It’s not polite, as a general rule, to visit your hosts and criticize the way they do things. Unless, that is, you’re helping to pay the rent.

World leaders have spent the past week at the United Nations doing just that, convening at its grandiloquent headquarters to tell each other — and those who administer the planet's most prominent global institution — that the foundational pillars are cracked, outdated and not in good working order.

Some version of this happens every year. It's part of the overall theater. Leaders point out the U.N.’s flaws and tell it to buckle down and get things done. Then, at the end of speeches, they congratulate themselves for doing important work and go home saying, effectively, “Good talk!” And the conversation pauses for a year.

Yet in recent years, as the United Nations increasingly becomes one of its members' favorite subjects at the General Assembly, a particular turn of phrase has been emerging from world leaders' mouths more and more, aimed at the U.N. itself. It can be mapped sort of like this: We need you, we support you, BUT ...

And this year, with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres himself setting the bleak and critical tone after his team proposed major reforms for the instution's 80th anniversary, the critiques from dozens of nations as they “address this august assembly” feel even more prominent and pointed than usual. Two particularly sharp comments this past week draw that notion out in stark relief.

“We must ask ourselves today: How has the U.N. lived up to expectations? And just look at the state of the world," said Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's foreign minister. “Where has the U.N. actually made a difference?”

And from........

© Japan Today