# António Guterres **António Guterres** (b. 30 April 1949, Lisbon) is the ninth Secretary-General of the [[United Nations]], in office since **1 January 2017**. His second term ends **31 December 2026**, which makes him, for the whole of the period this vault tracks most closely, a lame duck — and makes his September 2026 address to the [[UN General Assembly]] a farewell. He is in the vault not as a subject of the American right but as its designated counterparty. When [[Donald Trump]] or [[Stephen Miller]] attack "[[Globalist]]" institutions, Guterres is the person on the other end of the sentence: the office they are describing, the vocabulary they are rejecting, and — in the [[UN Charter]]'s terms — the official custodian of the rules they say do not bind the United States. ## Before the UN A trained electrical engineer who entered politics through Portugal's Socialist Party, Guterres was **Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002**, resigning after his party's losses in local elections. He then ran the UN refugee agency as **High Commissioner for Refugees from June 2005 to December 2015** — a decade that spanned the Iraqi, Afghan, Somali and Syrian displacement waves and ended as the 2015 European migration crisis was reshaping the politics of the continent. That biography matters for how he is read on the American right. The figure defending migration and international law at the UN podium is the same figure who spent ten years administering the global refugee system, which is precisely the résumé that makes him a useful villain in the [[Second Trump Administration]]'s framing of immigration as an externally imposed project. ## Secretary-General, 2017–2026 His tenure covers the period in which American engagement with the UN went from selective to adversarial. The [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]] records the sequence: withdrawal from the [[World Health Organization]], the Paris climate agreement and the [[UN Human Rights Council]]; defunding of [[UNRWA]]; and by January 2026 an announced exit from dozens of additional bodies. Because the United States is assessed at the 22% ceiling of the regular budget, the arrears produced a system-wide cash crisis that Guterres described in January 2026 as an "imminent financial collapse." The UN80 reform initiative he launched in March 2025 became, in practice, indistinguishable from managed contraction. On the wars, his position has been consistent and largely unenforceable. He has called Israel's conduct in Gaza a scale of killing beyond anything he had seen in the job (see [[Gaza War]]), condemned Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a Charter violation (see [[Russo-Ukrainian War]]), and pressed for an end to the [[Iran War 2026]]. In each case the [[UN Security Council]] veto held by a party to the conflict — or by that party's patron — is the reason the Secretary-General's position is a statement rather than an action. ## The farewell address, 22 September 2026 On the opening day of the 81st session's high-level General Debate, hours after Trump told the same hall that "[t]o the victor belong the spoils," Guterres laid out the competing account. He warned that "we are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals," whose reach now runs through politics, economies, information flows, technology and civic space. He gave the world two routes: fragmentation into "transactionalism," "rising tensions and deepening mistrust," "shrinking cooperation and zero-sum calculations" — or "**networked multipolarity**," a world of "multiple centres of influence" coexisting "within a common framework of international law and shared rules." > [!quote] António Guterres, UN General Assembly, 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?" Against the record of the wars in Ukraine and Iran he observed that the superpowers had learned "their power isn't so super. That their power has limits." He asked the Assembly to hold to "the primacy of international law," said force must not "be the final arbiter of whose lives, rights, and future matter," named the inequality between men and women as inequality's "most universal form" — "Equality is not a dream. It is a decision" — and closed on the UN's founding as "an act of defiance… The defiance against the self-defeating notion that might makes right." The address is the cleanest available statement of the position [[Spheres of Influence]] politics rejects, delivered on the same morning as the rejection. Full treatment of the exchange is at [[UN General Assembly]]. ## Succession The race to replace him was already well advanced when he spoke. Seven candidates were in the field as of late September 2026, four of them women — among them Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett of Guyana, Rafael Grossi of Argentina, Macky Sall of Senegal, María Fernanda Espinosa of Ecuador, Ivonne A-Baki and Olara Otunnu of Uganda. Security Council straw polls, the informal encourage/discourage ballots that precede any formal vote, had reportedly favored Grynspan and Birkett without producing consensus. The Council's formal recommendation requires nine votes and no veto from a permanent member, and the appointment is normally settled between October and December, with the successor taking office **1 January 2027**. > [!warning] Unresolved > Straw-poll standings are reported from leaks and are not an official record; they are carried here as reporting, not result. The field itself may still change — several analysts expect late entrants because the P5 have shown little enthusiasm for the declared candidates. For the vault the succession is worth watching for one reason: the United States holds a veto over it, and the [[Second Trump Administration]] has spent two years arguing that the institution should be smaller. Whoever the Council recommends will have been acceptable to the government that is not paying its assessment. ## See Also - [[United Nations]] — the institution he heads - [[UN General Assembly]] — the 2026 General Debate in full - [[UN Charter]] — the document he invokes - [[UN Security Council]] — where the veto lives - [[Spheres of Influence]] — the rival theory of order - [[Globalist]] — the epithet aimed at his office - [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]] - [[Donald Trump]]