As the world’s leaders and foreign ministers meet in New York for the UN General Assembly this week, recognition of a Palestinian state is expected to be paraded as progress towards peace. In reality, it will be nothing of the sort. It will confirm what has become increasingly obvious to anyone watching the UN over the past eight years: that the organisation is in a state of malaise, and its Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, is the embodiment of the decline.

The UN is no stranger to dysfunction, which I saw first-hand as a Security Council Counterterror Coordinator for five years. Every secretary-general has faced allegations of irrelevance, hypocrisy or incompetence. But Guterres stands out for having presided over an organisation that is now derided by its own staff. It is not the us

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