UN chief warns of bipolar world
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned global leaders of the risk of the world becoming split between two rival sides, an apparent reference to the United States and China.
Without directly naming any country, Guterres said in his address to the annual UN General Assembly meeting on Tuesday that the two sides were “creating two separate and competing worlds.”
“We must do everything possible to avert the great fracture and maintain a universal system, a universal economy with universal respect for international law, a multipolar world with strong multilateral institutions,” Guterres told presidents, prime ministers, monarchs, and ministers from the UN’s 193 member states.
He said that the two sides were creating rival internets, currencies, financial rules, “and their own zero-sum geopolitical and military strategies.”
US President Donald Trump initiated a trade war with China last year, imposing unusually heavy tariffs on imports from the country, seeking extensive structural changes from Beijing, and alleging that it had engaged in intellectual property theft over many years, which China strongly denies.
Since then, the two countries have exchanged tariffs on more than 360 billion dollars in two-way trade.
Guterres also painted a grim picture of a deeply divided and anxious planet facing a climate crisis, “the alarming possibility of armed conflict in the [Persian] Gulf,” spreading terrorism, rising populism, and “exploding” inequality.
“Above all, we are facing the alarming possibility of armed conflict in the [Persian] Gulf, the consequences of which the world cannot afford,” he said. “In a context where a minor miscalculation can lead to a major confrontation, we must do everything possible to push for reason and restraint.”
In May 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew his country from a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran, and has been significantly ratcheting up tensions with the country ever since.
Elsewhere in his speech, Guterres referred to the plight of the peoples of the world in general.
“A great many people fear getting trampled, thwarted, left behind. Machines take their jobs. Traffickers take their dignity. Demagogues take their rights. Warlords take their lives. Fossil fuels take their future,” he said, adding, however, that people still believed in “the spirit and ideas” of the UN and its foundation of multilateralism.
In his own speech later in the day, Trump, a protectionist, rejected globalism.
“The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots,” Trump said.
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