How UN chief Antonio Guterres tests the limits of quiet diplomacy

How UN chief Antonio Guterres tests the limits of quiet diplomacyUnited Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres interviewed at the United Nations headquarters, September 9, 2024 [Pamela Smith/AP]United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres interviewed at the United Nations headquarters, September 9, 2024 [Pamela Smith/AP]By Niko VorobyovPublished On 16 Oct 202616 Oct 2026SaveSharefacebookxwhatsapp-strokecopylinkPortugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres called President Bill Clinton from Lisbon on August 30 and September 8, 1999, to discuss the growing crisis in East Timor. The small Southeast Asian territory, which had endured a brutal Indonesian occupation since 1975, was again engulfed in violence after voters overwhelmingly chose independence in a referendum. Pro-Indonesian militias responded to the vote for independence by unleashing a so-called "scorched-earth" campaign, destroying infrastructure, displacing up to half a million people and killing thousands.The crisis resonated in Portugal, where linguistic, Catholic, and historical ties to its former colony helped fuel a solidarity movement. An estimated 10,000 demonstrators, dressed in white, formed human chains through Lisbon’s city streets.Guterres had raised the issue before. At a 1996 summit in Bangkok, he met Indonesia’s President Suharto and broached the politically sensitive topic of East Timor, offering to restore diplomatic relations (severed since the 1975 invasion) in exchange for the release of Timorese resistance leader Xanana Gusmao. The proposal was met with an awkward silence.This time, Guterres was asking the United States to support a UN mission in East Timor, but Washington was reluctant to confront Indonesia. Guterres recalled in his 2022 biography, “Honest Broker”, that he warned Clinton during the second call that Portugal could reconsider its Balkan deployments if the international community failed to intervene. Portugal’s contribution to NATO was small but politically well-placed, with its troops serving in the alliance’s prominent post-Cold War missions in Bosnia and Kosovo.Guterres offered Clinton a choice: risk a public falling-out with a founding NATO ally, or use Washington’s influence to make Indonesia accept an international force in East Timor. The next day, amid growing international pressure, the White House stated that Indonesia “must” allow international assistance.For Guterres, it was an early test of multilateral crisis diplomacy, a skill set he would later bring to his post as UN secretary-general in 2017. East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, finally won its freedom in 2002. For spearheading diplomatic efforts during the 1999 crisis, Guterres was awarded Timorese citizenship in 2024.“Antonio Guterres pushed a lot for what we now call the referendum, and when violence broke out he was one of the people calling for a UN intervention,” said Christine Cabasset, a teacher at Lille Catholic University and an expert on East Timor, reflecting on how the East Timor crisis foreshadowed Guterres’s later career.“Guterres had a critical role all along the way,” she added, noting how he later pushed for the creation of the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor.“There is also a kind of love story with the UN, I mean, that strong link between Timor-Leste and the UN… Multilateralism, which is still really the purpose of the UN, has been critical in the independence of Timor-Leste. And Guterres [himself] became very important in the UN starting from 2005.”Guterres’s response to the East Timor crisis reflected an approach shaped by his Catholic faith, his early work with Portugal’s poor and his political coming of age after the fall of a dictatorship. He carried those experiences into a career built on finding common ground and helping people caught in crises. But as UN secretary-general, he has faced the limits of that approach, struggling to turn appeals for peace into action when the world’s most powerful countries are at odds.US President Bill Clinton is welcomed in Lisbon by Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres for a three-day official visit, May 30, 2000 [Armando Franca/AP]US President Bill Clinton is welcomed in Lisbon by Portugal's Prime Minister Antonio Guterres for a three-day official visit, May 30, 2000 [Armando Franca/AP]A revolution of flowersAntonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was born in Lisbon on April 30, 1949, to Ilda Candida de Oliveira Guterres and Virgilio Dias Guterres, a senior employee of the Lisbon gas and electricity company. He spent summers and extended periods in the countryside with his grandparents in the small village of Donas. His childhood friend Vitor Dias told the newspaper Publico that Guterres’s grandmother stressed the importance of education and by “three or four years old, he already knew how to write his name.” The grandparents’ house was right next to the church where “Little Toni” often served as an altar boy.Portugal was then under the rule of dictator Antonio Salazar, whose Estado Novo regime closely resembled Italian fascism, but with less emphasis on brute force, personality cults and revolutionary zeal, and more on Catholic conservatism. As a result, the country was politically and culturally cut off from much of democratic Western Europe.“As dictator, [Salazar] was very much marked by corporatism, the idea of an organic society without conflict and also by Roman Catholic conservative values,” said Antonio Costa Pinto, a historian at the University of Lisbon.“But especially in the late 60s and early 70s … it basically became a Cold War dictatorship, an anti-communist one.”Among the regime’s core beliefs was that the seafaring Portuguese were innately suited to colonialism and it stubbornly clung to the centuries-old Portuguese empire, fighting bloody rebellions in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.“We were a very closed country. We had censorship everywhere. We had the political police,” remembered Joao Goulao, a retired Portuguese doctor who grew up in that era.“There was a very limited mobility of citizens; we were not able to travel abroad without a lot of formalities. We were not a very sexy destination for tourism, so people didn’t come to us and we were very isolated.”Still, Portugal was a founding member of NATO, a US ally and a participant in Western economic institutions.“In the late 60s especially, there was a huge contradiction between the type of censorship and the type of values – very conservative – supported by the dictatorship and the structure of Portuguese society that was already much more modern,” said Costa Pinto.“There was a contradiction between the values of the political elite and the values of a more developed, educated middle class.”Portuguese citizens saw those contradictions in everyday life: Coca-Cola was banned from being made in Portugal, and until 1970, anyone who owned a cigarette lighter needed an annual licence — a regulation imposed to protect the national match industry.Although literacy rates improved under Salazar, outside the major cities, many Portuguese children received only minimal schooling from teachers who often had only had a fourth-grade education themselves. The instructors’ main qualification was loyalty to the regime.But Guterres’ grandmother’s efforts to ensure he had a proper education paid off. He earned top marks at his high school in Lisbon and was reportedly recognised with a national academic prize in 1965. The future statesman went on to study electrical engineering at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Tecnico, graduating in 1971.While there, Guterres led the university’s Social Action Centre, which conducted social work in the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods. He also joined the Grupo da Luz (Group of Light), a Catholic student club led by Father Vitor Melicias, who became a close personal friend and confidant.Although the Group of Light never directly challenged the regime, Melicias told World Mission Magazine that its members regularly changed meeting locations to avoid attracting the attention of the secret police.Even before university, Guterres’s faith impacted his views on social work and volunteerism. He was especially inspired by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which affirmed the Church’s commitment to human rights and encouraged everyone to play an active role in society. In 1967, at age 18, he joined the mass movement to help victims of the catastrophic Lisbon flash floods, which had killed hundreds. The regime, meanwhile, worked to conceal the scale of the disaster.“There was a huge mobilisation, especially of students – not just Catholics – to support the shantytowns that had been flooded in the suburbs of Lisbon and the Tagus River,” explained Costa Pinto.“Many of the students became politicised against the dictatorship as another effect of this huge movement to support the poor shantytowns.”Guterres met his soon-to-be wife, Luisa Amelia Guimaraes e Melo, through the Catholic University Youth movement, according to his biography. The couple wed in 1972 — Father Melicias officiated — and went on to have two children, Pedro and Mariana. Guterres said it was his wife, a child psychiatrist, who shared a valuable lesson with him that proved useful in his international diplomacy.“She taught me something that was extremely useful for all my political activities. When two people are together, they are not two but six. What each one is, what each one thinks he or she is and what each one thinks the other is,” he said at a 2016 debate hosted by the Guardian newspaper.“And what is true for people is also true for countries and organisations. One of the roles of the secretary-general … is to [ensure] that misunderstandings disappear and the false perceptions disappear. Perceptions are essential in politics,” Guterres said.Salazar fell ill and was removed from office in 1968, dying two years later. The Estado Novo survived under his successor, Marcelo Caetano, until 1974. Disillusioned with the colonial wars, a cadre of military officers mounted a coup and seized control of the government on April 25 that year. Crowds flooded the streets to rally behind the mutineers, and women stuck red carnations in soldiers’ rifle barrels, begging them not to kill. The Carnation Revolution, as it became known, set Portugal on a whole new course.Holding red carnations and shouting "Fascism never again" while marching in Lisbon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, April 25, 2024 [Armando Franca/AP] Inset, a Portuguese soldier with a carnation in his machine-gun barrel talks to a crowd in Lisbon, April 28, 1974 [AP]“There was a complete change, a sudden openness in our society,” said Goulao, who was 20 at the time.“We started to have the right to speak about our problems, without censorship in the press,” he explained. Portugal’s citizens were also suddenly able to travel abroad, which he had never done before. This inspired Goulao to buy an Interrail train pass and travel throughout the continent. “I travelled through Europe and I saw things I’d never have guessed. Portugal became fashionable, so we started to have lots of people visiting us.”That period immediately after the coup also saw a tense revolutionary upheaval, said Costa Pinto, with some fearing that Portugal could fall to a reactionary counter-coup or a communist takeover. But by 1975, more moderate forces prevailed and the country became yet another West European-style democracy.In 1974, Guterres joined the Socialist Party (PS) and grew a moustache in tribute to Chile’s overthrown left-wing President Salvador Allende.“I didn’t have significant political activity before the 25th of April [of 1974],” he said in a 2016 interview with journalist Anabela Mota Ribeiro.“My involvement was in social issues. I slowly, through that, awakened to political options,” he said.In 1976, the young engineer was elected to parliament to represent Castelo Branco in Portugal’s first democratic election.Portuguese Socialist Party leader Antonio Guterres is cheered by supporters after his party won the Portuguese general election to end 10 years of Social Democratic rule, October 1, 1995 [Santiago Lyon/AP]Portuguese Socialist Party leader Antonio Guterres is cheered by supporters after his party won the Portuguese general election to end 10 years of Social Democratic rule, October 1, 1995 [Santiago Lyon/AP]Becoming prime ministerDuring his years in the PS, Guterres sat on several government committees.Foreshadowing his future career, he cofounded the Portuguese Refugee Council in 1991, which prioritised fighting discrimination and inequality for asylum seekers.That same year, the PS lost the general election to the centre-right Social Democrats (PSD), whose leader, Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, had presided over years of stable economic growth.“I’m in shock!” Guterres told reporters on election night. The remark dealt a blow to PS leader Jorge Sampaio and helped set the stage for a leadership challenge. Guterres took over the party the following year. He then set about recasting the PS as a moderate, modern European social-democratic party that could appeal beyond its traditional base.The party revised its imagery, pairing its clenched fist with the rose associated with European social democracy, part of Guterres’s push to soften the party’s militant image and present it as a credible alternative.“His priority and leadership style were basically very respectful to democratic institutions,” observed Costa Pinto. “There were no elements of the typical populist type of approach to politics.”The same year, Guterres was also elected vice president of the Socialist International, a global organisation of social-democratic, socialist and labour parties.Campaigning under the slogan “heart and reason”, Guterres narrowly won the 1995 Portuguese election and became prime minister of a minority government. Governing without a parliamentary majority required him to build support, issue by issue, reinforcing a consensus-building style. Costa Pinto traces that approach to the Catholic activism that shaped Guterres long before he got into politics.“The main skeleton, let’s say, of Guterres’ political activity is political Catholicism,” said Costa Pinto. “He is on the centre-left, social democratic party, but he is always very keen on two specific dimensions. The first is the social dimension of democracy, redistribution, support of the poor and that comes from his early activism as a young Catholic during the last phase of the dictatorship. And the second, of course, is Catholicism.”A practising Catholic, Guterres stood out in the Socialist Party, whose early membership included many secular activists and former Marxists. His beliefs were put to the test in 1997 when his own party proposed to legalise abortion. He faced internal pressure from his own MPs to support the law, but Guterres held firm and refused. But that was not the end of it.The issue went to a referendum the following year, and Guterres allowed socialist MPs a free vote. Although his party backed the reform, the prime minister said he personally opposed it and stayed out of the campaign. The proposal was narrowly rejected, but turnout was low.“It failed because the main party of the centre-left did not mobilise and that's because Guterres was the leader of the party,” Costa Pinto explained.Portugal finally legalised abortion after a second referendum in 2007, long after Guterres had left office.In early 1998, Guterres suffered a profound personal loss. His wife Luisa, who had been gravely ill for years, died after a serious relapse despite having undergone a liver transplant. She had been receiving treatment at a clinic in London.Another pressing social issue for his government was drugs. While the dictatorship had kept Portugal closed to the world, narcotics came flooding in after the 1974 revolution.“Everybody wanted to experiment with something new that came with freedom,” Goulao, who ran a network of addiction clinics, told Al Jazeera.“Heroin became very popular and spread rapidly among all the social groups in our society. [Then] in the beginning of the 1980s, AIDS came along to complicate things.”By the 1990s, an estimated one percent of the population was hooked on heroin and the country had one of the highest rates of HIV infection among people who injected drugs in the European Union. In 1998, Guterres appointed Goulao to an expert panel exploring solutions to that crisis.“It’s important to say that Guterres paid a lot of attention to this area,” Goulao recalled.“We had some proximity because his sister was a psychiatrist who used to work in this area at the time. So we had a direct line to pass along our concerns, and he was very attentive,” he explained.The panel recommended decriminalisation: drug dealers remained criminals, but catching their clientele was no longer a priority for police. Instead, someone with a dose in their pocket would be sent before a panel that warned them of the dangers and connected them with health services if necessary, after which they were free to leave. The goal was to stop punishing addicts and to stop wasting resources on casual consumers.The policy changes worked. Despite fears that Portugal would become a drug den attracting addicts worldwide, the number of serious addicts, fatal overdoses and HIV infections dropped dramatically after the reforms of 2001. The number of new annual HIV infections among drug users fell from 907 in 2000 to 267 by 2008.“He’s very nice and a good listener and he is very easy to approach and to discuss issues with,” Goulao said of Guterres’s style, noting how the UN chief has faced difficult decisions and had to take in advice from a broad group while trying to find consensus.But this accommodating approach has not always worked.Pedro Ferraz da Costa, who headed the Confederation of Portuguese Industry (CIP) at the time, described Guterres as having “intelligence and quick thinking,” but noted how his determination to build consensus was sometimes detrimental.“He likes everyone to like him so much that it makes it impossible for him to make decisions,” Ferraz da Costa told TV channel SIC Noticias in 2016. “A head of government, to manage a country, has to make decisions that please some and displease others and sometimes that pleases almost no one.”Still, Guterres was growing increasingly comfortable on the international stage. In the first half of 2000, Portugal held the rotating presidency of the European Union, giving its prime minister a prominent diplomatic role. Guterres was valued for his ability to mediate among competing governments and to remain composed during tense negotiations.“At the European Council, I remember a conflict between Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl over one issue,” Francisco Seixas da Costa, a Portuguese diplomat who served as Guterres’s European affairs secretary, told the Guardian.“Guterres asked for the floor. I was sitting next to him; I was afraid it might be naive. But he took the floor and made a proposal that covered both their interests and it was a success. It worked. He had a fantastic capacity to moderate and create links and bridges.”In late 2000, EU leaders were negotiating rules for expanding the bloc from 15 members to as many as 27. The central question was how to distribute voting power in a much larger bloc. The major powers — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — wanted greater weight in the EU Council, while smaller countries feared they would be reduced to bystanders.Guterres called the initial proposal an “institutional coup d’etat” and joined Belgium and other small states in resisting it — adding pressure that led to a compromise.At home, however, his minority government was struggling, and in December 2001 the socialists suffered major setbacks in local elections. Guterres accepted the blame and a little over two years into his second term, he resigned to prevent the country from falling into what he called a “political swamp”.According to Costa Pinto, Guterres resigned partly because his government was in such a weak position that he would have been forced to compromise his principles, for example, by greenlighting austerity measures he disagreed with. Still, he was seen as abandoning his post in a time of need and was harshly criticised by the socialists.“He was also accused of resigning [because] he was not proud to lead the country in an already difficult financial situation,” the historian added.After leaving office, Guterres quietly resumed volunteering, teaching free maths lessons several times a week in the deprived Lisbon neighbourhood of Quinta do Mocho. The former PM avoided publicity, refusing to allow reporters to photograph him or his pupils.“That’s the kind of person he is,” Goulao said about Guterres’s private volunteerism.“He’s very involved in social issues. He’s Catholic and he practises the demands of his beliefs very well.”In 2001, Guterres remarried, this time to Catarina Vaz Pinto, a former secretary of state for culture.Meanwhile, with a keen interest in the plight of refugees, Guterres was considering what to do after his political career when the international stage beckoned. Kofi Annan, the then-UN secretary-general, nominated Guterres to become the next UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2005. His experience as the founder of the Portuguese Refugee Council put him ahead of the other candidates and in June of that year he took on his first UN posting. Four days later, he was at a camp for refugees displaced by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, the first of countless field trips to hotspots around the globe.The job, which he held until the end of 2015, would show Guterres that refugee protection rarely existed without political involvement. He repeatedly had to defend people who were fleeing violence while also persuading governments — often under intense domestic pressure — that forced returns were unlawful and impractical. Just before the end of his tenure at UNHCR, that tension confronted him in Kenya.UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres and UNHCR special envoy and actress Angelina Jolie visit the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, near the Syrian border, June 2013 [Mohammad Hannon/AP]UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres and UNHCR special envoy and actress Angelina Jolie, visit the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, near the Syrian border, June 2013 [Mohammad Hannon/AP]The refugee crisesEarly on April 3, 2015, four armed men stepped onto the campus of Garissa University College in eastern Kenya and opened fire, going from building to building and killing students they identified as Christians. They killed 148 people before Kenyan soldiers cornered and killed them in a female dormitory.Following the bloodbath, Kenyan authorities singled out Dadaab refugee camp, a large complex in the country’s northeast, as a security threat. They claimed that the al-Shabaab armed group was using the camps to recruit and plan attacks. Unless the UN helped close Dadaab, Kenyan officials were threatening to shut it down themselves and return its Somali residents to the country they had fled because of war.As the UN refugee chief, Guterres was responsible for protecting the Somali refugees in Dadaab and ensuring that any return to Somalia was voluntary and safe. He boarded a plane from his headquarters in Geneva to Mogadishu to meet the Somali president before flying to Nairobi to speak with his Kenyan counterpart. They reached an understanding to keep the camp open.Internally, at UNHCR, the former Portuguese premier implemented reforms to improve the organisation’s response capacity and efficiency, while reducing its presence in Geneva. The organisation still managed to grow and Guterres persuaded donors to part with more funding while he dispatched staffers into the field. Through the Global Protection Cluster, the UNHCR broadened the scope of those under its care to include those escaping natural disasters.“It's not by coincidence that he started an international career as commissioner for the refugees of the United Nations,” Costa Pinto said.Guterres’s efforts were closely aligned with Pope Francis, the reformist head of the Catholic Church and a strong advocate for refugees.“That’s where, I think, his vocation as a politician is clearly represented: humanism, peace, conflict resolution and of course, this is very much connected with political Catholicism. Actually, firstly, that dominates his career.”That commitment was also evident to those who worked with him. In 2012, he appointed Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie as a special envoy to raise awareness of humanitarian crises.“I spend a lot of time with him on the ground and have been able to see not only his compassion for refugees and their families, but also how tirelessly he fights on behalf of the UN to protect these people,” Jolie told SIC in a 2016 interview.“Guterres does much more than meets the eye. He is relentless in his commitment," she added.But he has also faced criticism. In 2015, as Europe struggled with its largest refugee influx in decades, the body of three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach. The image became a symbol of a crisis marked by hostile border guards, squalid tent cities and chaotic reception centres. Critics argued that the UN system had failed to push European governments to share responsibility and create safe routes for refugees.Guterres, however, was publicly demanding a far more ambitious response. He called for a mandatory EU relocation programme for up to 200,000 refugees, greater support for Greece and expanded resettlement and humanitarian programmes.During his visits to Washington, DC, as the head of UNHCR, Guterres reportedly spent his spare time perusing Politics & Prose and other local bookshops.Described by former Portuguese Finance Minister Guilherme de Oliveira Martins as possessing an “unbeatable knowledge of world history”, Guterres has developed a reputation as an intellectual who enjoys conversations on a variety of topics — from ancient Greece and Middle Eastern culture to opera and geography. He is also said to have a sweet tooth, with a particular weakness for Portuguese custard tarts, which he reportedly took with him onboard official flights.Back home, the Socialist Party wanted Guterres to run for national office again, this time as president, but he wasn’t interested.Then, in December 2015, the Portuguese government received a letter from the UN, asking if it was interested in presenting a candidate to succeed the outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Ideally, the UN advised, the candidate would be a woman from Eastern Europe.Portugal ignored the advice and presented Guterres as its candidate instead, emphasising his experience as head of the Portuguese government, his diplomacy on behalf of East Timor and his handling of many crises during his decade-long leadership of UNHCR.Back home, Guterres enjoyed bipartisan backing.“In Portugal, the centre-right and the centre-left always support each other when their politicians apply to major international positions,” explained Costa Pinto.“It’s an old policy of the main two parties [and] the typical policy of a small country: one wants to have a not very ideological profile in international terms.”In the end, Guterres’s personal charm and humour, and because he was seen as someone both Moscow and Washington could work with, made him the frontrunner for the position. On October 13, 2016, aged 67, he was approved by the UN General Assembly to succeed Ban Ki-moon.Outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after Guterres was sworn in at UN headquarters, December 12, 2016 [Seth Wenig/AP]Outgoing Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon after Guterres was sworn in at UN headquarters, December 12, 2016 [Seth Wenig/AP]The senior statesmanOn taking the reins as UN Secretary-General, Guterres pledged “a surge in diplomacy for peace”. In practice, of course, this was far easier said than done.Like at the UNHCR, Guterres implemented institutional reforms as UN chief and his early years were shaped by protracted wars in Syria and Yemen, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, the renewed conflict in Libya, the anti-multilateralist approach of Donald Trump’s first presidential term and the pandemic. Security Council divisions, however, limited what he could achieve when it came to the biggest conflicts.Then, on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians and Russians awoke to news that their countries were in a full-scale war. Russian tanks rolled over Ukraine’s eastern frontier while terrified civilians sought shelter in Kyiv’s Metro.The UN Security Council convened and Guterres condemned the invasion. “In the name of humanity, bring your troops back to Russia,” he implored President Vladimir Putin, who ignored the plea.On April 26 , Guterres met with Putin to discuss evacuation routes from besieged areas, such as the city of Mariupol, and later that week he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Guterres’s diplomacy saw some initial success. In 2022, he brokered the Black Sea grain deal, enabling the safe passage of Ukrainian ships carrying grain exports from the country’s southern ports, as well as Russian vessels carrying food and fertiliser.But beyond these humanitarian initiatives, he’s been less successful in handling the war’s thorny politics. In 2024, Zelenskyy spurned Guterres’s planned visit to Kyiv after the UN chief attended the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit in Kazan, Russia, where he shook Putin’s hand and called for a “just peace”.By this point, Putin was wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes. Guterres’s decision to attend the summit and meet Putin drew sharp criticism from Ukrainian officials, European leaders and human rights groups.Then, on October 7, 2023, another conflict erupted as Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and foreign nationals, including hundreds of revellers at a music festival. The Israeli response was a heavy bombardment of Gaza, including attacks on hospitals, refugee camps and designated “safe zones”. An estimated 75,000 Palestinians had been violently killed by early 2025 and the UN’s independent Commission of Inquiry concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejects.Two weeks after the initial attack, Guterres drew sharp condemnation from Israeli leaders for saying October 7th “did not happen in a vacuum” – referring to the blockade of Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank – and calling for a ceasefire. Guterres clarified his remarks, stressing that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” as he kept pushing for a ceasefire.On December 6, 2023, Guterres invoked the rarely used Article 99 of the UN Charter, bringing to the attention of the UN’s 15-member Security Council “any issue that may aggravate existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security”, calling on its members to “avert a humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza and press for a ceasefire. Two days later, the United States vetoed the resolution.In October 2024, Israel declared Guterres persona non grata, barring him from the country after accusing him of failing to “unequivocally condemn” Iran’s missile attack on Israel. This deepened the rift between Israel and the UN, limiting his ability to engage with Israeli leaders.So Guterres has failed to make significant progress in Gaza or Ukraine, two of the major conflicts of his tenure. Part of that is due to the natural constraints of the job, having to maintain a commitment to international law while remaining a credible broker between global powers. He cannot impose settlements without the cooperation of the parties involved and the backing of major powers.The Security Council is often divided by the competing interests of Russia, China and the Western powers, and the UN’s work has been complicated by governments — including the United States under Trump — that have challenged multilateral institutions or disputed the authority of international legal bodies.A 2021 International Crisis Group assessment found that some officials involved in Middle East mediation viewed Guterres as reluctant to expend his personal political capital on risky peace initiatives. The assessment reflected his approach before the Gaza war and the invasion of Ukraine, but it perhaps explains his style of relying on envoys, humanitarian advocacy and quiet diplomacy rather than high-stakes personal mediation.Others say that while he takes a keen interest in crises worldwide, he can rely too much on world leaders’ interpretation of events. During Ethiopia’s Tigray war, for instance, he publicly relayed Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s assurance that Eritrean troops had not entered Tigrayan territory, apart from a disputed border area. Abiy later acknowledged that Eritrean forces had entered Tigray.Guterres has also been cautious about deploying traditional UN Blue Helmet missions, questioning whether they can operate effectively without a viable political process and sufficient security. That caution was visible in Haiti. Asked to consider a wider range of UN options as gangs tightened their grip on Port-au-Prince, Guterres ruled out deploying a conventional Blue Helmet mission. Instead, he proposed that the UN fund and operate a logistics office to support the Kenyan-led multinational force while strengthening the UN’s political mission and providing limited assistance to Haiti’s police.“Before Guterres came to office, there had been a steady expansion of UN peacekeeping,” explained Daniel Forti, a UN specialist at Crisis Group.“There was a worrying trend that a number of missions – including previous ones deployed to Somalia and the current one in the Central African Republic and the DRC – were being asked to impose peace in places where there was no peace to keep.”“Guterres was incredibly sceptical of this type of approach and sought to encourage others to take on those responsibilities and have a much narrower interpretation of what UN Blue Helmets can actually do in certain types of conflicts,” he added.When it comes to actual peace-making, Guterres prefers the UN to refrain from taking decisions on behalf of locals and instead delegates to regional players. In the case of Ethiopia, he wanted the African Union (AU) to take a more prominent role and called for more funding for AU efforts.His reluctance to engage more fully may stem from personal experience. In 2017, the secretary-general took part in Cyprus reunification talks that collapsed, leaving him “visibly despondent.” Likewise, in 2019, he visited Libya to try to bring the warring sides to the negotiating table, only for rebels to mount an offensive on Tripoli. Before leaving the country, Guterres said Libya left him with “a heavy heart”.According to Forti, these experiences may have also left him wary.“At first, when he came into office, he emphasised a very strong agenda on conflict prevention,” Forti said.“But after a few instances where Guterres tried to get personally involved in peace-making efforts, including in Cyprus, he got burned quite quickly and didn’t show an inclination to persevere with political processes over a long period of time.”Any hope of quick wins or decisive outcomes proved a lot harder.“From that moment, he’s shown less and less inclination to be directly involved,” Forti added.Rather than finding solutions to conflicts, he says, Guterres instead focuses on humanitarian relief, ensuring lifesaving assistance reaches civilians.Guterres himself has admitted that world peace is “a Sisyphean task”, referring to the mythical Greek king cursed to keep pushing a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again. Perhaps drawing a lesson from that, Guterres has channelled some of his energy into areas where he felt he could make more of a difference – notably, the climate crisis.“Half of humanity is in the danger zone from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires,” he told world leaders in 2022. “No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”“We have a choice – collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”Paloma Costa, a 34-year-old Brazilian climate activist who served on Guterres’s 2020 inaugural Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, said the secretary-general sees global warming as a major problem facing society and has actively supported youth-led movements fighting for their future.“He has been very committed to paying attention to the [problem], to listening to young people who have been taking on this agenda for ourselves and putting up our voices strongly against decisions that are destroying our common environment.”The advisory group’s responsibilities included compiling reports and demands from young people across the globe and summarising them for Guterres.“He made sure there was pressure on the global level because for a long time, the climate discussions were not advancing very much,” Costa said.In doing so, Guterres has emphasised that poorer, underdeveloped nations in the Global South suffer the most from environmental catastrophes and that wealthier countries must take on their fair share of the responsibility. He has called for windfall taxes on the fossil fuel industry, telling global delegates in 2022 that “polluters must pay”. He also praised the establishment of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), agreed to at a 2022 climate conference, to help vulnerable countries cope with climate emergencies. But these initiatives have yet to be applied at the scale needed and the FRLD remains severely underfunded.“Even though he didn’t always have an immediate answer, I always felt embraced because he always made sure we were understood and taken seriously, and there was always a follow-up to let us know if something could not be resolved, why it could not be resolved,” Costa said.Consistent with his non-confrontational approach, however, Guterres has stopped short of naming specific parties or countries unduly responsible for the warming planet.Guterres has also warned against the unchecked development of artificial intelligence (AI). Since 2023, he has sought to make AI governance a central UN concern, pressing governments to develop international safeguards and give developing countries a greater voice in shaping the technology. He has also called for a legally binding ban on lethal autonomous weapons.In July, he warned that AI could become one of humanity’s greatest opportunities — or one of its greatest dangers — depending on whether governments and technology firms agree to govern it effectively.Antonio Guterres at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 22, 2026 [Yuki Iwamura/AP]Antonio Guterres at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, September 22, 2026 [Yuki Iwamura/AP]Making historyWith his second five-year term as UN chief ending on December 31, how will the world see Guterres’s legacy in the years to come? Will he be remembered for his handling of acute crises or for his climate advocacy?“The UN’s relevance has certainly taken a hit in recent years, especially when members of the Security Council have not shown interest in following core principles of the Charter,” said Forti.But the UN specialist doesn’t think Guterres fared worse than others would have under the same circumstances.“Many secretaries-general would struggle with some of the same fundamental tensions that Guterres has,” Forti said.While he acknowledges that Guterres has lost political capital with some states, Forti still sees a positive legacy for the UN head.“History books will remember Guterres more favourably for the work he’s done, both on the climate change agenda and on bringing the artificial intelligence agenda into the multilateral sphere.”Guterres, he says, has been “shining the beacon” on the need for international rules before the technology outruns governments’ ability to control it.“These are incredibly global-changing issues that have not always been the easiest politically to corral member states to think about, now or in the future, and the fact that Guterres has been consistent in putting these on the agenda [will have] far more positive and long-term ramifications than we can see right now.”