António Guterres

There was a speech worth listening to at the United Nations 81st General Assembly yesterday, but it wasn't given by Donald Trump, who only knows how to self-aggrandize and threaten.

This speech was by outgoing UN Secretary-General António Guterres. In my limited, American way, I've been admiring his commitment to climate advocacy throughout his 10 years in office. I will miss him and I hope his successor continues on that path.

In his final opening speech, he talked about power in four ways. In one part, he said:

...we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals [whose] reach now extends across politics, economies, information flows, technological development, and the civic space on which societies depend.

At the very moment when humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of threats, our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain.

Will we fall into “transactionalism,” “rising tensions and deepening mistrust,” “fractured markets and weakened institutions,” “shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations,” or will we instead follow the path the UN was created for: 

[a] networked multipolarity, [a] world built on interdependence — and sustained by a dense web of economic, political, social, and technological connections. A world in which multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules....

Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?

He also talked about power and equality among men and women, and came to this:

... institutions are more effective when power is shared equally. Equality is not a dream. It is a decision.

Excellencies, the test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law — or beyond it.

In the face of a global catastrophe more than 80 years ago, the United Nations was created as an act of defiance. The defiance of people who refuse to surrender the future to fear. The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right. The defiance of countries that know our futures are bound together. The defiance of hope.

The whole transcript is here. 

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Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson's for highlighting this speech in her daily post. It was not covered in the Star Tribune this morning, though it was in the Pioneer Press.