# UN General Assembly The General Assembly is the plenary organ of the [[United Nations]] — all 193 member states, one vote each, no vetoes. It meets in annual session in New York from September, elects the non-permanent members of the [[UN Security Council]], appoints the Secretary-General on the Council's recommendation, and holds the one power that has proven consistently consequential: **it controls the budget.** Its resolutions on peace and security are non-binding, which is the fact most often cited to dismiss it. Its budget decisions are binding, which is the fact that determines whether the rest of the organization can operate. ## The Power of the Purse Every UN member is assessed a share of the regular budget on a capacity-to-pay formula, capped at 22% — a ceiling that exists specifically so that no single state can dominate through contributions. The United States pays at that cap. Peacekeeping assessments are separate, and US law caps American peacekeeping payments at 25%. This makes the Assembly the venue where the current crisis in US–UN relations is actually playing out. Not through a withdrawal announcement, but through arrears. ## The 2026 Funding Crisis | Date | Development | |---|---| | 2025-12-30 | Assembly adopts a **$3.45B regular budget for 2026**, ~7% below 2025, abolishing 2,900 posts | | 2026-01-30 | Secretary-General warns of "imminent financial collapse" | | 2026-02 | US arrears: ~$2.19B regular budget, ~$2.4B peacekeeping, $43.6M tribunals — **roughly 95% of all outstanding regular-budget dues** | | 2026-02-19 | US pays ~$160M against ~$4B owed | | 2026-07-01 | Assembly approves a four-year trial of new budget rules, projected to free $1.5B over twelve months | | 2026-08 | Regular-budget cash projected to run out | The July reform is worth understanding, because it is an institution redesigning itself around a single delinquent member. Under the old rules, unspent assessed contributions were credited back to member states whether or not the cash had actually arrived — an accounting fiction that worked only while everyone paid. The new rules return credits only on cash received. ## UN80 Running alongside the funding crisis is UN80, a reform initiative launched 12 March 2025 proposing roughly a 20% cut to the Secretariat budget and elimination of about 6,900 of 35,000 posts. The 2026 budget delivered the first tranche. Reform and defunding have become difficult to distinguish, which is a problem for the organization's defenders. Many of the efficiencies UN80 targets are real. But the initiative is being executed under fiscal duress created by one member's non-payment, which means the cuts fall where the cash pressure is rather than where the waste is — human-rights advocates note the human-rights pillar has absorbed a disproportionate share. ## The Visa Instrument The Assembly meets on American soil, and the US is obligated under the 1947 UN Headquarters Agreement to admit delegates. Since 2025 the administration has used visa denial as leverage: revoking or denying visas for the Palestinian delegation ahead of the September 2025 session; in May 2026, reportedly telling Palestinian officials to drop a bid for a senior UN post or lose visas; and in the same month denying a visa to a Russian diplomat for a UN meeting. This is a distinct mechanism from defunding and worth tracking separately. It converts the host-country relationship into a screening function over who may participate in a body where the US has no veto. ## Why It Matters Here ## The map vote, September 4, 2026 On **September 4, 2026** the Assembly adopted, by **164 votes to 1 with 6 abstentions**, a nonbinding resolution encouraging governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area maps where relative size matters, and to teach the limits of any flat map. Togo negotiated it on behalf of the African group, building on an [[African Union]] campaign; foreign minister Robert Dussey introduced it with the line "A fair map does not change the geography of the world, it changes how we see the world." The resolution neither bans the 1569 Mercator projection nor mandates a replacement — Mercator preserves compass direction at the cost of area, which is why Greenland can read as comparable to a continent Africa is roughly fourteen times larger than. **The United States cast the only vote against.** Its representative called the resolution a mockery of the institution's purpose and objected to its language of reparations and "cognitive justice," describing initiatives of the kind as "barnacles on our work here and the reason this institution is losing its credibility." The six abstentions — [[Estonia]], Georgia, [[Lithuania]], [[Moldova]], Serbia and Ukraine — were about borders, not size: Ukraine supported correcting the distortion but objected to how some Equal Earth maps depict occupied Ukrainian territory, and the EU, speaking through Ireland, put on the record that the measure concerns landmass area only and says nothing about sovereignty. France announced hours before the vote that it would drop Mercator for its own world maps. For the vault the vote is a clean instance of the pattern this page already describes. On a one-state-one-vote question with no budget attached, the United States finished 164–1, and its stated objection was not to the cartography but to the vocabulary — a symbolic-politics veto exercised in the one chamber where it has no veto. The Assembly is where the one-state-one-vote principle lives, and therefore where American structural advantage is thinnest. The US has a veto on the Security Council, a veto at the [[International Monetary Fund]], and the presidency of the [[World Bank]] by convention. In the General Assembly it has one vote out of 193 and a 22% bill. Read against the [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]], the pattern holds: the bodies the US has kept are the ones where it holds disproportionate power, and the bodies it has left, defunded, or stopped attending are the ones where it does not. The Assembly is the largest institution in the second category that the US has not formally exited — it is simply not paying. ## The 2026 General Debate — 81st session The 81st session opened on **8 September 2026**. Its high-level General Debate — the annual run of head-of-state and head-of-government addresses, open to all 193 members — began on **22 September 2026**. Two speaking-order conventions are worth recording because they are protocol rather than rule. **Brazil speaks first**, a practice dating to **1955**, when no other delegation was willing to open and the Brazilians volunteered often enough that it hardened into custom. The **United States speaks second**, because it hosts the headquarters. The arrangement means the American address is always the first one the hall hears from a great power, and always lands before any rebuttal. ### Trump's address Reading from a teleprompter, [[Donald Trump]] used the second slot to reject the premise of the institution he was standing in. On **Iran**, he framed the seventh month of the [[Iran War 2026]] as a personal choice between a deal and extermination: > [!quote] Donald Trump, 22 September 2026 > "I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before…? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?" Most of the **Iranian delegation walked out**, leaving a single junior diplomat in the seats. Later, on **Cuba** — "It's an absolutely failed state. It's failing like never before and it will fall," adding that "[[Marco Rubio]] is handling a negotiation. He's deep into negotiations with Cuba" — the **Cuban delegation walked out** as well. On **[[Venezuela]]**, he presented the January 2026 removal of [[Nicolás Maduro]] and the oil arrangement signed with the [[Delcy Rodríguez]] government as a template: "Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States." The characterization of the arrangement was blunter — "To the victor belong the spoils. You've all heard that." On the **UN's human-rights and cultural bodies**, he accused the organization's top human-rights officials of wanting the United States to "open up our borders to gangs and criminals," called it "deeply ironic" that a body devoted to protecting cultural heritage promotes migration, and concluded: "There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation." The "[[Globalist]]" framing tracks the standing line from [[Stephen Miller]] and [[JD Vance]]. Three things about the speech matter more than its tone. First, it **states the [[Spheres of Influence]] claim in the open** — the Western Hemisphere as an American zone of right — which is the position Article 2 of the [[UN Charter]] exists to deny. Second, it pivoted to the [[2026 Midterm Elections]] mid-address, which suggests the audience was domestic and the hall incidental. Third, the two walkouts were by delegations of states the United States is currently either at war with or negotiating the collapse of; they were a response to specific threats, not a general protest. ### Guterres's answer Hours later, Secretary-General [[António Guterres]] delivered what turned out to be his farewell General Debate address — his term ends **31 December 2026** — and put the opposite case. He warned of "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 a moment when "our mechanisms for collective action are under growing strain." He offered two futures: fragmentation into "transactionalism," "rising tensions and deepening mistrust," "fractured markets and weakened institutions," "shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations" — or "**networked multipolarity**," a world "built on interdependence" in which "multiple centres of influence coexist within a common framework of international law and shared rules." Against the record of Russia's war in Ukraine (see [[Russo-Ukrainian War]]) and the American position in Iran, he noted that the superpowers had learned "their power isn't so super. That their power has limits." He named the wars he wanted stopped: Iran and the wider Middle East; [[Israel]]'s conduct in Gaza, "with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General" (see [[Gaza War]]); settlement expansion and displacement in the occupied West Bank; Russia's invasion of [[Ukraine]] as a Charter violation; the war on civilians in [[Sudan]]; and escalating violence in Myanmar. He called the inequality between men and women inequality's "most universal form" — "Equality is not a dream. It is a decision." > [!quote] António Guterres, 22 September 2026 > "It comes down to this: Will we act to ensure that power is governed by law or by force? By cooperation or coercion?" > > "The test before us is whether power will be exercised with the law—or beyond it." He closed on the organization's founding as "an act of defiance… 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." ### Why the pairing matters here The two speeches are the cleanest same-day statement of the vault's central foreign-policy division, delivered from the same lectern to the same audience within hours. Trump's is [[Spheres of Influence]] politics asserted as entitlement; Guterres's is the Charter's sovereign-equality principle restated as a choice still available. Neither is a new position. What is new is that the American one was said aloud, in the Assembly, without the customary cover of Charter vocabulary — the pattern the [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]] tracks in the form of exits, stated here as doctrine. The Guterres address carries an additional weight the letter coverage generally missed: it was a **valedictory**. The succession is live, the United States holds a veto over it, and the next Secretary-General takes office on **1 January 2027**. See [[António Guterres]] for the state of that race. ### Aftermath, 23 September The day after the speech, Rubio told reporters the United States was open to talks with Cuba conditional on a change of government — "Cuba has a golden opportunity to place itself on an irreversible path towards a better future. We are prepared to be helpful in that regard if they are open to it" — and said Washington would work with Cuban figures whose "hands are not stained with blood." **Cuban officials denied that any negotiations were underway.** See [[Cuba]] and [[Cuban Influence]]. > [!warning] Unresolved > Trump described an active Rubio negotiation track with Cuba; Havana denies one exists. Both claims are recorded; neither is treated here as established. ## See Also - [[United Nations]] — the parent organization - [[UN Security Council]] — where the US veto is - [[UN Human Rights Council]] — the subsidiary body the US left in 2025 - [[Executive Order 14199]] · [[2026 International Organizations Withdrawal Memorandum]] - [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]] - [[African Union]] — sponsor of the September 2026 map resolution - [[António Guterres]] — Secretary-General through 31 December 2026 - [[Spheres of Influence]] — the doctrine stated from the podium on 22 September 2026 - [[UN Charter]] — the Article 2 principles at issue - [[Iran War 2026]] · [[Venezuela]] · [[Cuba]]