Author: Maciej Dachowski

António Guterres is finishing his ten-year tenure in a world that barely resembles the one the UN was built for. Peace negotiations happen without the organization. Conflicts are managed outside the Security Council. Alternative frameworks are displacing institutions. The UN itself has sprawled into a tangle of agencies with overlapping mandates, disconnected from ground realities and fragmenting donor attention. In this environment, choosing a new Secretary-General is not a personnel decision — it is a test of whether multilateralism still has political backers. Poland, with a G20 invitation and regional-power ambitions, is present in this new world. The question is whether it knows what it wants [1].

The UN in the Shadow of Wars Fought Without It

Guterres is leaving office in conditions of sustained institutional marginalization. The Minsk process on Ukraine, launched in September 2014, was run by France and Germany, not the UN. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 followed a bilateral deal between the US and the Taliban in Doha — the UN, despite years of presence in the country, was neither a party to the talks nor a guarantor of any commitments. Nagorno-Karabakh ceased to exist as a frozen conflict after Azerbaijan’s lightning offensive in September 2023. The Security Council held a session, heard statements, and took no action. The Syrian settlement was negotiated in Astana, without the UN, between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. Talks on Gaza after October 7, 2023 took place in Cairo, Doha, and Washington. Four years into Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, the Security Council has not been able to adopt a single binding decision, and peace negotiations have been held in Mar-a-Lago, Istanbul, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi — not New York or Geneva [2]. When Iran was struck in February 2026, Guterres issued a public condemnation that triggered no organizational response [3]. Addressing the General Assembly for the last time in January 2026, he said plainly that “the problems of 2026 cannot be solved with the tools of 1945.” That is an epitaph for a decade in which he tried to defend an institution that the world had increasingly learned to route around [4].

Alternative conflict-management arrangements are emerging alongside. Trump’s so-called Peace Council represents the first explicit attempt since 1945 to construct a security mechanism outside the UN framework, with no reference to international law or formal accountability [5]. This matters because the system now unraveling was not an accident. It was a deliberate philosophy. Wendell Willkie, a Republican businessman who published One World in 1943 after circling the globe as Roosevelt’s envoy, argued that global interdependence was a fact, not an idea, and that the only rational response to that fact was building institutions to manage it. His case was not idealistic. It came from a businessman’s conviction that predictable rules are a condition of lasting advantage, not an obstacle to it. The logic of the 1945 system followed directly from that philosophy [6]. Today that system is tearing along precisely the seams Willkie tried to close. The G20 is ceasing to be a club of the world’s largest economies and becoming an instrument for sorting states by their usefulness to the emerging power configuration. Russia is losing its capacity to act as a stabilizer even in its own neighborhood [7]. China is building its own formats while formally invoking the existing order and practically circumventing it. In this environment, choosing a new UN Secretary-General is not choosing an institutional manager. It is choosing a symbol — and answering the question of which powers are still willing to treat multilateral legitimacy as a political asset.

The eight Secretaries-General before Guterres map the full range of possible relationships between a person and the institution they lead. Dag Hammarskjöld, killed in 1961 over Rhodesia on a peacekeeping mission, defined the office as an active political force. He was a Secretary-General who flew in personally to negotiate ceasefires rather than wait for instructions from the major powers. Kurt Waldheim ran the institution bureaucratically while concealing a Nazi past. Boutros Boutros-Ghali paid for defying Washington: the United States vetoed his second term at precisely the moment the international community was watching the Rwandan genocide unfold. The major powers did not ask why the system had failed; they replaced the man at the top. Ban Ki-moon gave up on political ambitions from the start and spent two terms managing the organization without notable aspiration. Guterres chose differently, spending a decade speaking with conviction on climate, inequality, and peace — but his words rarely translated into organizational action. The office became, for him, primarily a moral platform rather than an instrument of change [8].

Four Candidates, Four Diagnoses

The four candidates nominated by the end of February 2026 differ less in their programs than in their diagnoses of what is broken and how it should be fixed [10].

Rafael Grossi, Director General of the IAEA and Argentina’s candidate, has published a full vision statement titled “Renewing the Promise: A United Nations that Works.” His diagnosis is precise. “The world does not need more declarations, but a UN capable of responding to the real needs of our times.” Grossi’s program identifies five priorities: preventive and proactive diplomacy rather than reactive management; development solutions grounded in private-sector and scientific engagement; human rights as the foundation of peace; governance modernization with elimination of overlapping mandates; and multilateral engagement built on impartiality. Grossi sees a UN that can and should operate effectively above all — as long as it cuts loose from the empty rhetoric of recent years. It is a crisis manager’s vision, not an ideologue’s [11].

Michelle Bachelet, twice president of Chile and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, nominated jointly by Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, puts a values crisis at the center — not a performance crisis. In her vision statement filed in February 2026, she declares that the international system faces challenges “unprecedented in scale, urgency, and complexity,” and that the central task is “rebuilding trust in the UN.” For Bachelet, the multilateral crisis is fundamentally normative. Institutions are only as credible as the values they embody. This is a vision of the UN as guardian of norms, rather than of the institution itself [12].

Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, an economist who heads UNCTAD, emphasizes the crisis of trust in its economic and institutional dimensions. In her campaign statements she stresses the need to rebuild the UN’s credibility under geopolitical pressure, and positions economic justice as a core part of the multilateral agenda. As UNCTAD’s head, she has reformed an institution from the inside — capital none of the other three candidates holds. Her vision is of a UN that shields against global economic inequality: a mechanism for correcting financial imbalances, unsustainable debt, and unequal access to resources [13].

Macky Sall, former President of Senegal nominated by Burundi on behalf of the African Union, offers a structural diagnosis. In his reading, the UN’s crisis is a representation crisis. The system built by the victorious powers of 1945 reflects neither the demographic nor economic nor political reality of today’s world, and it is the global majority that bears the consequences of that asymmetry. Sall calls for Security Council reform, climate and development financing on terms acceptable to that majority, and a stronger African voice in global governance. He represents the bloc of states that see the current UN crisis as an opportunity to redistribute power within the institution, not merely to fine-tune its operations [16].

Analytically significant is what all four programs omit. None of the candidates answers directly the question of how the UN is supposed to function in a world where the United States is actively constructing alternative structures. None offers concrete proposals on Security Council reform, even though everyone understands it is the system’s bottleneck. No one addresses institutional reform of the organization itself. The UN has grown into an unwieldy network of agencies and programs with overlapping and competing mandates. The bureaucracy has lost mobility; staff at headquarters in New York and Geneva are increasingly disconnected from field operations. Mandate proliferation fragments donor attention too — parallel structures end up doing the same work with separate budgets. Reforming the core secretariat, consolidating agencies, and restoring operational coherence are preconditions without which no change at the top will translate into change on the ground. And that reform cannot be left to the UN apparatus itself. Rebuilding the institution requires civil society, national human rights bodies, academic communities, and member states working together to design a model fit for the challenges the current structure cannot handle. Everyone writes about reform; no one writes about what would have to be given up. The candidates’ platforms are worded broadly enough that every member state can find something to recognize in them without feeling it has anything to lose.

Who Will the Security Council Choose?

The question about candidates is secondary to the question about the Security Council. Formally it recommends, and the P5 holds the veto. In 2026 that is a Council which spent four years unable to adopt any binding decision on Ukraine, confirmed its impotence on Gaza, and which the United States treats as an instrument of obstruction rather than a forum for decision. Washington and Beijing are simultaneously strategic rivals in it and co-veterans of the veto procedure. The Secretary-General election is one of the rare moments when they have to reach agreement [14]. The question of Council reform is, however, equally important as the question of its composition. Thirty years of debate about expanding permanent membership have produced nothing, and every new Secretary-General inherits an institution whose central decision-making body does not reflect the power configuration of the world it is supposed to govern.

Which raises a question that candidate debates and campaign platforms carefully avoid. Is the P5 in its current configuration willing to choose someone who will genuinely try to repair the system, or rather someone who will ensure its continued erosion under the guise of managing it? For Washington, which is building its own security formats outside the UN, a weak Secretary-General is convenient. For Beijing, which wants to preserve veto rights and a legitimacy platform without bearing systemic costs, likewise. Moscow, excluded from most Western formats, may prefer the UN as the last arena where it is formally equal to the others. The interests converge in one point only: none of these actors needs a Secretary-General who is genuinely independent [15].

That question is existential for Poland and for the global majority of states. The rules-based system has historically protected small and medium-sized states from the arbitrariness of great powers. The costs of its erosion fall on states that have neither the military resources nor the diplomatic leverage to operate in a world without rules. For Namibia, for El Salvador, for Georgia — and for Poland — this is not an abstract concern.

Where Does Poland Stand?

Poland is today in a position that is simultaneously exceptional and underappreciated. The G20 invitation to the Miami summit signals that Warsaw is perceived as a systemically useful actor — a link connecting the West to the Eurasian space, a credible partner in conditions of order fragmentation. This is not a sentimental distinction. It is a functional assessment [17].

At the same time, Poland has not defined its position on the Secretary-General race. It has put forward no candidate. It has not declared support for any of the contenders. When Trump announced progress in the Ukraine negotiations, he named Poland’s president among the leaders he had consulted [18] — which attests to Warsaw’s real presence in important conversations, but not to its agenda. That is a structural difference. Being mentioned is not the same as having influence. Poland is being invited to the table. What it puts on that table remains unclear.

Poland has several possible positions in the ongoing debate about the future of the UN.

The first is as the voice of Central and Eastern Europe. None of the four candidates represents that perspective, yet it is a distinctive one. No region in the world has a stronger, more existential reason to want a functioning collective security system. Grossi writes of “proactive diplomacy” as the remedy for the UN’s helplessness before ongoing conflicts. Poland could amplify that demand with its own lived experience. For three decades it built its security on the assumption that the collective system would hold. That gives it both the standing and the reason to speak concretely about what kind of UN states whose security depends on functioning institutions actually need.

The second is as a bridge between the West and the global majority. Sall and Grynspan represent the perspective of states for which the UN was always an institution run from outside, by the P5, by donors, by the geography of power. Poland, with its own history of peripherality in the international order and eight decades of struggle for genuine agency, holds a credibility that the old Western powers lack in that conversation [21].

The third — the most difficult, and the most important — is as an active participant in the debate about what multilateralism should look like going forward. Poland does not need to field its own candidate to shape the direction of that conversation. It only needs to bring a coherent diagnosis to it. Willkie argued that stable rules are a condition of lasting advantage, not an obstacle to it. That is an argument Poland can and should make better than almost anyone, because its experience of what happens when rules dissolve or no one enforces them is not theoretical. It is visceral.

A Test for the Institution, and a Test for Warsaw

Candidate dialogues are scheduled for the week of April 20, 2026. The Security Council is expected to begin its formal selection process by the end of July. The new Secretary-General takes office on January 1, 2027 [19].

After eight decades and nine men at the helm of the UN, pressure is mounting to make this selection historic: for the first time, a woman would lead the organization. The General Assembly “regretted that no woman has ever held this position” and called on member states to put forward female candidates [20]. By supporting Bachelet or Grynspan, Poland could invoke this argument and reinforce its standing as a state actively committed to reforming the system.

The election of a UN Secretary-General is a question about which states value multilateral legitimacy enough to fight for it. Poland — G20-invited, historically burdened, positioned in a region where rules-based order is a security condition rather than an aspiration — has more reasons than most to answer that question. Silence is also a decision, of course. It just costs nothing and yields nothing.

Notes

[1] Cf. Maciej Dachowski, A Redundant Actor: Russia’s Disappearance from the International System, Pułaski Commentary, February 2026; Maciej Dachowski, Beyond the False Choice: Trump’s Peace Council as a Test of Rules and Power, Pułaski Commentary, January 2026.

[2] Maciej Dachowski, Negotiating the Same War. Russia’s Continuum, America’s Cycles, and Why Momentum Still Isn’t Change, Pułaski Commentary, December 2025.

[3] UN News, Iran strikes ‘squandered a chance for diplomacy’: Guterres, 28 February 2026; cf. Maciej Dachowski, War in the Shadow: Pakistan–Afghanistan Amid Iran Escalation, Pułaski Commentary, March 2026.

[4] United Nations, Secretary-General’s remarks to the General Assembly on Priorities for 2026, 15 January 2026.

[5] Maciej Dachowski, Beyond the False Choice, op. cit.

[6] Wendell Willkie, One World, Simon & Schuster, New York 1943; Samuel Zipp, The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World, Harvard University Press, 2020; Maciej Dachowski, Withdrawal as Doctrine: American Power Between Institution and Precedent, Pułaski Commentary, January 2026.

[7] Maciej Dachowski, A Redundant Actor, op. cit.

[8] Council on Foreign Relations, The Role of the UN Secretary-General, September 2025; AMUN, Seventy Years of Secretaries-General: From Lie to Guterres; Better World Campaign, Becoming Secretary-General, November 2025.

[9] G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, Princeton University Press, 2001; Security Council Report, Special Research Report: Appointment of the UN Secretary-General, 2015.

[10] United Nations, Selection and Appointment of the Next Secretary-General, un.org/en/sg-selection-and-appointment, accessed March 2026; 1for8billion.org, Candidates and speculation, accessed March 2026.

[11] Rafael Mariano Grossi, Renewing the Promise: A United Nations that Works, vision statement, November 2025, also published by Buenos Aires Times, 27 November 2025.

[12] Joint letter regarding the nomination of Michelle Bachelet Jeria by Chile, Brazil and Mexico, 2 February 2026 [A/80/616-S/2026/56]; Reuters, Explainer: How will the next UN chief be chosen and who wants the job?, 3 February 2026.

[13] Better World Campaign, Becoming Secretary-General, November 2025; Maya Plentz, Who will be the next UN Secretary-General?, The UN Brief, December 2025.

[14] Pan African Visions, Macky Sall’s UN Bid Is a High-Stakes Test of Power, Principle and the Veto System, 4 March 2026; The Peninsula Qatar, Two more candidates nominated for next UN secretary-general, 5 March 2026.

[15] Council on Foreign Relations, The Role of the UN Secretary-General, op. cit.; Ethics & International Affairs, Secretary-General selection process and the P5 stranglehold on power.

[16] Maciej Dachowski, G20, Poland and Central Asia: What the Miami Invitation Actually Means, Pułaski Commentary, December 2025.

[17] Maciej Dachowski, G20, Poland and Central Asia, op. cit.; Maciej Dachowski, Withdrawal as Doctrine, op. cit.

[18] Maciej Dachowski, Negotiating the Same War, op. cit.; White House readout of President Trump call with European leaders, 28 December 2025.

[19] United Nations General Assembly, Letter from the President of the General Assembly on interactive dialogues with candidates, 14 January 2026; Security Council Report, The Search for the Next UN Secretary-General Begins, December 2025 Monthly Forecast.

[20] United Nations General Assembly resolution 79/327, Revitalization of the work of the General Assembly, 5 September 2025.

[21] Maciej Dachowski, G20, Poland and Central Asia, op. cit.; Maciej Dachowski, Withdrawal as Doctrine, op. cit.