In his address before the United Nations General Assembly’s annual meeting on Wednesday, President Joe Biden will rebuke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and call on the world to continue standing together against Vladimir Putin’s aggression, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at a briefing Tuesday.
The president will also address global food insecurity, health initiatives and “describe his vision for American foreign policy and principled leadership in the world,” Sullivan said Tuesday.
The U.N. General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting — or UNGA, as it’s colloquially known — kicked off Tuesday with a return to relative normalcy, with leaders reconvening in person at the organization’s New York headquarters for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Last year’s meeting was a hybrid, while 2020’s event was fully virtual.
The President of the United States, representing the host country, typically speaks second after the U.N. Secretary-General, but he forfeited the coveted slot Tuesday after traveling back from the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II on Monday.
During his speech Wednesday, Biden will “make significant new announcements about the U.S. government’s investments to address global food insecurity” and will “lay out in detail how the U.S. has restored its global leadership and the integrity of its word on the world stage” by fulfilling promises he made on climate change, global health and other initiatives.
Sullivan said that Biden heads to New York “with the wind at his back” in terms of foreign and domestic policy goals.
“We’re making historic investments here at home,” Sullivan said. “Our alliances are as strong or stronger than they have been in modern memory. Our robust, united support for Ukraine has helped the Ukrainians push back against Russian aggression, and we’re leading the world in response to the most significant transnational challenges that the world faces — from global health to global food security to global supply chains to tackling the climate crisis.”
“Meanwhile, our competitors are facing increasingly strong headwinds, and neither [China’s] President Xi [Jinping] nor [Russia’s] President Putin are even showing up for this global gathering,” he continued.
Ukraine
Biden, according to Sullivan, “will offer a firm rebuke of Russia’s unjust war in Ukraine and make a call to the world to continue to stand against the naked aggression that we’ve seen these past several months.”
The president will also call on allies to continue arming Ukrainian forces as their conflict with Russia continues, according to administration officials.
Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive — a swift recapturing of territory captured by Russia by the Ukrainians — will also feature prominently in Biden’s speech, Sullivan said.
“The main thrust of his presentation when it comes to Ukraine will really be about the United Nations charter,” Sullivan said. “About the foundational principle at the heart of that charter that countries cannot conquer their neighbors by force, cannot seize and acquire territory by force, and he will speak to every country in the world — those that have joined our broad-based coalition to support Ukraine, and those who so far have stood on the sidelines — that now it’s a moment to stand behind the foundational principles of the charter.”
Biden “will also indicate that a free people fighting for their land and their freedom,” Sullivan said. “They’re going to fight with a passion and an intensity and a capacity and an endurance that can outlast any would-be conqueror.”
When asked by a reporter if Biden will discuss removing Russia from its place on the U.N. Security Council, Sullivan said the president will not raise the issue.
“I think the world can see that when a permanent member acts in this way, it strikes at the heart of the U.N. Security Council, and so that should lead everyone collectively to put pressure on Moscow to change course,” Sullivan added.
On Friday, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said that while the world’s focus is still on Ukraine, leaders must also take heed to “conflicts taking place elsewhere.”
“We know that as this horrible war rages across Ukraine, we cannot ignore the rest of the world,” she said.
Global health and food insecurity
President Biden will “make significant new announcements about the U.S. government’s investments to address global food insecurity” in his speech on Wednesday, Sullivan said.
The head of the United Nations’ World Food Program said last week that 345 million people are facing acute food insecurity, with 70 million pushed closer to starvation by the war in Ukraine.
“What was a wave of hunger is now a tsunami of hunger,” David Beasley, the U.N.’s food chief, said, calling it “a global emergency of unprecedentd magnitude.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Beasley said, soaring food, fuel and fertilizer costs have driven 70 million people closer to starvation.
Despite the agreement in July allowing Ukrainian grain to be shipped from three Black Sea ports that had been blockaded by Russia and continuing efforts to get Russian fertilizer back to global markets, “there is a real and dangerous risk of multiple famines this year,” he said. “And in 2023, the current food price crisis could develop into a food availability crisis if we don’t act.”
The Security Council was focusing on conflict-induced food insecurity and the risk of famine in Ethiopia, northeastern Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen. But Beasley and U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths also warned about the food crisis in Somalia, which they both recently visited, and Griffiths also put Afghanistan high on the list.
The United States co-hosted a food security event on Tuesday which Sullivan said Biden had hoped to attend, but could not due to his attendance of the queen’s funeral.
“We’re going to make very robust financial commitments on humanitarian assistance, significantly greater than $100 million,” Sullivan said. “In addition, we’re going to work on financial facilities to help — so beyond just the money for humanitarian assistance — to help build agricultural systems and resilience in the developing world in Africa and Latin American and other places.”
Biden will also push for the end of export bans and hoarding “so that there is a better supply of food to the world market and overall prices come down,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan also said that Biden is “very focused on the nexus between climate and food,” calling the impacts of climate change on agricultural land in many parts of the world “significant and severe.”
“Through some combination of technology and adaptation, we believe we can help protect that land so that we can continue to get the level of food production necessary to reduce global food insecurity,” Sullivan said. “He’ll speak to all of those things, both with leaders in New York and he will have a robust section of his speech devoted to global food security as well.”
In terms of global health, President Biden will communicate that the world — already in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and a widespread monkeypox outbreak — must be prepared for future health emergencies.
“One of the core things that the president wants to communicate when it comes to global health is that, from the point of view of dealing with pandemics, what COVID-19 should teach all of us is that we darn well better be much better prepared for the next one,” Sullivan said.
“That means having a financing facility that the U.S. helped stand up at the World Bank,” he continued. “It means making sure that we are more rapidly developing vaccine manufacturing capability in the rest of the world. It means that we have to be able to move testing and treatment to a much larger and more rapid extent than we have so far.”
“He will talk in his speech at the U.N. about the need for the world to learn the fundamental lessons of COVID-19 so that we never again face a circumstance like we did over the course of the past two years,” Sullivan added.
Democracy on the world stage
President Biden has made a number of speeches domestically in recent weeks about threats to American democracy, and Sullivan said that Wednesday’s speech will be no exception.
“This is a speech by President Biden to the world,” Sullivan said.” I can promise you that he will talk about his support for democracy and his belief that democracy and not autocracy is the model that best delivers both for its own citizens and against transnational challenges.”
“That will continue to be a hallmark of President Biden’s foreign policy and a hallmark of any major address that he gives around it,” he said.
Biden, Sullivan said, will bring the speech back to the U.N. Charter and the commitments that countries made when they signed up to it.
“This is not, in our view, a shift or inconsistent with the proposition that democracy is the right system to actually deliver at the end of the day, but it is a way to speak to every country gathered in that hall, including countries who recently have come out and express more concern or more distancing from Russia, to say, ‘whatever you believe on X issue or Y issue, and whatever your current form of government, everyone should be prepared to stand together on the basic underlying principle of the U.N. Charter,” Sullivan said.
“In that respect, [Biden] is both going to be able to set out a vision for how democracies can deliver for the world and what that world looks like well, the greater human rights and human dignity and also be able to speak collectively to the entire body about an issue of immediate urgent, global security significance,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
