Jacinda Ardern on a previous trip to New York. Photo / Supplied
Dozens of world leaders are boarding planes in London, where they have been attending the funeral of the late Queen, and fly to New York, where they'll attend the event they'd planned to be at this week: the United Nations General Assembly leaders' week.
UNGA high-level week (often known as leaders' week or just UNGA) as it's known in the trade, is an annual shopping mall of diplomacy, in which leaders from every corner of the globe congregate under one roof for a whirlwind week of diplomacy.
Among the leaders red-eyeing it to New York was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. The PM was meant to enjoy a "velvet carpet" business class experience on Air New Zealand's inaugural flight to New York as part of a major tourism push in the United States. Instead, Ardern had to snap up the last remaining tickets on a layover-heavy route to London before hightailing it to New York as soon as the funeral was over.
The Herald understands securing tickets for Ardern, her small delegation, and security on flights in and out of London was no easy task.
She'll miss two days of UN diplomacy - but no one's that bothered, most of the important folk were in London anyway.
Ardern will be in New York City from today to Saturday. The rapidly rearranged schedule includes a Christchurch Call summit with French President Emmanuel Macron and a bilateral meeting with UN Secretary-General António Guterres. She'll deliver her address to the UN General Assembly on Friday (Saturday morning NZ time). A handful of other diplomatic engagements are still being scheduled or rescheduled, victims of the chaos resulting from the death of the Queen.
UNGA is a highlight of any diplomatic calendar, but this year is special in that it is the first time the UN has held an in-person leaders week since 2019.
Leaders from the world over are scheduled to attend - but there's a catch: you have to visit in person, Zooming in is not an option. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a possible attendee, although he may have secured a rare exception allowing him to appear remotely (his foe, Russian President Vladimir Putin and ally Chinese President Xi Jinping are not attending).
The sheer number of attendees is the main reason UNGA is so important.
Former Prime Minister Helen Clark, who attended high-level week as prime minister in 2000 and in her role as the head of the United Nations Development Programme between 2009 and 2017 said it was a rare opportunity for leaders to meet with leaders.
Clark said it was an "incredibly busy week", but one that provided an incredible opportunity to bump into other leaders.
"Normally the Secretary-General would host a leaders' lunch. That's a good opportunity to see upwards of 150 people at leader level," she said.
Colin Keating, who was New Zealand's Permanent Representative of New Zealand to the United Nations, from 1993-1996 (a period encompassing a stint on the powerful Security Council during the Rwandan Genocide) said leaders' week was "an opportunity for presidents and prime ministers to all be in one place at one time and to conduct business without all of the protocol and palaver that goes with state visits.
"You can achieve a lot of the same things that you need or want to achieve with just a few hours, informally without the publicity that would come if you had to do it on a bilateral basis," Keating said.
He compared it to a "marketplace" where everyone gets together to attend.
Basically everyone attends. The most recent schedule has 153 heads of state or heads of government attending. Even international pariahs sometimes venture out of the geopolitical doghouse to show face. In 2009, then-Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi attended. His delegation famously pitched Bedouin tents in a field owned by a famous New York property developer - one who shared Gaddafi's enthusiasm for fascistic politics and cosmetically altered skin pigmentation (yes, that one).
The kinds of meetings leaders have at the UN can generally be broken down into three categories (not including the massive gatherings of multiple leaders).
There are formal bilateral meetings, which are prescheduled, relatively formal one-on-one meetings between leaders and their top officials. Then there are "pull asides", named after what they sound like, a leader pulling another leader aside in the sidelines of an event. These have actually become more formalised to the extent they are essentially pre-arranged.
Then there are what Keating described as the "genuinely impromptu opportunities" to meet other leaders.
"Inevitably people are mingling and they get the chance to talk about stuff," he said.
Clark believed there was something about the cloistered UN complex that engendered these impromptu meetings.
"The UN precinct is off limits to anyone who doesn't have a special kind of pass. It's very tight. Behind the cordon area there is scope for leaders to rub shoulders and talk in the corridors," Clark said.
Clark said the other big opportunity for leaders to mingle was on the floor of the General Assembly hall itself.
It's also an opportunity for governments to hold or attend sideline events, casting some of the international spotlight onto an issue they particularly care about. For Ardern, this means a Christchurch Call Summit with Macron, where the pair will discuss the latest efforts to bring states and tech companies together to combat the spread of harmful online content.
Ardern will also appear at a pandemic leadership event moderated by Clark, and attended by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was president of Liberia during the Ebola crisis. She is also appearing at a star-studded climate change investment event, filling in for Prince William, who had to cancel his appearance after the death of the Queen.
A programme of other bilateral leader-to-leader meetings was being reorganised after the death of the Queen.
Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies, David Capie, said the UN provided a "rare opportunity to get a lot of leaders in the same place at the same time, and for NZ that give us a chance to press some issues that are important to us".
He said Ardern will "always be wary about being seen out on the international cocktail circuit when people are hurting with the rising cost of living at home. That's why you will see a lot of this framed around the PM as a marketer in chief – plugging the new Air NZ flight to New York, meeting movie industry people."
Keating said the logistics of the event were like nothing else. Ambassadors from nearly 200 countries try to book meeting rooms in the UN complex for meetings between their leaders and ministers - leaders who are often used to getting their own way.
Then there were security and logistics concerns, which tended to be taken over by the United States, which has extraordinary security requirements for its president.
Leaders sometimes choose to meet at the offices or hotels, but this opens up a different problem: liaising with New York City over shutting down streets for leaders' motorcades.
"New York is a city which hates the thought of being locked down," Keating said.
As for the actual agenda, this year is likely to be dominated by the war in Ukraine, climate change and pandemic recovery.
Another issue that might bubble to the surface is how the UN could reform itself to deal with the future.
The United Nations General Assembly has agreed to have a summit in two years on the world of the future.
Keating said the United Nations had deliberately avoided calling this project a "reform" of the United Nations, because that word has become "poisonous".
"They're talking about how to future-proof global relations for the future," Keating said.
"Inevitably people are going to be talking about that. How are we going to make this happen? How are we going to take control of it so it delivers outcomes that work for us and delivers outcomes that work for us as opposed to the kind of outcomes that China and Russia and North Korea would like to see?"
Keating said that while this process had started with quite a limited mandate, it could expand to include much more, including potentially widespread reforms of the UN itself.
"Everybody knows that once the negotiating book is opened, probably everything will be on the table," he said.
He said he hoped to see a more "nimble" and quick United Nations.
New Zealand has had a longstanding opposition to one particular feature of the United Nations: the power of the permanent five members of the Security Council to veto resolutions. This gives those countries - France, the UK, Russia, China and the United States - immense power.
Keating said that while reform of the Security Council was not explicitly on the agenda, it was inevitable that it would come up.
"While no one has said 'let's put reform of the Security Council on the agenda' it's almost inevitable that it's going to come up as part of the negotiations," he said.
"A UN of the future, any global system of the future, is going to involve compromise," he said.
Clark was less sure the Security Council could be reformed, particularly in light of US-China tensions.
"I'm not holding my breath," Clark said.
Capie said he expected Ardern to use her time at the UN to call out Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and for its sabotage of nuclear non-proliferation talks this year.
"[R]emember the Security Council couldn't act on Ukraine because of the Russian veto, Russia blocked consensus in the UN's Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty negotiations.
"Ardern has called out that bad behaviour before and I am sure will do again.
"She has said that while New Zealand understands international institutions are imperfect we need to work to make them stronger. But beyond reminding people of the value of multilateralism and berating countries that use the veto, there's obvious limits to what New Zealand can do," he said.
