 Richard, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me again about the state of the United Nations, a little bit later than we did last year when we spoke at the time of the opening of the General Assembly. But I think going back to last year is probably an appropriate place to start when we, when we spoke. Trump was still in power. A number of people were looking forward to him, leaving the White House partly because he will give the United Nations a more friendly White House and I wonder whether you'd care to reflect a little bit upon that what you know the US change of administration has meant. When we spoke, the, the Secretary General was still waiting to be want to get his second term. And, of course, he did that this past summer, and I wonder also whether that has led to a more activist. And one of the criticisms in the view of some against him that is always been exceedingly cautious when it comes to to crisis, and whether this, this second term has has altered that. And more generally, when we spoke last year, of course, the dynamics of the Security Council was very fraught, we looked at a number of the different files from Syria to Yemen and others. And once we touch on Afghanistan and a great deal has changed there so I wonder whether you could give us a very brief or give me a very brief sense of where we are one year on, in terms of the dynamics of Security Council, particularly in relation to the, to the management of crises. So let's start with the change in US leadership, which has come unsurprisingly with some major changes in the US approach to the UN. I mean by the end of Trump's term in office. You can see at the UN over COVID and other issues had become highly erratic and sometimes they're pretty destructive. And actually, in New York, we could see that morale in the US mission to the UN on First Avenue was declining. And we noticed that American diplomats in New York were often cut off from their masters in Washington. And this lack of US support for the UN was feeding into a broader sense of malaise around the institution. And if you go back to late 2020 and you look at the way the UN responded to the start of the war in Ethiopia, or the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. So the UN just couldn't respond in considerable part because the US didn't have a plan and didn't want to work through the UN. Things were very bad indeed. Now, we have seen some clear and obvious changes since Biden took office since in January. And his ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas Greenfield, kept on telling us that America was back and that meant multilateralism was back. And in a lot of ways, they've lived up to those slogans. The US has rejoined the Paris climate change agreement. And Biden stopped the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization, which Trump was boycotting over COVID. Just a few days ago, the US won a seat on the Human Rights Council, which Trump also boycotted. And so we have seen the US re-engage in a pretty systematic fashion with bits of the UN that Trump hated. Beyond that, talking to diplomats in New York, they will tell you that the mood in US-UN, the US mission has improved a good deal, that American diplomats are suddenly civil and constructive, whereas previously they were either disconnected or actively unhelpful. And so, you know, overall, the morale at the UN has improved quite a lot thanks to Biden. But there are still some fairly big problems overshadowing the organization. This has been a year of crises, hitting the UN often without much warning. Who in Myanmar, the fighting between the Israelis and Palestinians in May, and then very obviously the Colette in Afghanistan, have all shaken the UN. And it hasn't always seen that the Biden administration has really had a plan for dealing with these crises through the UN, or indeed more generally. The Biden administration is primarily focused on domestic issues. Biden only really came to the General Assembly session at the UN for a day. In September, he, you know, he's not going to devote a lot of time personally to UN diplomacy. And in addition to that, the Biden administration is very focused on the strategic competition with China. And, you know, the UN is, to be honest, pretty secondary to the competition for power in the Asia Pacific. And so there's a sense that Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, all feel broadly benign towards the UN, but it is not high on their strategic radar. And so it has definitely been a period of re-engagement for the US here, but it's still been somewhat limited. And that's come through in some cases, such as the May conflicts between the Israelis and Palestinians, when the White House made it very clear that it wanted to deal with that problem. Bilaterally, it wanted to get a deal with the Israelis and it really did not want the Security Council to engage in the crisis. So yes, the US is back, but the US is back with caveats, I think we might say in the UN. We can talk a bit more about the US relationship with China here too, because I think that's a very interesting part of the equation. As to Antonio Guterres, he won a second term as Secretary General pretty easily in the summer. He had the support of all the permanent members of the Security Council and he didn't face any serious opposition. And he obviously is somewhat liberated by the fact that he now gets to work with a US administration that broadly speaking wants the UN to succeed, as opposed to the Trump administration, which was always threatening more budget cuts and more political headaches for Guterres. He's begun to stake out a vision for his second term. He's really focusing unsurprisingly on climate change. He's really focusing on the recovery from COVID and he's talking a lot about the need to deal with inequality globally. And I think those are all themes that actually he can pursue knowing that the US will be will be supportive. What we're less clear on is whether he's going to become more outspoken on some issues like human rights, which he has been criticized for underplaying during his first term. Whereas in general seems more comfortable right now talking about, you know, big global threats like pandemics, rather than highly sensitive political issues, like human rights or crisis management in in regions where the big powers are involved. And so he's definitely expanding his focus. But there are still against some limits to what he can he can risk doing. So if we get down into the into the specifics and nitty gritty of some of the crisis you mentioned to, I think it's definitely worth saying that one of the big questions that I'm watching here as a UN observer is what the role for the UN in Afghanistan will be. And this I think is going to be a huge test, frankly, for all parts of the UN, because after the fall of the government of Ashraf Ghani and the rise of the Taliban. You know, Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of many, many interconnected crises, there's a risk of more violence we're seeing terrorist attacks coming back up. There's a humanitarian crisis, there's an economic crisis. Afghanistan could fall apart very easily. And it's actually the UN that is going to have to provide the safety net across all these areas whether it's in terms of humanitarian aid or human rights monitoring, because the US and Western powers can't play that role alone anymore. So they're going to need UN assistance. What form that UN assistance takes, whether Russia, China and the US can agree on what the role of the UN should be. I mean, these are huge questions that I think we're going to be talking about for the next three to six months or longer in the UN. And so that's a big focus right now. Well, I'd like to pick you up just on those issues and Afghanistan as an example, fascinating insights. I mean, you mentioned relationship between the US and China. Now, on the one hand, Biden, you know, signal that diplomacy is back, but so also is a concern with human rights. And of course, for all his faults, Trump was very pragmatic when he came to putting human rights issues on the agenda. And I was wondering whether the commitment to bringing human rights back onto the agenda is something which can complicate relations, especially with China. On the other hand, when we look at Afghanistan, I think what is interesting here, I mean, as you, as you recall, I think he was a former Secretary General, Tant in his memoirs who said that great problems come to the UN, because member states don't really know what to do with them on their own, and the UN has a natural role to play in those circumstances. In Afghanistan, I think it was inevitable that there would be a fair amount of gloating necessarily on the part of the Russians and the Chinese. And after the humiliating collapse of the regime, but that gradually or deep down they would realize it's in their own interest to make sure that the country doesn't implode, and that some of the scenarios you read, it won't sort of play out. And I wonder whether that provides some kind of basis for for an agreement unspoken or unarticulated between the member states and some geopolitical sort of areas and centers. And it's very interesting, I think, because I've had, you know, individuals and missions to approach me just to talk about what you know I might look like, and a lot of it seems to hinge on what kind of agreement you can get among the members within the Security Council. And I wonder whether you see, see any prospects for that happening and I mentioned the human rights bit first whether that becomes an obstacle in the way of reaching an agreement with a more pragmatic agreement based on interest, which each of these neighboring countries and the US has in preventing Afghanistan from imploding. And that as an example we can extend it to other other cases of course where we had crisis over the past year, I mean you mentioned the home of Africa and you mentioned Myanmar but what what what is your sense of how the dynamics of the council will will play out on the one hand, a US which is prepared to be engaged but also which insists that principles as human rights are still important how the square those. I mean, overall, I think we have seen tensions over human rights at the UN affecting Chinese American relations in the Biden era. For example, when we look at Myanmar for example, it's very very hard for Western countries to ignore the awful human rights abuses that are taking place there in the wake of the coup. We look at Myanmar and they see it in terms of regional security and regional stability, and they don't really want to put human rights in the foreground and so we're seeing quite a lot of tension over that. In UN forums, obviously, you know the US has also continued as it did in the Trump era to use the UN as a platform to raise the situation of the Uighurs in China itself, and that is a source of great irritation for the Chinese in New York and in Geneva. But I think Afghanistan is a slightly different case because, as you say, there is a recognition that at root all of the permanent members of the Security Council, and especially China, Russia and the US have an interest in creating some sort of stable framework for managing the situation in Afghanistan. And that is something that has come through Council diplomacy today. Now, there have been some people who have said, well, why doesn't the UN send a peacekeeping operation to Afghanistan? The Council is not going to take any risks like that. What I think the Council will grope towards is agreeing a political framework for ongoing humanitarian action in Afghanistan. So the Council will put its political weight behind the work of the World Food Program, getting food into the country because, you know, there is an awful food shortage to be dealt with. There will be political support from the Council for the World Health Organization undertaking vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan and so on and so forth. This is the overall direction of travel for Council engagement in the Taliban's Afghanistan. The other issue which the Council will, I think, focus on with a broad degree of consensus amongst the P5 is how to contain and limit terrorist threats emerging from Afghanistan. And you will continue, I suspect, to see a pretty good degree of cooperation in New York over sanctions lists involving al-Qaeda or Islamic State targets who may be operating out of Afghanistan now. So that's the good news and it's actually quite unusual because it does look like a first order crisis where the P5 has, you know, a modicum of sort of common areas of agreement that they can work off. The problem is, as you say, that the P5 do not agree on human rights and whether human rights and especially women's rights should be a central issue in dealing with the Taliban. For the US, but actually possibly even more for some of its European allies, it's really important that the UN should play a role in monitoring and protecting human rights and women's rights in Afghanistan. And that's also true, I think, for some of the elected members of the Council, such as Ireland and Norway. On the other hand, if you are the Russians, if you are the Chinese, or indeed if you are the Indians who are currently in the first year of a two-year Council term, Afghanistan is fundamentally a regional security problem. And all those powers with very different emphases are going to want to try and focus on maximizing stability and minimizing security risks emerging from Afghan territory. And to be blunt, I don't think that the Chinese and Russians are going to sign up to Western demands that the Taliban should prioritize human rights going forward. They're going to say, no, we need to deal much more pragmatically with the government in Kabul. And at the end of the day, our security is, you know, affected much more by Afghanistan than Norway's or Ireland's. So I think we are going to see a big ideological fight over human rights. I think the big ideological fight over human rights in Afghanistan will fill the headlines. But beyond the headlines, there will be quieter cooperation on humanitarian issues, CT issues. And I don't think the P5 will allow the human rights debate to completely sink collaboration on those other topics. I think it's a fascinating insight, and I would tend to agree with it. And how important do you think it is for that to play out in the right kind of way that the Secretary plays an important, constructive and convening role in this? I mean, I come back to the Secretary General himself here, having kept a fairly low profile in relation to this. I've always and often, as you know, emphasize the importance of getting the right people in the right positions, who they appoint as the next SRSG, for example. I think serious thought is being given to that because it seems to me to be an important, important issues looking at the secretariat support for these places to play out. I think there is a lot of serious thought going into this, although it's worth saying that I still find that diplomats are talking about these medium and long term issues in slightly hypothetical terms. Not least because their governments are still focused on much more immediate problems in Afghanistan, such as getting out, remaining nationals or trying to evacuate people who worked with NATO and whose lives are under threat. I mean, those those sort of first order concerns continue to take up quite a lot of diplomatic time and energy. Looking forward, I do think there's sort of some serious thinking going on about what sort of frameworks for cooperation will be necessary. There's also a debate building up about under what conditions the UN should offer the Taliban formal recognition as the government in Afghanistan. There is one small piece of leverage that the UN does have over the Taliban that, you know, at some point the General Assembly could recognize them as the rightful rulers of the state. And that's something which is being discussed a good deal around Turtle Bay. What's interesting about personnel and what's interesting about the way the UN engages in Afghanistan, though, is that it's really going to come down a lot of the time to the humanitarian agencies for the reasons we were just saying. And so, you know, the World Food Programme leader David Beasley has met with the Afghans, the High Commissioner for Refugees, Grandi has met with the Afghans. And the way the UN engages with the Taliban is actually going to be through agencies, you know, often headquartered in Geneva or Rome, rather than through the, you know, the Department of Political and Peace Building Affairs based in New York. Now this is a bit harder to track exactly how the UN is dealing with the Taliban, because you have a lot of different agencies with a lot of different priorities. But I think, you know, for you, Matt, and for your students, I think this is also an interesting turning point, because here we have a major crisis that the UN cannot respond to with peacekeeping. And, you know, it can't really, I mean, it can't really respond to this with mediation or the good offices of the Secretary General alone. It's got to rely on the humanitarian agencies. And in a period in which we see UN peacekeeping shrinking overall, I think this may be a bit of a model for UN crisis management in future that a lot more of the burden of crisis management falls on the humanitarians. And there's less space for the UN to play a big political role. So I mean, Afghanistan may be a turning point in a broader sense for the UN too. That's interesting. And in fact, it leads me to another sort of set of issues I just wanted you to respond to. And this is the future. And I know you've written about this, the future of these large peace operations we have particularly on the Sub-Saharan continent, South Sudan, DRC, Central African Republic and Mali. And again, this, you know, supposed to be change coming up here. The drawdown has been reported to be in preparation for a long time in Manusco, whether or not it will happen is still uncertain where elections are supposed to be scheduled for UN Missing. We have this constant discussion, both in the academic circles and among policymakers about the drawdown and the future of these missions. Where do you see the Security Council on these different operations? I mean, will there come a point? I mean, if you take Manusco, I think the first time the French and Americans said it's time to pack up and return was in 2014, 2015, and here we are, we keep renewing them. Partly because of the concern with protection of civilians, which is an interesting sort of counter to the idea that we live in an increasing world where we do not concern ourselves with the humanitarian crisis. But I wonder what you, how do you see the perhaps these four major operations in particular without going into detail, sort of playing out the how long can we continue to renew the mandate. So these fairly sizable missions and whether the different Council members stand on that. You know, I think the interesting thing is that the Afghan crisis is going to play into discussions of all these remaining big UN peace operations, because I think the basic lesson that a lot of diplomats are going to take away from what they've seen in Afghanistan, even if it's a very crude lesson is, if we pull the troops out, things are going to fall apart. And, you know, actually the situation in the Congo, for example, is very, very different to that which prevailed in Afghanistan. It probably isn't that useful an analogy. But, you know, diplomats in some ways quite simple people, they will see the headline and no one will want to be sitting on the Council now saying, Oh, it's fine to draw down the leading peacekeepers. There's no risk of a return to crisis, because there will always be this nagging sense that no, no kinshasa could be the next Kabul you could see a collapse there, which would be a humiliation for the UN, just as what's happened in Afghanistan has been a humiliation for NATO. So I think that you will see the Council taking a pretty cautious approach now to drawing down its remaining missions. And that will be especially true when you look at Mali, which some people have called the UN's Afghanistan because that is where you do have very considerable jihadi groups attacking the UN. Again, there will be a sort of a concern that if the UN does draw down in Mali, which is something which the previous US administration in particular had floated, then you will just create another vacuum which Al Qaeda and its affiliates will be able to take over. So I expect we're going to be in a cautious state and let me let me say I think there's going to be one other case that people will be pointing to arguing for caution, which is what is going on right now, as we do this interview in Sudan, because Sudan was another country where the UN until very recently had sizable peacekeeping forces. After Sudan started to move towards civilian rule, the UN pulled those peacekeepers out and simply left a small political mission in Khartoum advising the transitional authorities. And then just today, there has been a new military coup in Sudan. It looks like the civilian transition may be over. And I think you will find some officials in New York saying well look that's just another example of what happens when you pull the troops out. And actually you create a political vacuum that can lead to more chaos. So, you know, a lot of people have been talking about the end of UN peacekeeping for a long time. It's always a long time dying. You say and I think that events in Sudan and Afghanistan will probably. Yeah, persuade the council to move cautiously elsewhere. Yes. So, you know, we've got to bring this proceedings to an end. I've been incredibly grateful for your incisive comments. I want to sort of just perhaps finish on what's a bit of the talk of the town here in the UK and of course that's the climate conference now. Let's go and I'm not going to go into you know what might come out of that but I'm interested here as and you've touched on this in some of your writings about the role of the of the and the attitudes of Security Council members with regard to the link between security and climate as you know yourself. The Germans. Last year I believe suggest that a position should be created within the Secretary to do specifically with the climate and security. There was a discussion about what the precise linkages are a lot of them are sort of been identified in resolutions as as obtaining in the Sahel and in some of these conflicts we just talked about. Others are saying that the links are less direct and less linear and would like. And the Chinese and the Russians have have long of course been more skeptical about whether this is really something that Security Council should concern itself about do you see any difference in this front, not as a direct consequence necessarily of Kabul, the whole focus on it but is there a sense in which the Security Council might be reached some kind of agreement on looking more systematically at the linkages between climate change and security and if that is the case to introduce in a mitigating effects in specific operations. What do you think this is one, you know, too many for the Security Council. I mean, we're currently in a situation where Island and Niger are leading a push for a Security Council resolution on climate change by the end of this year. And the focus of that resolution as you say is really just on systematizing and improving the reporting that the UN gives to the Security Council on how climate change is affecting conflicts and conflict risks worldwide. Anyway, it's quite a modest proposal and much more modest than what is being discussed in Glasgow, but it does continue to run into opposition from Russia and China. I think primarily because they are just wary of the Council expanding its definition of peace and security. We don't know how it's going to finish up. There is some evidence or at least some hints that while Russia is, you know, deeply skeptical of a resolution, the Chinese do not want to be seen as actively blocking action on climate change at the moment. So the Chinese may just change their position and allow this resolution to pass. And if the Chinese change their position, then, you know, the Russians could be persuaded to abstain as well. I mean, on a broader scale, I would say that what comes out of Glasgow is going to be really crucial to the future of the UN more generally. Just in terms of the substantive impact on global warming, but also because if the US and China are able to sort of find common ground on a really significant package of pledges on fighting climate change in Glasgow. That I think will be a stimulus for efforts to cooperate in other fields, despite the overall sense of competition between Washington and Beijing. By contrast, if Glasgow is seen as a bit of a dud, and in particular if China is seen as not really pulling its weight in Glasgow. Then that I think is going to provide some ammunition to those who argue that actually multilateral cooperation is a non starter in an age of major power competition. And if the US can't get major concessions from China on global warming, then it will be harder for US policymakers to try and work with the Chinese on other files. So Glasgow has I think some really, really broad and long term political implications for cooperation at the UN in general. So I think we'll, we'll, we'll finish there. Extremely interesting I think there is a, as you said in your most I believe your most recent report for the ICG on the challenges ahead for this is sort of paradox that I think if you look at the history of the UN as a whole that you know we obviously lament the sense of crisis and the fractures within the Council. And, and all the, the sort of negative developments yet it's precisely when that happens that the UN's role come into its own almost because we live in an intergovernmental, it's an intergovernmental organization. And we live in an anarchic system in a sort of a headlip all sense of the word, where the UN does provide a vehicle for trying to reconcile these differences. And we'll be back again talking about these things again in the future. But thank you so much for doing this and we'll, we'll stay in, in close, close touch. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Matt. This, this one will run and run. It will.