On the eve of the UN General Assembly Debate tomorrow, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that the U.S.-China “completely dysfunctional relationship” could lead to the world becoming divided into two camps. Guterres told Associated Press in an interview Sept. 18 that the world’s two major economic powers should be cooperating on climate and negotiating more robustly on trade and technology, even given persisting political fissures about human rights, economics, online security and sovereignty in the South China Sea.
“Unfortunately, today we only have confrontation,” Guterres said on Sept. 18. “We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers, essential to address the problems of vaccination, the problems of climate change and many other global challenges that cannot be solved without constructive relations within the international community and mainly among the superpowers.”
“We need to avoid at all cost a cold war that would be different from the past one,” he said, “and probably more dangerous and more difficult to manage.”
