At the UN’s 80th General Assembly, the Gaza-Ukraine deadlock and P5 vetoes fuel Kazakhstan-led calls to reform the Security Council by elevating middle powers.

The United Nations opened its 80th General Assembly debate in New York on September 23, 2025, with Germany’s Annalena Baerbock presiding and a theme that doubles as a plea: “Working Together: 80 Years of Collective Efforts for Peace, Development, and Human Rights, and the Path Forward.” The ritual is familiar—leaders cycling through 15–30 minute addresses that sketch national priorities—but the context is anything but. Wars grind on, climate diplomacy sags, and the rules-based order that the UN was built to steward creaks under the weight of power politics.

This year’s debate unfolded under two long shadows: Gaza and Ukraine. U.S. President Donald Trump—typically early at the podium—used his appearance to lacerate what he cast as the UN’s “globalist agenda,” rail against immigration, and deride green energy as a “hoax.” He urged Europe to stop purchasing Russian gas, condemned recognition of Palestinian statehood, and reiterated support for Israel, including a demand that hostages in Gaza be released. For 56 minutes, he wandered beyond the prepared text, detouring into personal broadsides—London’s mayor caught a stray—and scolding allies from Paris to London over migration and climate policy. Media coverage quickly framed the speech as confrontational, and The Guardian branded it pre-election “electioneering” aimed at a domestic audience rather than multilateral compromise. Even his boasts about brokering peace elsewhere—for instance, between Armenia and Azerbaijan—drew skepticism as inflated.

Trump’s performance served as a reminder that the United States, the UN’s largest financial backer, is both indispensable and unpredictable. António Guterres, who in an earlier era quietly worked to maintain lines of communication with Washington to avoid institutional whiplash, now promotes “UN80,” a gradualist package of managerial and economic reforms aimed at making the system less sclerotic and more effective. European capitals—the UK among them—spent years telling themselves that Washington’s volatility could be waited out. That wager has expired. Delay has only deferred hard questions about what a functional UN looks like when its central shareholder oscillates between engagement and scorn.

Other leaders tried to drag the hall back to the calamity still unfolding in Gaza. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned the humanitarian devastation and demanded that Israel immediately halt military operations. Qatar’s Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani decried political assassinations and actions he said were undercutting efforts to stop the mass killing of Palestinians. Their rhetoric—anguished, accusatory—captured the mood of a chamber where consensus has become a rare commodity.

Amid the cacophony, one address stood out for its diagnosis and prescription. Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev called for comprehensive UN reform centered on the Security Council. He pointed to a world that is arming up—global military spending hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024—and to an arms control architecture that is fraying, eroding strategic stability. The mindset hardening across capitals, he warned, is pulling states into an abyss; the task now is to uproot belligerent thinking itself.

That plea lands hardest where the UN’s credibility is daily contested: the Security Council. The body retains a simple geometry—15 members, five of them permanent (the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, and France), and ten rotating by region for two-year terms. Resolutions need nine affirmative votes, but any permanent member can veto, and with that single upraised hand, halt action even when the other 14 agree. In theory, the Council is where the international community comes together to prevent war, sanction those who undermine peace, and authorize peacekeepers. In practice, it is where national interests collide in the open.

The Gaza file has laid this bare. Since hostilities escalated, Washington—Israel’s key patron—has cast six vetoes, including on September 18, 2025, when the U.S. blocked a draft from ten elected members that demanded an immediate, permanent ceasefire, the release of hostages held by Hamas, the removal of aid restrictions, and secure access for UN and humanitarian workers. Moscow and Beijing, for their part, have swatted down texts they judged too indulgent of Israel—most notably a U.S.-tabled resolution in March 2024 calling for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire.” The Ukraine file is similarly stalemated: since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, successive condemnations have been strangled in the cradle by Moscow’s veto. The through-line is unmistakable: the P5 continue to use procedural privilege as a shield for themselves and their friends.

None of this is new. Reform of the Council has been debated since the 1990s, usually as a thought experiment and occasionally as a campaign promise. What is new is the urgency. The system designed in 1945 to maintain peace is misfiring in 2025, not only because the veto exists, but also because the geopolitical compact that made the veto tolerable has eroded. The United States, Russia, and China treat earlier bargains as optional; each seeks room to maneuver, and all three have little patience for constraint when their equities are at stake. Middle powers—those with serious capabilities but modest ambitions—are losing patience with a chamber that cannot hold the heaviest states to account.

Tokayev’s solution gestures toward a long-standing blueprint: the so-called G4 proposal, which has been pushed since 2005 by Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil, would add permanent seats (two for Asia, one for Africa) with veto rights. But Tokayev puts a different emphasis. He argues for elevating “responsible” middle powers—via expansion, rotation, or new membership categories—to dilute the gravitational pull of the P5, particularly China, which views most reform packages as a threat to its relative clout. His case is not abstract. Kazakhstan, he suggests, has the profile the Council needs more of: energy-rich, uranium-heavy, anchored at a strategic crossroads—yet without imperial pretensions. Empower such states, the argument goes, and you might prevent paralysis on the toughest dockets, from Ukraine to Gaza.

The pitch doubles as a biography. Tokayev is a former diplomat and senior UN official who understands how the institution actually functions. Speaking in English on the first day to maximize reach, he reminded delegates that Kazakhstan had surrendered the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the 1990s, hosted talks with Syria, and in 2023, launched a UN Center for Nuclear Disarmament. Beyond set-piece speeches, Astana has pressed Council reform on the G20 and BRICS agendas, backing additional permanent seats for Africa, Asia, and Latin America—spaces where middle powers could serve as bridges rather than battering rams. It is an appeal to rebalance representation without breaking the machine.

Could it work? Reformers have always run aground on the rock of reality: changing the Council requires consent from those least inclined to share power. Even so, the ground is shifting. The Gaza and Ukraine stalemates have given elected members unusual cohesion—and a willingness to force procedural votes that keep the moral ledger legible. Regional blocs are more assertive than they were a decade ago, and Africa’s case for at least one permanent seat is now near-unanswerable on both demographic and legitimacy grounds. The veto’s abolition is fantasy; recalibrating who sits at the table is not.

There is also the matter of what reform is for. If the point is to restore the Council’s capacity to act on mass-atrocity files, then composition must be paired with constraint: ideas such as voluntary veto restraint in situations of mass atrocities; emergency procedural pathways that force public explanations when a veto is cast; and tighter reporting requirements that link Council deadlock to General Assembly accountability. None of these fixes is glamorous. All of them make it harder for the most powerful to pretend that paralysis is a neutral outcome.

Eighty years on, the UN remains a mirror. It reflects neither our best aspirations nor our worst impulses exclusively, but whatever the member states bring into the room. This General Assembly showcased both extremes: nationalist theater and humanitarian alarm, bureaucratic tinkering and genuine reform proposals. As the superpowers flex, the most interesting politics may be happening in the middle—among states that have no desire to dominate the system but every reason to keep it from breaking. If the UN is to remain the place where the world argues without coming apart, those states will have to be given more than a back-row seat.