Extract from ABC News
Analysis
US President Donald Trump addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York last year. (Reuters: Mike Segar)
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.
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.
What's on the UN's agenda?
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.
When Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong attended the United Nations General Assembly 12 months ago, it felt like something significant might be happening. (AP: Andres Kudacki)
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.
Drone warfare in Ukraine
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."
Germany's weapons transformation
But Russia can now target passenger trains on Ukraine's western borders, as well as penetrate the airspace of Lithuania, Poland and Germany.
While analysts vainly searched for signals about what had been achieved at the recent meeting in Moscow between Donald Trump's envoys and Vladimir Putin, you have to assume that they were prompted by Trump altering his assessment of who may come out a winner from this war, after briefly putting the case that Ukraine had the upper hand.
The same drones being fired at Ukraine can be used by the Iranians, of course, in their assault on Gulf states and US facilities located there.
Like Ukraine, the Gulf states have run out of interceptors, making them increasingly vulnerable to attacks, including those on Saudi Arabia from Iranian-linked Houthis in Yemen.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has cancelled his trip to the UN. (Reuters: Christian Mang)
Donald Trump was this week dismissing calls for the US to give more immediate assistance to Saudi Arabia in fighting the Houthis, despite the threat their move along the coast of Yemen now poses to global oil markets.
The sudden urgent need for armaments — and the transformation of many economies into weapons manufacturers — notably Türkiye, Poland and now Germany — changes many geopolitical equations.
Two more states in Germany, in the old East, will have elections this weekend, with uncertain outcomes. But German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is concerned enough — and worried enough about his own future — that he cancelled his trip to the UN.
Just consider the spectre of a Germany run by a far-right party, openly sympathetic to Moscow, that has been transforming itself into one of the world's major weapons manufacturing hubs.
It casts manoeuvring at the UN headquarters in a rather irrelevant light.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.
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