UN secretary-general, António Guterres, used his final address to the general assembly to recast the world’s crises as a single problem. War, inequality, the climate emergency and artificial intelligence, he argued, are not separate crises but chapters of the same story. That story, as he told it, is the story of power: who has it, who is denied it, how it is used and how it is changing.

Guterres identified three shifts. Among states, new centres of economic, political and technological influence have emerged. Power is also moving away from governments to a handful of private corporations and individuals. And humans are increasingly handing power to machines, with AI agents going rogue and lethal autonomous weapons becoming a military reality.

These shifts put the use of power to the test: power over war and peace, the power that concentrates wealth and drives inequality, the power fuelling climate chaos, and the power unleashed by artificial intelligence.

The theme of the week’s debate in the general assembly: “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all” is an unusually self-reflecting one. But the institutional anxiety behind it was explicit in Guterres’s diagnosis that global governance still reflects the power realities and interests of a largely bygone era.

The strain on the rules-based order became plain about an hour after Guterres spoke when Donald Trump offered his view of power and how he intends to use it – confirming Guterres’s bleak view on the same stage.

The gap on AI,........

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