U.N. must become less inward-looking and more strategically relevant. Its leadership—including the incoming secretary-general, who will take office after incumbent Antonio Guterres’ term ends on Dec. 31—should concentrate political capital beyond ongoing reform processes and instead push for the permanent five members of the Security Council, known as the P5, to engage in a constructive and sustained fashion within the organization as it is currently constituted.
Nowhere is the need for strategic engagement more relevant than the Security Council. For years, the council’s dysfunction has been treated as a symptom of geopolitical rivalry rather than the central problem to be solved. We throw up our hands at the council’s inability to act in the face of massive human suffering in Gaza and Ukraine. Vetoes are lamented, and calls for Security Council reform are reiterated, all while an underlying reality goes unaddressed: without sustained deconfliction among the P5, the U.N. cannot function as a system of collective security. As Richard Gowan points out, the council remains a place where compromise is possible, including on the big issues.
Now, the U.S. strike on Venezuela and President Donald Trump’s threats to take Greenland have raised the stakes even higher. These situations can quickly escalate into great power confrontation, potentially collapsing longstanding arrangements that have preserved peace for decades. Indeed, the launch earlier this month of a new U.S.-led Board of Peace is a fairly clear effort to offer a U.S.-dominated alternative to a languishing U.N. Security Council. If the U.N. is to survive this year intact, it will need to stop fixating on its own internal reforms and refocus on the core purpose for which it was created: preventing great-power confrontation from escalating into World War III.
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