“Cracks have become canyons.” With about 100 days left in his term, UN Secretary-General António Guterres used his annual report to the General Assembly on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, to argue that the world’s troubles are really one struggle over who holds power and how they use it. He sorted them into four tests: war or peace, inequality, climate change and artificial intelligence.
He described a decade in which civilians have been targeted in war, humanitarian workers killed, international law “cast aside” and trust between nations worn thin. Power itself, he said, is being reshaped. Authority is shifting from governments to private corporations and individuals, and AI and autonomous weapons are taking decisions once reserved for humans.
“The faultlines in our world are widening,” he said. He warned against a slide into rival blocs with separate economic and security systems, which he has called the Great Fracture in recent years, and urged a global network built on interdependence and shared rules. “The greatest power is not the power to dominate. It is the power to build a future that works for everyone.”
War and peace
Guterres pointed to crises in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar. So-called ceasefires, he said, have often amounted to little more than “lesser fires,” while civilians keep paying. He renewed his call for compliance with International Court of Justice orders on Gaza and warned that settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank threatens to extinguish the two-State solution. He called Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a clear violation of the UN Charter.
On the Security Council, he called the continued lack of a permanent African seat “unjust and indefensible.” The 15-member body, he noted, was built for a very different geopolitical era.
Inequality and the financial system
Record global wealth sits beside billions of people without enough food, clean water, schooling or healthcare. Guterres called that a question of power over opportunity, resources and self-determination, not only an economic one. He repeated his view that the financial system leaves developing countries crushed by debt while they face climate disasters they did little to cause. His remedies: faster debt relief, bolder multilateral development banks and fairer access to the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights.
He also announced that the UN has reached full gender parity across senior leadership, headquarters staff and professional roles, a first in its history. “Equality is not a dream; it is a decision,” he said, offering it as proof that entrenched power structures can change.
Climate and artificial intelligence
He called the climate crisis the “most profound intergenerational power imbalance” and warned that the 1.5°C threshold will almost certainly be breached. Polluters should “pay,” he said, and developed nations should triple adaptation funding. Major oil companies, he noted, have made substantial profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while adaptation finance for developing countries remains a fraction of that.
On AI, he said power is piling up in data, computing capacity and algorithms, and moving faster than humanity’s ability to govern it. “The danger is not technology. The danger is technology without accountability.” He asked for a multilateral AI risk management framework with independent oversight. Children must never become test subjects for unregulated systems, he said, and “killer robots must have no place in our future.”
Guterres said he would keep defending the Charter’s values after he leaves office. “The world does not need a weaker United Nations,” he said. “It needs a UN strong enough to face the world as it is and determined enough to build the world as it should be.”
