U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres briefs reporters following an informal meeting on Cyprus at the United Nations Office in Geneva, March 18, 2025. Violaine Martin/U.N. Photo.
Eve Epstein is the president of Epstein & Associates, a strategic communications and media firm located in NYC. She has also advised top U.N. officials, including a U.N. secretary-general.
(JNS) Anticipation is at a fever pitch for President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations on Sept. 23. While U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres renews his signature call for global leaders to “silence the guns,” Trump—derided by U.N. elites as a U.S. nationalist—is upstaging Guterres by making diplomacy deliver, effectively fulfilling the peacebuilding mandate that the secretary-general has forsaken.
The problem for Guterres is that under his watch, the guns have not fallen silent; if anything, they have grown louder since he took office in 2017. Meanwhile, the United Nations faces a deep financial crisis: Gutted staff disheartened, peacekeeping missions shuttered and entire agencies relocated, leaving the institution weakened just as global turbulence increases.
Promoting peace and security requires more than titles, and so, the world has turned elsewhere for leadership.
Diplomacy is judged by results, not rituals. The breakthroughs brokered in tense side rooms, the hostages released when negotiations seemed hopeless, the bridges built between adversaries, the ceasefires brokered that stop wars—this is the real diplomacy, not the titles engraved on U.N. letterhead or the speeches, press statements and reports beamed worldwide out of Turtle Bay. Judging by that metric, there is currently only one statesman on the international stage whose track record of diplomatic achievements looks decidedly more like that of a secretary-general than the man who currently occupies the post.
Like him or not, the man who once ridiculed the United Nations as “just a club for people to talk” has become the secretary-general’s functional substitute. The U.S. president is brokering historic peace deals, securing hostage releases in Gaza, Belarus, Russia, Afghanistan and Venezuela, and building unlikely partnerships—not as a utopian dream, but as a practical arrangement among U.N. member states.
One need not embrace Trump’s politics to admit that he achieved more tangible peace‑building initiatives than Guterres has managed as the “world’s top diplomat.”
For decades, the United Nations preached Arab-Israeli peace, yet the breakthrough came not from Turtle Bay but from Trump’s White House. The 2020 Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Trump upended years of stalemate with these states over the Palestinian Arab issue, focusing instead on practical cooperation in trade, technology and defense. His diplomacy created real working ties where endless U.N. resolutions had failed.
This was pragmatic peacemaking rooted not in moral lectures but in common-sense incentives. For example, by recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara—a move Guterres never dared—Trump unlocked Rabat’s participation in the Abraham Accords. All of a sudden, Morocco and Israel were cooperating on defense, agriculture, technology, travel and more. A regional stalemate had turned into a regional partnership.
The U.N. dreamed of such a breakthrough. Trump achieved it. That’s leadership.
Under Trump’s auspices, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century, Israel and Syria are expected to make official diplomatic contact, signing a historic security deal in Washington on Sept. 25, yet another breakthrough that eluded U.N. envoys.
Trump’s statesmanship played a crucial peacebuilding role across continents: He ended hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan; secured a peace accord between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda; negotiated a Thailand-Cambodia border ceasefire; and helped further economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, advancing Balkan peace.
He averted a potential war over the Nile River Dam dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt, and strong-armed Sudan’s generals to end decades of terror support and make peace. While Guterres remained stuck in process, Trump had presidents and warlords in the same room hashing out terms of agreement.
The president is a vocal proponent of ending the war in Ukraine through negotiation rather than indefinite escalation. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not, the fact that he champions direct talks sets him closer to the U.N. Charter’s ideals than the secretary-general’s muted presence.
During one of the most volatile periods of Indo-Pakistani relations in this century, Trump’s engagement exemplified the equitable outreach that is supposed to define the U.N. secretary‑general’s diplomacy. He again outperformed Guterres by doing something that the secretary-general hasn’t mastered: He balanced rivals without alienating either side. He created space for dialogue. He lowered the tension.
With all of his staff, budgets, mandates and “moral authority,” Guterres has few achievements under his watch. Instead, he retreats into rhetoric. And when it comes to hot wars, he tends to descend into partisanship, forfeiting the effectiveness of the world body as a trusted referee.
The U.N. Charter endows the secretary-general with an inviolate responsibility: impartiality. His role is not to be a player in conflicts but a mediator. Yet Guterres has repeatedly undermined this principle with his fanatical fixation on one U.N. member: Israel.
Guterres issues one-sided erroneous statements against Jerusalem while sidestepping decades of terrorism and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. He obfuscates the savage Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 and the legitimate self-defense of the Jewish state with Orwellian moral equivalence between terrorists and victims. He gives second billing to the plight of Israeli hostages who are tortured, starved, sexually abused and buried alive underground in Hamas tunnels.
This posture has made Guterres persona non grata in Israel, a country that, love its politics or not, is a sovereign U.N. member state whose borders were violated by Hamas terrorist thugs ruling Gaza and ruthlessly dedicated to annihilating Israel.
When the head of the United Nations alienates a member state this completely, he loses any ability to perform one of his core functions: serving as an honest broker in disputes. No one seriously believes that he can resolve the Gaza war.
That is the bind Guterres has put the United Nations in. He has eroded the institution’s credibility in one of the world’s most volatile regions and squandered his own credibility. Obsessed with condemning Israel, he has alienated one U.N. member to the point where he cannot possibly serve as a neutral arbiter. He issues statements, organizes summits, gives lofty speeches and meanders around the globe for photo-ops and ceremonies, yet peace remains elusive.
The lesson here is that legitimacy in global diplomacy is not conferred by title; it is earned through efficacy.
For decades, the United Nations has enjoyed a near-monopoly on the “moral authority” of peacemaking. But authority cannot subsist on prestige alone. It must be replenished by action. And if the American president can demonstrate that deals can be struck where the United Nations sputters, then perhaps the real question is not who holds the title of secretary‑general, but whether the institution itself still deserves U.S. tax dollars and the relevance it claims.
The paradox of our moment is striking: Guterres, tasked with impartial global mediation, plays the partisan; while Trump, reviled by U.N. elites as a unilateralist, fills the vacuum and steps into the shoes of the “world’s top diplomat” to do the U.N. secretary-general’s job.