When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening.

Australia joined a number of other nations in recognising the state of Palestine. The world was scrabbling to regroup around the chaos unleashed by Donald Trump. The UN was itself fighting for survival amid Trump's hostile assault on it.

The UN often feels damned to irrelevance, but it is needed now more than ever

By Laura Tingle

This year, things feel like they will be a bit more… prosaic. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is due to finish his term at the end of the year so lobbying is in full swing on the question of his replacement.

Australia is lobbying for a non-permanent place on the Security Council for the 2029-30 term.

That's something that Australia has always taken reasonably seriously — though outsiders might wonder why, given veto powers of the permanent members of the Council (the US, Russia, China, France and the UK) means it rarely makes significant decisions.

The Security Council is still seen as an important platform for smaller countries.

Australian leadership "of the Council's response to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and the first Council resolution on small arms and light weapons are prominent examples" of what occasional membership of the Security Council can achieve, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website says.

And there is a particularly long history for Australia with the Security Council, given the significant role the country, and External Affairs Minister HV 'Doc' Evatt, played in the establishment of the UN in the first place. It was one of the first members of the Council in 1946 in acknowledgement of that role, and in fact even chaired its first session.

The hostility of the Trump administration to the UN — and for that matter many multinational institutions — often feels it damns it to irrelevance.

(In July, the US also reportedly attempted to enlist its NATO allies in a campaign to "systematically dismantle" the International Criminal Court.)

But the UN continues to play important roles, to the extent its much reduced funding allows, in humanitarian work and peacekeeping.

Those activities would only seem more important just now, given the increasingly intractable and widening conflicts in the Middle East and Europe.

Yet strangely the escalation of those conflicts doesn't seem to be reflected in any material actions contemplated by the UN when leaders meet there next week.

There will be a "two state" conference where leaders will discuss events in Israel.

But there are no signs of any further movement to try to address the lack of progress in Gaza, nor the increasing settler violence and land grabs by Israel in the occupied West Bank.

This is despite the fact that the Trump Board of Peace proposal for Gaza — to which the Security Council gave its blessing last year — has gone absolutely nowhere since then.

There seems to be no talk of any further UN resolutions on these issues. Or of Australia pushing for them, even as it now finds itself at odds over West Bank trade sanctions with the countries it acted with on the recognition of Palestine last year.

Last year's meeting of the UN happened before the US and Israel attacked Iran, and before events seemed to turn for a while in Ukraine's favour before, in more recent times, looking as if they may have turned in Russia's favour.

And it happened before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz gave a whole new impetus to the long conflict in Yemen by increasing the strategic importance of the Red Sea.

These developments feel to have only tipped the scales determining world events further towards those possessing weapons and away from those pursuing diplomacy and multilateral action.

The wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East are now being transformed by defensive weapons being depleted, or running out altogether, while new forms of offensive weapons are arriving.

In Ukraine, analysts note the arrival of the newest iteration of drone warfare — but this time it is not drone innovation on the Ukrainian side as it has so often been this past year.

Instead, Russia is using Iranian-sourced attack drones with a terrifying new feature: the capacity to travel at jet speed, thanks to turbojet engines rather than propellers, carrying large payloads, at considerable distance. For all intents and purposes, these are likened to a cruise missile, but much cheaper to build.

It was one of these Shahed 136 drones — a new version called the Geran 5 — that hit a train station near the Ukrainian-Polish border, well to the west of Kyiv, just after a train carrying a range of European officials had passed through and while former Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was in the station.

The managing editor of Foreign Policy, Ravi Agrawal, sketched a bleak picture this week after returning from Kyiv.

"We're coming up against the cold months now, and Russia's been developing about maybe 3,000 of these jet-powered drones a week", he said.

"That means that, come the winter season, it'll probably have tens of thousands of these drones ready to go. And it could shoot them at all forms of civilian and energy infrastructure."

What this is going to end up meaning, Agrawal said, "is that Ukraine could lose energy supplies, power supplies. It could get very cold, very dark for the Ukrainian people."

Agrawal observed that "one could have made the case a few months ago that Ukraine was in the ascendancy".

"It was really beginning to attack Russian energy installations. They had made Putin fearful to the extent that he low keyed his Victory Day parade, which he cares about a lot."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-19/united-nations-damned-to-irrelevance-needed-more-ever/107170310

UNFORTUNATELY, LAURA TINGLE HAS NOT [OR CANNOT DUE TO INGRAINED POLITICAL RUSSOPHOBIC IDEOLOGIES] STATED THE GEOPOLITAL GAME PLAYED BY THE WEST AGAINST RUSSIA. PITY. WE NEED SOMEONE LIKE HER TO OPEN THEIR EYES TO THE REALITY OF WESTERN AGGRESSION AND DECEIT THAT HAVE PROVOKED THIS CONFLICT.... EVENTUALLY WE HOPE A SERIOUS WESTERN JOURNALIST WILL BREAK RANK LIKE TUCKER CARLSON HAS DONE — AND START USING INFORMATION FROM THE LIKES OF SCOTT RITTER ET AL...

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT (WW3) HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA TO BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

RESTORE THE RIGHTS OF THE RUSSIAN SPEAKING PEOPLE OF "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

RESTITUTE THE ORTHODOX CHURCH PROPERTIES AND RIGHTS

RELEASE THE OPPOSITION MEMBERS FROM PRISON

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE EU.....

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

PLEASE VISIT:

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