The US stalemate with Iran and Russia’s stuttering invasion of Ukraine have exposed the stark limits of superpower might, António Guterres has said, as he dismissed the idea of the UN being eclipsed in a multipolar world.
In a wide-ranging interview as he approaches the end of a decade at the helm of the UN, Guterres described a world being reshaped by the decline of US dominance, the rise of new powers and the humbling lessons from wars of choice where the cold war’s superpowers failed to secure decisive victories.
With his organisation beset by financial crisis, low morale and great-power divisions, the secretary general warned that a more multipolar order risked sliding into confrontation unless global institutions adapted to it.
“It’s time for superpowers to understand the limits of their power,” Guterres told the Financial Times in his offices on the 38th floor of the UN headquarters in New York. “If you look at what happened in recent times, the capacity of superpowers to impose their will or their strength or their force in several situations has been severely limited.”
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“Look at what happened with Russia and Ukraine,” he said, referring to the full-scale invasion in 2022, which Moscow expected to last for a matter of days.
“Look at what’s happened with the US and Iran,” Guterres added, referring to the US and Israeli war on Iran. The US hoped Tehran would capitulate when it attacked in February, but six months later Iran’s regime is holding out and has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy waterway.
“Superpowers need to understand that things have changed, the weight of different countries has changed,” said Guterres, casting the setbacks as part of a shift from the US-led order of the post-cold war era to a multipolar world.
The 77-year-old former Portuguese premier brushed aside the idea that Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, a grouping of international leaders founded last year with an initial focus on securing a deal between Israel and Hamas, could rival the UN Security Council, pointing to its failure to make headway in Gaza.
“With all the difficulties that might exist [for the UN], the truth is, if you look at what happens in Gaza, with the measures that were taken and you look at the progress that was made, let’s be honest, it is not for the UN to be worried. It is for others to be worried about what they are doing.”
In Guterres’s decade in charge, the UN’s profile as a mediator in global crises has waned. Some former and current officials argue he and the UN made a mistake in his second term by being less visible in the world’s war zones, as his focus has appeared to shift from mediating conflicts to broader societal challenges, such as combating climate change.
Guterres concedes it has been hard to mediate in the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. The UN’s decision-making body, the Security Council, had been “practically paralysed”, he said, as the US and Russia, two of its five veto-wielding powers, have blocked it while pursuing their goals. The UN has also, he accepts, been pushed to the sidelines in the civil war in Sudan as outside “spoilers” have taken advantage of the deadlocked Security Council to intervene in the fighting.
“A sense of impunity is now prevailing,” he said. “Our leverage is dramatically diminished” by the fact that there is not a Security Council able to tell countries that “they must behave [or] they’ll be punished”.
But he denies he has stepped away from mediating, highlighting a recent trip to Cyprus, which has been divided for 60 years. “Mediation today is extremely difficult and the results are limited,” he said. “But we are not giving up.” The US too had found it hard to mediate in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan and Libya, he added.
As for the criticism that the UN’s voice has become “quieter” on his watch, he argued few spoke out more clearly about the war in Ukraine, the “awful and intolerable” attack by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and the “totally intolerable” retaliatory assault by Israel on Gaza.
Both Israel and Russia are furious with him over his criticisms of their record. He passionately rejects Israel’s accusation that the UN is institutionally biased against Israel. “I think we have been on the right side of history,” he said. “We have been defending what is necessary for two peoples to be able to live together.”
Guterres, as so many of his eight predecessors, has found his greatest problem has often been his relationship with the US. Trump has made no secret of his frustration with the record and multilateralist agenda of the UN. His administration has withdrawn support from the World Health Organisation and other UN agencies, and stopped funding dozens of UN operations. It owes more than $2 billion in arrears to the UN budget and $3 billion for peacekeeping operations, the UN says, although the US has signalled it intends to release $725 million for the budget.
Guterres has presided over severe cutbacks, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs. US officials have welcomed the budget cuts as a first step, although they argue they should have been implemented years ago. UN insiders concede that the post-cold war era saw a huge increase in its ambitions – and a wasteful duplication of mandates.
“Many people thought several UN agencies would collapse,” Guterres said, referring to the budgetary squeeze. “Nothing has collapsed. Of course we have [been] diminished. Are [agencies] close to collapse? No, because we were organised in a way that allowed us to quickly adjust.
“With a huge volume of arrears, about $4 billion, we are able to keep our activities going. In the budget of 2026 we have reduced the number of posts by 22 per cent. I don’t know any public institution in the world that has done that.” It reduced last year by 25 per cent the number of soldiers in peacekeeping operations, he said.
Guterres has a poor relationship with Trump and has barely spoken to him in the US president’s second term. But he said that beyond the headlines the UN and US were co-operating in a number of disputes, including Western Sahara, Libya and Sudan. He also highlighted the UN’s role in helping Washington with the humanitarian crisis in Haiti.
“Sometimes there is a difference between what people say and what people do ... between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the co-operation.
Guterres’s decade as secretary general has coincided with the rise of a new tier of “middle powers” as increasingly powerful actors on the world stage, including giants of the Global South, such as India, and the wealthy Gulf states.
He sees this “as a very positive trend” that should lead to global bodies, such as the IMF and the World Bank, at last changing to reflect the world today rather than when they were established in 1945.
But he warned that the shift had to be handled very carefully. If global powers do not move fast to make these bodies reflect the changing world, “the risk is that more multi-polarity will translate itself into more competition and eventually more confrontation”.
“Let’s not forget that Europe before the first World War was multipolar,” he said. “But in the absence of multilateralist institutions of governance, the result was the first World War.”
Middle powers and smaller nations are pushing hard for reform of the Security Council where the US, China, Russia, Britain and France, the victors in 1945, have a veto, not just on resolutions but in choosing the secretary general.
Guterres says having three out of five veto-wielders from Europe is unsustainable. “The reality on the ground will in the end have to prevail. It will be inevitable that the Security Council will have to adapt ... to the relative weight of the different powers in the world.”
But he accepts that agreeing new permanent members of a reformed Security Council will be hard. “Power is never given, it needs to be taken,” he said. “The question is how can we organise the community to create the conditions for that power to be taken.”
As the competition intensifies to succeed him when his second five-year term ends in December, contenders have indicated they would want the UN to be more prominent in world crises. One has talked of the UN potentially facing a “slow death” without sweeping reform and hinted at cutting back its activities. Guterres’s only advice to his successor is “to be yourself and do the right thing you believe in”.
Guterres has spoken privately of his concerns that in the future the UN’s authority and range could be reduced. He dismisses the risk that the UN might go the same way as its predecessor, the ill-fated League of Nations, which became irrelevant in the countdown to the second World War. For “all its difficulties and problems” the greatest service the UN had provided in its eight decades was to avoid a war among superpowers, Guterres said.
Now is the twilight of his tenure. Like all the UN’s secretaries general, he has had to battle over whether to be more “secretary” and focus on management, or more “general” and focus on the world, and has ended up facing criticism on both fronts. He is especially proud of his record in championing the fight against climate change in the face of populist leaders playing down the issue.
“The secretary general has no powers,” says Guterres. “The secretary general has a voice and some convening capacity. Power is another thing and we don’t have that. But the voice will not be shut up.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
