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Its forthcoming summit will be little more than a talking shop. Rishi Sunak would be right to skip it
Heads of government from across the world will next month gather in New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The permanent members of the Security Council will not, we may be sure, be represented by all their leaders, since it is more than unlikely that Vladimir Putin will take up residence in the Plaza Hotel, although no doubt the ventriloquist’s doll who passes by the name of Sergey Lavrov will think of making an appearance. President Xi may also feel he has better ways to spend his time. Why, then, should it matter if, as has been suggested, Rishi Sunak also declines to travel to this great jamboree? The summit will occur close in time to an all-important Conservative Party conference that may offer the Prime Minister his last chance to set out effective and ambitious new policies, and expose the sheer vacuity of Sir Keir Starmer’s political programme.
From the Labour benches, David Lammy complains that Sunak’s absence “would mark a low ebb of the Conservative Party’s isolationist foreign policy”. “Isolationist” is hardly the right word for a government that has been more agile than almost any other in supporting Ukraine, and has been actively negotiating trade treaties and defence partnerships across the globe. Brexit does not allow for isolationism.
The real failure has, alas, been in the workings of the United Nations, which has found it impossible to resolve the big foreign policy questions of our day, most recently in Ukraine, and has betrayed the fundamental principles that go back to its establishment at the end of the Second World War. For instance, its attempts to handle the 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict have surely been frustrated by the willingness of the General Assembly to condemn Israel (which is certainly not above criticism, particularly under its present government), while bypassing the genocidal horrors perpetrated in Syria and Iraq. In flagrant breach of the UN Charter, Russia can get away with fighting its wars thanks to its much used, or rather abused, powers of veto on the Security Council. Iran is about to chair the UN Human Rights Social Forum.