The Strategic Horizon — United Nations has a Security Council. Your company probably does too.

What the 2026 United Nations General Assembly reveals about power, rules and those who exempt themselves from them.

This year the United Nations General Assembly chose a theme few could quarrel with: restoring trust and managing transformation. In the very week it was unveiled, the president of a permanent member of the Security Council explained from the rostrum that, failing a deal with Iran, the alternative was to "annihilate" the Islamic Republic. Institutional slogans rarely enjoy a long shelf life. This one barely made it to lunch.

It would be easy to write yet another obituary for multilateralism. I think it would also be a misreading. The international order did not collapse in New York this week, nor did any speech bring it down. It simply stopped pretending. What came into view should concern the people who sit on boards rather more than it concerns diplomats.

The 81st Assembly convened with a US–Iran war pushing oil prices higher. Freedom of navigation through Hormuz had become a subject for presidential speeches, and the war in Ukraine was entering its fifth year. The host institution arrived weakened. The International Crisis Group describes it as trapped in an open-ended institutional crisis, its peacemaking largely paralysed after two years of budget cuts, and about to choose a new Secretary-General.

What was revealing was not the criticism, which arrives every September, but who delivered it. Brazil's Lula argued that the UN is failing its highest mission, which is to spare humanity the scourge of war. Argentina's Milei accused it of failing to guarantee collective security. When two presidents from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum reach the same diagnosis, it is time to stop arguing about ideology and start examining design.

For eighty years the post-war order worked, for business, as an invisible insurance policy. It kept sea lanes open and trade rules reasonably predictable, and it contained conflicts far from the markets that mattered. Companies of every size built supply chains, capital structures and growth plans on that assumption. Almost none paid the premium explicitly. Someone else absorbed it.

What I often observe in boardrooms is that geopolitical risk still lives in the appendix. It occupies a heat map, a slide, or a paragraph in the risk report approved without discussion. It is an elegant way of treating as a hypothesis something that is already a cost. The insurer has not vanished. It has simply stopped paying claims, and a great many companies continue to operate as though the policy were still in force.

The answer is not a geopolitics department. It is accepting that every organisation must now self-insure, and that this is a board decision rather than a matter for the chief risk officer.

The board has to decide which dependencies it is prepared to carry, whether on a route, a supplier, a currency, a regulator or a single market, now that no one guarantees the stability that once made them reasonable.

There is a serious defence, and it deserves a hearing before we go further. Czech President Petr Pavel called the organisation indispensable, precisely as a forum where adversaries can talk. He is right about something essential. The UN was never designed to impose peace. It was designed to keep enemies in the same room. Even this week, Washington and Tehran held mediated talks, although, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged, without a breakthrough.

I accept that. But the argument confirms the thesis rather than refuting it. A forum that talks without binding anyone has real value. It is not insurance. Many boards confuse the two.

The underlying problem predates this week and any administration. In 1945 the victors built a system of rules for everyone and reserved for themselves the right to stand above them. The veto worked as long as the powerful had an interest in the system working, and it stops working when they don't. Opening the session, the Assembly's president warned that this is not 1945. Kenya's William Ruto made the point concrete: Africa's 54 countries make up almost a quarter of the membership and hold not a single permanent seat.

The lesson is easy to state and hard to apply: rules survive only when the most powerful accept being bound by them.

Now look closer to home. Many companies run their own Security Council. In family enterprise it takes a recognisable form: a family assembly that deliberates but never decides, a board whose members are permanent in all but name, and a founder holding a veto that appears in no document. The family constitution binds everyone except the person who signed it first. In companies without a family name the form changes but the flaw survives. There is the chairman who is also chief executive and ends up appraising himself. There is the controlling shareholder who respects the board until the day it disagrees. And there are the independent directors who are independent chiefly in the articles of association.

Those who were not at the table in 1945 rarely revolt. They do something more damaging: they withdraw legitimacy. In a company, that has very specific names. The next generation sells. The minority shareholder litigates. The talented executive leaves. The investor applies a governance discount that never appears in the valuation but always shows up in the price.

I believe deeply in economic freedom, which makes it tempting to applaud anyone who takes a swing at multilateral institutions. Consistency demands more. This same week, Washington backed a ban on diesel exports to contain fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections. That is textbook intervention, and we would call it so without hesitation if any other government did it. A liberal who only denounces his opponents' interventionism is not a liberal. He is a fan.

The same holds for boards. Demanding rules of the rest of the organisation while the top table exempts itself is not governance. It is hierarchy with good manners.

Good governance does not assume that the people in power are bad. It assumes something more realistic: that even good people, when nothing constrains them, end up granting themselves exceptions. They rarely do it out of greed. They almost always do it out of a sincere conviction that their case is different. Institutions that endure do not rely on the virtue of those in charge. They protect it from itself.

So the question New York leaves behind is not what the UN will do. It is what we will do with the part we actually control. I would take two questions into the next board meeting.

Which part of our strategy rests on a stability that no one guarantees any more? Who, at this table, stands above our own rules?

The first can be answered with analysis. The second requires something far scarcer: someone in the room willing to look towards the head of the table.