NEW YORK: The United Nations will mark its 75th anniversary on Monday , celebrating the mantra that"multilateralism is not an option but a necessity", even as COVID-19 underscores the fragility of international cooperation.
Everyone else will have to appear by video-conference, including some 160-170 heads of state and government planning addresses. Even so, he said, there would be"many virtual meetings" on the sidelines of the assembly, convening by teleconference on subjects such as climate change, biodiversity and the conflicts in Libya and Lebanon.The event kicks off with a joint declaration full of good intentions and a call to combat unilateralism.
Instead, cooperation broke apart amid allegations that China and the World Health Organization moved slowly on the initial outbreak, and the US declared it would act alone and pulled out of the WHO. "Our world is not yet the world our founders envisaged 75 years ago," it says, citing growing inequality and the persistence of poverty, hunger, armed conflicts, terrorism and climate change.
In the wake of coronavirus, it says,"we have a historic opportunity to build back better and greener".Yet the coronavirus has placed a spotlight on the paralyzing rivalry of the superpowers, especially between the United States and China, rapidly eroding Washington's global leadership.
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