Critics of the UN often describe its General Assembly as a talking shop. This week, that somewhat pointed description could arguably be regarded as a compliment. One welcome example of dialogue took place in New York where, despite months of war in the Middle East, a three-hour meeting transpired between US and Iranian officials, brokered by Qatari and Pakistani mediators.
Whatever comes of this encounter, the meeting is a timely reminder of one of the most important opportunities the General Assembly can create – the unglamorous work of getting adversaries into a room. As a forum for convening nearly 200 countries, UNGA remains in a field of its own. However, the deeper point is that most modern conflicts end not on the battlefield but around a talks table. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide put this most precisely in an interview with The National in which he talked about “seeing the limitations of warfare”.
At the end of the day, military power has to be translated into an arrangement both sides can live with. Such translation generally happens only in a talks process that leads to a political settlement. However, despite the logic of this approach, too often diplomacy is framed as capitulation. This misses the point of what negotiation is – the mechanism by which conflicts conclude, especially in an era when wars rarely produce a decisive winner.
So, while multibillion-dollar militaries and cheap drone warfare alike can destroy targets and disrupt economies, it is a negotiated political outcome that matters most. It is also harder to achieve. In the Gulf, for example, rebuilding institutions, restoring trade routes and reviving trust between neighbours could take a generation. That is why the UAE has kept faith with dialogue even after being repeatedly attacked by Iran this year. As Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh told The National in New York, “we are very much focused on de-escalation and dialogue”. This is a clear-eyed reading of what the alternative costs.
None of this guarantees success in the near term. Mediation can stall, spoilers can wreck fragile openings and the region has watched promising talks collapse before. Indeed, aggressive or strident public rhetoric from political leaders, often intended for a domestic audience, can set back the delicate, behind-the-scenes work of establishing communication.
However, the alternative to diplomacy is not victory but more of the same, at greater cost, for all warring parties. If UNGA week produces nothing more than the stirrings of talks between Washington and Tehran, that alone will have justified the journey to New York. It must be hoped that all sides realise that, eventually, escalation has nowhere else to go.
