Back in full force, UN General Assembly shows how the most important diplomatic work is face-to-face

There are two opposing theses about the UN General Assembly: It's a place that shows the true power of words, where leaders inspire action with rousing speeches on the urgent issues of our times; or it's a talking shop, where leaders perform for domestic audiences with political rhetoric on the cause of the day.

These duelling viewpoints were tested when the coronavirus pandemic shut down much in-person diplomacy for several years. After three years of virtual, then hybrid General Debates, the scores of top leaders who attended the annual U.N. summit this week exhibited the return of in-person diplomacy, and provided ammunition to those who advocate for its importance.

It wasn't just drama, like whether Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky would be addressing the Security Council in the presence of Russia’s top diplomat (the two ultimately did not cross paths).

Many of the formal speeches delivered before the green stone in the General Assembly could have been performed straight to camera, with few other people in the room (and in 2020, they were). More than the speeches, at the heart of the annual meetings is the face-to-face interaction between leaders. And as important to day-to-day relations between countries is the face-to-face interaction between lower-level staff, shown this year as diplomatic delegations and non-governmental organizations packed the UN headquarters and hotels and meeting spaces nearby.

The diplomatic agreements worked out in informal interactions have been key to accomplishments that weren't formally laid out in the U.N.’s founding document — activities like peacekeeping in recent years and decolonization decades ago, said Katie Laatikainen, a professor of political science and international relations at Adelphi University.

Much of the world looks at the General Assembly like a world government body, she said, and ignores the less high-profile work that's advanced in behind-the-scenes interactions.

“People expect governance but that’s not really what the U.N. does,” she said. The General Assembly, she said, actually “overshadows what the U.N. does well."

Side meetings on themes running from conservation to Middle East peace were taking place throughout the week. In-person relations are as important, if not more so, for non-governmental organizations with stakes in the outcomes, attendees said.

The La Jolla, California-based Waitt Institute works on ocean conservation and during the pandemic, “we were all on Zoom, of course ... it actually served an enormously important function,” in communicating with the small island nations where Waitt does much of its work, said executive director Kathryn Mengerink.

However, real life is not “how we engage when we’re in a box on a screen,” she said, from midtown Manhattan, where she was engaging in the sort of in-person communication that she called essential to her group's work.

Scott Hamilton, a former State Department official who has worked in Cuba, among other locations, described how the pandemic hurt diplomacy because “face-to-face, you can build trust and comfort between people.”

Despite the more robust attendance, this year did see some notable absences: With the exception of U.S. President Joe Biden, the leaders of China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom — the four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — did not attend.

United Nations officials say it’s a mistake to confuse in-person attendance, particularly by national leaders, as a referendum on the meeting's importance.