The senior statesman
On taking the reins as UN Secretary-General, Guterres pledged “a surge in diplomacy for peace”. In practice, of course, this was far easier said than done.
Like at the UNHCR, Guterres implemented institutional reforms as UN chief and his early years were shaped by protracted wars in Syria and Yemen, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, the renewed conflict in Libya, the anti-multilateralist approach of Donald Trump’s first presidential term and the pandemic. Security Council divisions, however, limited what he could achieve when it came to the biggest conflicts.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians and Russians awoke to news that their countries were in a full-scale war. Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s eastern frontier while terrified civilians sought shelter in Kyiv’s Metro.
The UN Security Council convened and Guterres condemned the invasion. “In the name of humanity, bring your troops back to Russia,” he implored President Vladimir Putin, who ignored the plea.
On April 26 , Guterres met with Putin to discuss evacuation routes from besieged areas, such as the city of Mariupol, and later that week he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Guterres’s diplomacy saw some initial success. In 2022, he brokered the Black Sea grain deal, enabling the safe passage of Ukrainian ships carrying grain exports from the country’s southern ports, as well as Russian vessels carrying food and fertiliser.
But beyond these humanitarian initiatives, he’s been less successful in handling the war’s thorny politics. In 2024, Zelenskyy spurned Guterres’s planned visit to Kyiv after the UN chief attended the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Kazan, Russia, where he shook Putin’s hand and called for a “just peace”.
By this point, Putin was wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes. Guterres’s decision to attend the summit and meet Putin drew sharp criticism from Ukrainian officials, European leaders and human rights groups.
Then, on October 7, 2023, another conflict erupted as Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and foreign nationals, including hundreds of revellers at a music festival. The Israeli response was a heavy bombardment of Gaza, including attacks on hospitals, refugee camps and designated “safe zones”. An estimated 75,000 Palestinians had been violently killed by early 2025 and the UN’s independent Commission of Inquiry concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejects.
Two weeks after the initial attack, Guterres drew sharp condemnation from Israeli leaders for saying October 7th “did not happen in a vacuum” – referring to the blockade of Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank – and calling for a ceasefire. Guterres clarified his remarks, stressing that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” as he kept pushing for a ceasefire.
On December 6, 2023, Guterres invoked the rarely used Article 99 of the UN Charter, bringing to the attention of the UN’s 15-member Security Council “any issue that may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security”, calling on its members to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza and press for a ceasefire. Two days later, the United States vetoed the resolution.
In October 2024, Israel declared Guterres persona non grata, barring him from the country after accusing him of failing to “unequivocally condemn” Iran’s missile attack on Israel. This deepened the rift between Israel and the UN, limiting his ability to engage with Israeli leaders.
So Guterres has failed to make significant progress in Gaza or Ukraine, two of the major conflicts of his tenure. Part of that is due to the natural constraints of the job, having to maintain a commitment to international law while remaining a credible broker between global powers. He cannot impose settlements without the cooperation of the parties involved and the backing of major powers.
The Security Council is often divided by the competing interests of Russia, China and the Western powers, and the UN’s work has been complicated by governments — including the United States under Trump — that have challenged multilateral institutions or disputed the authority of international legal bodies.
A 2021 International Crisis Group assessment found that some officials involved in Middle East mediation viewed Guterres as reluctant to expend his personal political capital on risky peace initiatives. The assessment reflected his approach before the Gaza war and the invasion of Ukraine, but it perhaps explains his style of relying on envoys, humanitarian advocacy and quiet diplomacy rather than high-stakes personal mediation.
Others say that while he takes a keen interest in crises worldwide, he can rely too much on world leaders’ interpretation of events. During Ethiopia’s Tigray war, for instance, he publicly relayed Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s assurance that Eritrean troops had not entered Tigrayan territory, apart from a disputed border area. Abiy later acknowledged that Eritrean forces had entered Tigray.
Guterres has also been cautious about deploying traditional UN Blue Helmet missions, questioning whether they can operate effectively without a viable political process and sufficient security. That caution was visible in Haiti. Asked to consider a wider range of UN options as gangs tightened their grip on Port-au-Prince, Guterres ruled out deploying a conventional Blue Helmet mission. Instead, he proposed that the UN fund and operate a logistics office to support the Kenyan-led multinational force while strengthening the UN’s political mission and providing limited assistance to Haiti’s police.
“Before Guterres came to office, there had been a steady expansion of UN peacekeeping,” explained Daniel Forti, a UN specialist at Crisis Group.
“There was a worrying trend that a number of missions – including previous ones deployed to Somalia and the current one in the Central African Republic and the DRC – were being asked to impose peace in places where there was no peace to keep.”
“Guterres was incredibly sceptical of this type of approach and sought to encourage others to take on those responsibilities and have a much narrower interpretation of what UN Blue Helmets can actually do in certain types of conflicts,” he added.
When it comes to actual peace-making, Guterres prefers the UN to refrain from taking decisions on behalf of locals and instead delegates to regional players. In the case of Ethiopia, he wanted the African Union (AU) to take a more prominent role and called for more funding for AU efforts.
His reluctance to engage more fully may stem from personal experience. In 2017, the secretary-general took part in Cyprus reunification talks that collapsed, leaving him “visibly despondent.” Likewise, in 2019, he visited Libya to try to bring the warring sides to the negotiating table, only for rebels to mount an offensive on Tripoli. Before leaving the country, Guterres said Libya left him with “a heavy heart”.
According to Forti, these experiences may have also left him wary.
“At first, when he came into office, he emphasised a very strong agenda on conflict prevention,” Forti said.
“But after a few instances where Guterres tried to get personally involved in peace-making efforts, including in Cyprus, he got burned quite quickly and didn’t show an inclination to persevere with political processes over a long period of time.”
Any hope of quick wins or decisive outcomes proved a lot harder.
“From that moment, he’s shown less and less inclination to be directly involved,” Forti added.
Rather than finding solutions to conflicts, he says, Guterres instead focuses on humanitarian relief, ensuring lifesaving assistance reaches civilians.
Guterres himself has admitted that world peace is “a Sisyphean task”, referring to the mythical Greek king cursed to keep pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again. Perhaps drawing a lesson from that, Guterres has channelled some of his energy into areas where he felt he could make more of a difference – notably, the climate crisis.
“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires,” he told world leaders in 2022. “No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”
“We have a choice – collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
Paloma Costa, a 34-year-old Brazilian climate activist who served on Guterres’s 2020 inaugural Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, said the secretary-general sees global warming as a major problem facing society and has actively supported youth-led movements fighting for their future.
“He has been very committed to paying attention to the [problem], to listening to young people who have been taking on this agenda for ourselves and putting up our voices strongly against decisions that are destroying our common environment.”
The advisory group’s responsibilities included compiling reports and demands from young people across the globe and summarising them for Guterres.
“He made sure there was pressure on the global level because for a long time, the climate discussions were not advancing very much,” Costa said.
In doing so, Guterres has emphasised that poorer, underdeveloped nations in the Global South suffer the most from environmental catastrophes and that wealthier countries must take on their fair share of the responsibility. He has called for windfall taxes on the fossil fuel industry, telling global delegates in 2022 that “polluters must pay”. He also praised the establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), agreed to at a 2022 climate conference, to help vulnerable countries cope with climate emergencies. But these initiatives have yet to be applied at the scale needed and the FRLD remains severely underfunded.
“Even though he didn’t always have an immediate answer, I always felt embraced because he always made sure we were understood and taken seriously, and there was always a follow-up to let us know if something could not be resolved, why it could not be resolved,” Costa said.
Consistent with his non-confrontational approach, however, Guterres has stopped short of naming specific parties or countries unduly responsible for the warming planet.
Guterres has also warned against the unchecked development of artificial intelligence (AI). Since 2023, he has sought to make AI governance a central UN concern, pressing governments to develop international safeguards and give developing countries a greater voice in shaping the technology. He has also called for a legally binding ban on lethal autonomous weapons.
In July, he warned that AI could become one of humanity’s greatest opportunities — or one of its greatest dangers — depending on whether governments and technology firms agree to govern it effectively.
