- The single most important thing is to have peace in Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine is a complicating factor of everything else.

The first thing that we need is to stop that war.

[lighthearted music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World", I'm Ian Bremmer.

Today, we are taking you inside the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

As this year's General Assembly gets underway, bringing diplomats, ministers, and heads of state together, I'm sitting down with the man in charge, Secretary-General António Guterres.

Whether it's the costly war in Ukraine, lurching towards its third year, or the ongoing climate crisis that, in Guterres' words, is "Boiling the planet," we have a lot to talk about.

Don't forget our brave new world of artificial intelligence.

Is it all as dire as it sounds?

You're about to find out.

Don't worry.

I've also got your puppet regime.

- You have finally arrived in your ridiculous slow moving train.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

[lighthearted music] - [Ian] What if no one had listened to Paul Revere?

"The British are coming," you say.

Well, that's your opinion.

Why don't you stick to your silversmithing, Revere?

I imagine you and Secretary-General António Guterres must feel a bit like Paul Revere about this time every year, as world leaders descend on my own Manhattan for the annual UN General Assembly, UNGA for short.

Pretty much every year in recent history, Guterres has delivered some version of the same urgent message.

Here he was last year.

- Our world is in big trouble.

- [Ian] And, here he was the year before.

- I'm here to sound the alarm.

The world must wake up.

- Based on some of Guterres' statements earlier this summer, the hottest summer on record, the outlook for 2023 looks bleaker still.

- Climate change is here.

It is terrifying, and it is just the beginning.

The era of global warming has ended.

The era of global boiling has arrived.

- But before you dive into the sand, there is an important point that follows most of Guterres' dire warnings, and it's this, we actually know how to make things better.

- But the reality is that we live in the world where the logic of cooperation and dialogue is the only path forward.

We need a coalition of the world.

- [Ian] This year, Guterres will again call for a coalition of the world to lessen the toll of the coming global climate catastrophe, to end global conflicts from Ukraine, To Mali to address global hunger and poverty connected to all these things, and to provide some global guardrails to the disruption of artificial intelligence.

But, what gets priority?

The war in Ukraine dominated last year's UNGA, but much of the developing world, including many of the African nations that make up the Global South, want to shift the focus to getting international development back on track, talking about debt relief and increasing access to financing.

They want to see progress on the much vaunted sustainable development goals that member nations have vowed to accomplish by 2030.

In other words, they want to focus on the things that matter to them.

What they don't want to do is spend the entire week talking about a distant European war.

I think India's foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up best at a global security conference in Bratislava last year.

- Look, a lot of things are happening outside Europe.

The world is changing, new players are coming, new capabilities are coming, but a new agenda must come.

The world cannot be that Euro-centric as it used to be in the past.

- Yet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is planning, as of this taping, to appear at UNGA in person.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may also be there in the flesh, which would be awkward to say the least.

With such theatrics sure to follow, will it be possible for member nations to focus on much other than the war in Ukraine?

Like Paul Revere's midnight ride, Secretary-General Guterres has sounded the alarms, he's made clear, the only way to confront the world's many, many problems in Europe and elsewhere is through multilateralism.

But how many member states will heed his call?

That's one of many questions I put to you and Secretary-General António Guterres during my interview with him this week.

Here's that conversation.

Secretary-General António Guterres, thanks so much for joining us again.

- Enormous pleasure to be here again.

- I want to start with the news that I'm sure is keeping you very busy today, massive humanitarian crisis, floods in Libya, thousands and thousands of people we already know dead.

What is the United Nations prepared to do to help?

- Well, we immediately mobilized all the resources we had in most countries.

We have a central emergency response fund, and we mobilized $10 million to support the operation in Libya.

We are discussing, with Moroccan authorities, how best we can support them.

But of course, Morocco has another capacity that Libya lacks.

We'll be doing everything to mobilize international community to support these two countries in this very, very tragic situation.

Especially, I would say, when one feels that this tragedy in Libya is the result of the war, the conflict, inability to invest in basic infrastructure, it's really something appalling.

- In Libya, a country that doesn't have centralized authority right now, has been fighting a war.

I see that, at least on the humanitarian front, these two leaders are engaging with each other, are facilitating humanitarian aid.

Does that give you any hope that we might more quickly bring an end to this conflict?

- We've seen other situations in which humanitarian needs to bring together people, then add consequences.

I hope there is no fighting in Libya.

As you know, the problem is to find a political solution allowing for election.

With those elections, to create a government with a legitimacy that has been lacking until now.

I hope that these will facilitate an agreement on how to move forward.

There are a number of legal questions that need to be addressed, but an agreement on how to move forward allowing for those elections and for the normalization of the political life in Libya.

It will not be easy.

We know the divisions, we know the problems.

Of course, many resistance of many people that, to a certain extent, like to be where they are, and they are not sure if their elections will still remain.

So, we know how complex these situations are.

But indeed, the suffering of the people may unite politicians to understand that it's better to come together.

- On Russia and Ukraine, last year when you and I sat down just before the General Assembly, there was a breakthrough grain and fertilizer deal that you facilitated along with the Turkish president.

We don't have that deal today.

These sides are still talking, facilitated in part by you and Mr. Erdogan.

Do you have any hope that we can get back to an agreement that would allow all of these essential commodities to get to the poor countries of the world?

- Hope is the thing that never dies, but it will not be easy.

I'm perfectly aware it will not be easy.

We are in an area of escalation, not an area of easy solution of problems.

But, hope never dies.

Of course, I will be going on talking with the Ukrainians, with the Russians, and with the Turks, because it will be very important for the global markets, and especially for prices to come down, and for everybody to benefit if we were able to have the Black Sea Initiative back on track.

- On climate, every year, I hear your speeches on climate.

They're not getting any easier.

A lot of that is baked in, but a lot of that is inadequate response from the rest of the world.

Is the technology at least moving fast enough that it's getting easier to get countries moving?

- Technology is moving very quickly, and we are witnessing some extraordinary developments.

For instance, China, one of each two cars that they sell now- - Is electric.

- On the Chinese market, is electric.

The capacity to storage energy is increasing by the day.

So there are very good technological developments that make us understand that, if there is political will, it is perfectly possible to have the 1.5 degrees still as the limit of temperature growth by the end of the century.

But, that political will is today dramatically lacking.

- We're not heading to 1.5 right now.

- We are heading to 2.8, if nothing changes.

Of course, things will change, but we are at high risk to, at a certain moment, made it irreversibly impossible to get to 1.5.

- What's the single biggest thing that needs to happen in the near term that would make you feel a little bit more optimistic that we are not moving over the cliff?

- The single most important thing is to have peace in Ukraine, peace based on international law, on the charter of the United Nations.

But let's also be clear, I don't see that in the immediate future.

The war in Ukraine has had a very negative impact on deepening the geopolitical divides.

The war in Ukraine is a complicating factor of everything else, and so the first thing that we need is to stop that war.

- I see President Lula from Brazil saying that Ukraine is getting far too much tension at the general assembly and other places.

Very frustrated.

He wants to take a much more global stance.

He thinks this is mostly a European problem.

What do you say to him?

Because we know that the costs of the Russia-Ukraine war are global.

They're global costs.

- It is obviously, today, a global problem.

It is undermining the capacity of the world to come together.

Capacity that was already difficult before, but now it's much more difficult.

This is a factor that is poisoning the international political atmosphere, independently of the horrible impacts for the Ukrainian people that is suffering enormously, and the impacts on energy markets, food markets, and financial markets globally.

- You just came from India, for the G20, the prime minister, by all accounts, did a pretty solid job of chairing the G20 process this year.

I was thinking back from this summit on your words in Paris a few months ago, on how strongly you called multilateral financing broken for the Global South inadequate.

That was a big part of the focus of the G20 this last week.

There are headlines, a lot of announcements, but did we move the ball?

- We have an international financial architecture that was created after the Second World War.

It represents the power relations and the economy at that time.

It is totally outdated, it is dysfunctional, and it is unfair.

- The money for Africa, for example, is completely inadequate in that environment.

- Yes.

- So we brought the African Union in now, as a member, just like the European Union of the G20.

The leadership of the G20 has been very focused on the Global South.

Is that enough to move the money?

Do we see the Americans, the Europeans, the Japanese, even the Chinese, making a response that matters?

- Let's be clear, there has not been more additional money except in relatively small quantities.

Official development assistance will not increase.

So the question is, how can we multiply the resources that exist?

Without private finance, we are not going to do it.

But multilateral development banks need to concentrate on that, in the way they do business, which is a big change in relation to their traditional modus operandi, and we need to have a serious response to the debt problem.

We have a huge number of countries in debt distress.

We have a huge number of countries at high risk, and many of them simply have no fiscal space for anything.

Africa is paying more in relation to debt than in relation to education or health.

This is totally unacceptable when we see the dramatic problems that the continent is facing.

So we need to do reforms in the system, in order to allow the system to be able to multiply the resources that exist, knowing that those resources are probably not going to increase substantially.

So what we need is to redesign the way the international financial system works in order to be able to multiply the resources we have.

But we know, we now see a number of emerging economies with a growing role in the global economy.

I think it's in the interest of developed countries to reform international financial institutions, to make sure that they correspond to the realities of today economy.

By the way, developed countries would still maintain a dominant position, but this would make those institutions truly universal in relation to what the universe is today.

This would also allow to have a meaningful increase in their capital, because the alternative to reform is not the status quo.

The alternative to reform is fragmentation.

- It just breaks down.

Specifically at the G20, we saw Xi Jinping chose not to come.

The premier was there from China.

You were in these meetings.

Number one, did it matter much that it was the number two and not the one from China that was around the table?

Do you think the Chinese were sending a broader message that they want to be in their own more like-minded groups?

Is this something that's becoming a bigger deal from China?

- It is clear that we not only have a fracture between developed countries and emerging economies, but we also have fractures within emerging economies.

It is clear the relationship between China and India is not an easy relationship.

I would say, a first important shakeup of the present rigid structures, and the recognition that something has to change for our institutions to be able to respond to the problems of today.

We have seen the lack of authority, how it's complicated the response to the COVID.

So we really need stronger reformed multilateral institutions to be able to coordinate what is becoming more and more a multipolar world.

I would remind you that Europe, before the first World War, was multipolar.

But because there was no multilateral governance institutions at the European level, the result was the first World War.

So multipolarity that many considered to be effective of equilibrium, and it is effective of equilibrium, it's a positive development, but multipolarity doesn't guarantee peace and doesn't guarantee effective cooperation.

Multipolarity requires even stronger- - Institutions.

- Multilateral institutions.

- Absolutely.

Now, most of the changes that you're talking about are really being driven by different members of the Global South, is that fair to say?

- I think that there has been a growing conscience in the Global South that something fundamentally wrong is in the present situation of the world economy, and the world's power systems, and that it is essential to change it.

The Global South is appearing with a stronger voice, not always a united voice, but with a stronger voice.

I believe that countries in developed worlds are understanding that they need to listen to that voice.

This is very clear when I speak with our European friends, more and more developed countries are understanding that the present situation leads nowhere.

- Is China sort of a member of the Global South, or not really?

- China is, on one hand, still a developing country, yeah.

China has good relations with most of the countries of the Global South.

But China is also, today, one of the most developed countries in the world in several key areas, and namely areas of high technology.

If you look at artificial intelligence, if you have space technology, we could go on and on.

China, in many aspects, is not only a developed country, but a living developed country.

But on the other hand, China still has problems of, not extreme poverty, but problems of poverty.

So China still has a number of significant problems, as a developing country.

But it is clear that, in today's world and in many key areas, China today occupies the first or the second place.

It is, for me, obvious that if we want to have a global market, there must be a serious negotiation between Western countries and China on trade and technology.

China needs to be more transparent into a number of things, and more open to a number of aspects of integration of the global economy.

- The last big question I wanted to end with was technology.

You already talked about AI, and the disruptive implications of AI as one of the big existential crisis for the world today, climate being the other one.

I just saw Ursula von der Leyen of the European Union, at her State of the EU.

She called for a UN-led intergovernmental panel on artificial intelligence.

Nice to see the head of the EU calling for the United Nations to take a strong leadership role here.

Do you think that's feasible?

How can the United Nations help to respond to this very, very fast moving challenge?

- Well, first of all, the decision will be a decision of member states.

Let's not forget it.

But we will put in place, immediately after the General Assembly, high-level advisory body on artificial intelligence to work with me, to come with concrete proposals in these regards.

For me, it is clear that we must have some global entity.

There are different models that have been put on the table.

One is the International Agents of Atomic Energy.

The other is the IPCC, the science- - On climate change.

- Reform of climate change.

We need to have some global entity in which there is technical competence, and in which there is some monitoring capacity, and eventually some regulatory capacity.

At the same time, to be a platform in which the different sectors come together, including of course- - The companies.

- The companies, including the scientists, including the civil society, because governments alone will not be able to tame this complicated animal that is artificial intelligence.

- The member states, are they prepared to accept an institution where the governments don't have all of the power?

That's the reality, but are they prepared to accept that reality?

- We'll see.

I believe that there needs to be an intergovernmental part on it.

But also, there needs to be a platform.

The key stakeholders need to be present for us to be able, as I said, to move in an effective way to get into artificial intelligence as a fundamental tool for our common development, and it's not a threat for the future of humankind.

- I asked you a whole bunch of big questions.

You're coming up to literally hundreds of bilaterals over the course of the next week.

What's the one thing that we should watch out for that I didn't mention from the United Nations high-level week next week?

- There will be, of course, a lot of discussions on Ukraine.

But our most important objective in this week is in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals Summit, and the possibility not only to approve a declaration that is far-reaching, but to have a number of strong commitments by member states, and by other entities in relation to the sustainable goals in general, and climate in particular.

We will have our Climate Ambition Summit.

Unfortunately now, we have not seen much ambition.

- Much ambition.

- I hope the Climate Ambition Summit will contribute to make some countries that have not been so ambitious until now, and also private sector, to come with concrete proposals that are game changers in relation to our needs to tame climate change.

- Secretary-General, it's so nice to kick off the week with you.

I wish you a great deal of luck as we go through it.

- Thank you very much.

It's always an enormous pleasure to discuss with you.

[electronic music] - Now it's a puppet regime where we have unprecedented access to the historic meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

- [Announcer] Earlier this week, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un took a ridiculous, slow-moving train to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

- Kim, hello.

You have finally arrived in your ridiculous slow-moving train.

- Correction, my ridiculous slow-moving train that is filled with Hennessy, and ice creams, and lady conductors.

- Right?

Okay, let's make this snappy fat boy.

I will give you oil and food for your starving isolated country.

- And I will give you weapons for your endless criminal war.

- Great.

- But, only on one more condition.

- Condition?

- You know, what we talked about.

- What is this about missile technology?

Because if it's about missile technology, I already told you I'm not ready to- - Taylor Swift.

- Taylor Swift?

- Taylor Swift.

- Kim, I told you, even I cannot get you Taylor Swift tickets at this point, it's ridiculous.

- Not even to the movie?

- Not even to the- - Not even to the movie?

- Kim, cool yourself.

- I don't want to live- - No.

- Forever.

- No, no, no.

Kim, please.

[Kim vocalizing] You know what?

Take the missile technology.

You can have the missile technology.

Take it.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, if you like what you see.

Or even if you don't, but you're thinking, "Hey, that United Nations, kind of like it.

How about my own global club?"

You know where you can start?

Why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

[lighthearted music] [lighthearted music continues] [lighthearted music continues] [music ends] [electronic music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate, and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at Cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and.

[lighthearted music] [electronic music]