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There was a remarkable scene at the United Nations yesterday as the President of the General Assembly and former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock read out the results of a hotly contested race for a Security Council seat.

For months, Portugal, Austria, and Germany had been duking it out behind the scenes at the General Assembly. These three EU allies were competing for just two seats on the Security Council, where they would serve for two years as non-permanent members. They needed the votes of two-thirds of the Assembly to secure those seats, and one country would be the odd European out.

As Baerbock read the results, she sat stone-faced while the General Assembly erupted in raucous applause: Portugal and Austria would be joining the Security Council in 2027. Germany was snubbed.

This was the first time that Germany sought a Security Council seat and lost. What's more, it was the first time that any of the so-called "G4" countries — India, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — were denied a seat on the Council. Adding insult to injury in Berlin is the fact that, ever since the United States sharply cut foreign aid, Germany has been the largest bilateral donor in the world, according to OECD figures.

So what happened here? Why was Germany snubbed? In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, our podcast about the United Nations, we break down the likely reason that Germany fell from a shoo-in for the Council to losing an election to much smaller European countries. But first, we discuss the first "hustings" in the race for UN Secretary-General, hosted in London by the United Nations Association of the United Kingdom. Five of the six declared candidates for UN Secretary-General took rapid-fire questions before a live audience in London. We break down what we learned about the candidates — and what their answers suggest about who might become the next UN Secretary-General.

There are two competing trends in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. On the one hand, there has been tremendous progress toward reducing the number of infections and deaths from HIV/AIDS over the last twenty years. Scientific advances in treatment and prevention, new policy tools, and political and funding commitments have driven down HIV/AIDS to the point where it is possible to foresee an AIDS-free world in the not-so-distant future. On the other hand, over the last few years, that progress has suddenly come under threat. COVID upended HIV/AIDS programs in much of the world, and more recently, sudden and swift funding cuts, including from the United States, are shaking the foundation upon which previous decades of progress were built.

On June 22 and 23, these two competing forces will come to a head at the United Nations, where diplomats are gathering for a major meeting on HIV/AIDS. According to my guest today, Mitchell Warren, the High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS at the UN presents a unique opportunity for multilateral coordination toward the goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, but that goal may be stymied. Key countries that previously led the global fight against HIV/AIDS, including the United States, are stepping back from their leadership roles, potentially upending decades of progress.

Mitchell Warren is the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group. We kick off by discussing some of the exciting new scientific innovations that may accelerate progress toward ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat, then have a discussion of how cuts in funding and eroding political commitments are hitting just as these promising new scientific innovations are coming online. We then have a long conversation about how this dynamic may play out at the UN — and what to expect from the High-Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the "glue" that holds the entire global nuclear security architecture together — but is it fraying?

I spent much of last month at the United Nations covering the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This is a conference of all members of the NPT that happens every five years. Countries come together to assess progress toward the treaty's goals and plot ways to enhance the treaty's impact and effectiveness in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, reducing nuclear stockpiles, and supporting the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

That's the idea. But on Friday, as the conference gaveled to a close, the 191 states parties could not come to an agreement. The conference failed to achieve consensus on a way forward for the NPT. And this failure comes amid a host of other challenges in the nuclear security landscape: China's rapid buildup; the end of all bilateral arms control agreements between the United States and Russia; the U.S.-Israel war on Iran; Russia's war on Ukraine; the increasing integration of AI into nuclear weapons systems; and more and more countries openly suggesting that nuclear weapons may be a solution to their security challenges.

My interview guest today is Alexandra Bell, head of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — the organization perhaps best known for the Doomsday Clock. We kick off by discussing what the NPT has achieved since it entered into force more than 50 years ago, and what this major conference at the United Nations suggests about the state of global nuclear security today?

This episode is produced in partnership with Ploughshares, a foundation committed to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear threats.

Today's episode is produced in partnership with the Global Challenges Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. The Global Challenges Foundation's 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today -- and how to stop them. You can find the report at globalchallenges.org/gcr-2026.

This is the fifth episode of this series, which has included episodes on specific risks like nuclear weapons, ecological collapse, catastrophic climate change — and even near-Earth asteroids. In today's episode, I am joined by the former prime minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven, and Jens Orback, a strategic advisor to the Global Challenges Foundation, for a wide-ranging conversation about how we can better reform our politics and diplomacy to confront global catastrophic risks.

Managing global catastrophic risks requires systems of global governance, and in this episode we discuss how we can build our common defense against these challenges.

An Ebola outbreak is spiraling in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — and one of the clearest lessons from past outbreaks is that Ebola requires multilateralism: countries working together through existing institutions like the United Nations and the World Health Organization to contain the disease, support frontline health workers, share information, and prevent cross-border spread.

But the Trump administration's retreat from the global health architecture built for precisely this kind of emergency has made that task harder. In this episode of To Save Us From Hell, Mark Leon Goldberg and Anjali Dayal discuss how American attacks on the WHO and other key nodes of our global defenses against disease outbreaks have made this particular Ebola outbreak more difficult to contain than it ought to be. Later in the show, they discuss the newest entrant in the race for UN Secretary-General — and whether we can expect more candidates to throw their hats in the ring.

In late April, an unlikely alliance of Islamist militants and separatists from the Tuareg ethnic group launched a series of surprise attacks against government forces in Mali. They attacked the capital, Bamako; killed Mali's defense minister; and even evicted Russian forces from a key city they were defending on behalf of the government of Mali.

Mali has been beset by instability since a 2012 coup, a revolt by separatist groups in the north of the country, and the establishment of several jihadist groups. In this episode, Norman Sempijja, an associate professor of governance, economics, and social sciences at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco, Norman Sempijja, explains what this new alliance of jihadists and separatists suggests about the trajectory of the crisis in Mali — and what the international community can do to end this spiraling conflict.

Today's episode is produced in partnership with the Global Challenges Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to raising awareness of global catastrophic risks and strengthening global governance to address them. The Global Challenges Foundation's 2026 Global Catastrophic Risks report outlines five of the biggest risks facing humanity today, including an asteroid colliding with earth, the topic of this episode. You can find the report at globalchallenges.org/gcr-2026.

To discuss the potential consequences of an asteroid impact, and how we have built a system of planetary defense to guard against this risk, I am joined by Romana Kofler, program management officer at the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and Anja Olin-Pape, head of programs at the Global Challenges Foundation.

We kick off by discussing the ways in which an asteroid impact could disrupt life on Earth and cause mass destruction, before turning to a longer conversation about how international cooperation and global governance have given us the tools to prevent an asteroid impact — and the catastrophe that would entail.

The civil war in Sudan is now entering its fourth year. Full-scale conflict broke out in April 2023 following a failed democratic transition, when two powerful rival militaries, the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces, fought each other for control of the country. Caught in the middle were the Sudanese people, 14 million of whom have been displaced, making this the largest humanitarian crisis in the world by the numbers.

Four years on, I wanted to learn more about the state of the civil war today, including how the Iran conflict is impacting Sudan. Many of the same outside forces in the Gulf that have backed various sides in Sudan's civil war are now themselves under attack. Further, as we explored in a previous episode, rising fertilizer prices are hitting crisis-prone places like Sudan particularly hard.

My guest today is Sudan analyst Dallia Mohamed. We kick off our conversation by discussing the current trends in this war. She then explains how the Iran war is impacting Sudan's own conflict before we have a longer discussion about what can break this cycle of violence.

The Security Council is weighing yet another U.S.-backed resolution on the Strait of Hormuz that is probably doomed from the start. In this first segment of To Save Us From Hell, Anjali and Mark explain the flawed logic behind this latest effort to return the Strait to its status quo ante bellum. Then, Mark discusses what he learned covering the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, underway at the UN — the major multilateral nuclear security gathering that happens every five years. Finally, Anjali and Mark consider the latest American effort to withhold money it already owes to the UN — threatening to plunge the organization into an even deeper fiscal crisis. The full episode is available to paying subscribers. https://www.globaldispatches.org/40PercentOff

I wanted to share with you a new podcast that I've had a hand in supporting. Houston at Large is a show produced by Rice University Master of Global Affairs students Luisa Tolda and Dante Garcia. The podcast aims to analyze Houston's role in international matters such as immigration, energy, and trade. The first episode of this series, presented today, features Dr. Tony Payan, Director of the Claudio X. González Center for the U.S. and Mexico at the Baker Institute at Rice University. In this episode, Dr. Payan discusses a range of issues, including how immigration impacts Houston and how current events, such as the Iran conflict, have affected Houston, a major energy hub. Congratulations to these students for bringing this podcast to life! Now here are Luisa Tolda and Dante Garicia.