Editor’s Note: Lia formerly served as our media specialist before moving to Germany and taking on media-related positions of greater prominence. She has always demonstrated a fine eye for both “things unsaid” and “things which should never have been said,” which made her a particularly valuable colleague in New York. While supporting what appears below from Lia, and despite having my own concerns about her candidacy from the start, I found her to be a better PGA than I had feared. There were some reckless moments to be sure, and I had expected a stronger response to the end of her presidency, on protocol grounds if nothing else. She did, after all, champion women’s issues from a dais which has seen few women predecessors. And she did come to a more balanced, nuanced place of support for Gazans and Palestinian West Bank residents. But there was something else about her, something not quite right. Lia as she often has done, has put her finger on what some of that might have been.
Some positions, by the very nature of their job description, are an invitation to elegant understatement and calculated invisibility. The presidency of the UN General Assembly has, by definition, always been one such role: a year of chairing meetings, organising consensus, smiling for the record, and above all, under no circumstances becoming the news itself. Annalena Baerbock has distilled something quite different from this role description: namely, a one-woman show with her sights set on the Security Council.
Her term of office expired on 8 September 2026, and rarely has an outgoing office-holder demonstrated so loudly that, for her, ‘diplomacy’ was more of an attitude than a professional craft. Generally speaking, social contexts and gatherings of people from a wide variety of backgrounds in the US always and under all circumstances require the ability to ‘read the room’, to engage in rhetorical indirection, and to make subtle innuendos. In such settings, the German ‘assertiveness’ – well known in the US and often met with derision – can quickly come across as vulgar. What applies to the cultural context of the US, particularly in New York City, applies to the UN context many times over – and it is something that has to be learnt.
Baerbock’s career, by contrast, is a case study in how to squander what little diplomatic leeway one has through excessive rhetoric. Even as Foreign Minister, in 2023 she spoke before the Council of Europe of a “war with Russia” – a statement that triggered crisis meetings in Berlin and provoked outrage in Moscow, and which, moreover, was quite simply diplomatically incorrect. She referred to Xi Jinping on television as a “dictator”, a phrase that even well-meaning foreign policy experts deemed unnecessarily escalatory. Anyone elected as president of the most courteous body in global politics with such a track record must either possess remarkable self-confidence or a remarkably short memory. Baerbock has proved that it is possible to possess both simultaneously. The former German UN ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, summed it up even before her election, calling her nomination an “outrage”. A politician who had made a name for herself more through pithy press statements than through persistent “grunt work”. One might suspect Heusgen of malice; after all, his preferred candidate, Helga Schmid, was sacrificed in favour of her more prominent party colleague. A year on, however, his warning reads less like resentment and more like a prophecy with an expiry date.
The real moment of reckoning came at the end of her term of office. Unsurprisingly, it was on the very issue that would have demanded the greatest restraint: the succession of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Organising public hearings with the eight candidates has been standard practice for years. So far, so unremarkable. However, at a dialogue event in late July, Baerbock had the audience assess the candidates live, without giving them or official observers any prior warning. She subsequently wrote to the Security Council, stating that it should not even consider candidates who had not taken part in her events. So far, so embarrassing.
As a result, the US and Russia – who are otherwise on opposite sides of the fence on virtually every UN issue – found themselves in rare agreement – united against Baerbock. The US representative to the UN, Jennifer Locetta, accused her in the Security Council of “overstepping her remit” and “irresponsible actions”, describing the audience poll as “unfair, non-transparent and unprecedented”. Her most scathing barb, however, was aimed at Baerbock’s self-image: she was portraying herself as a “diplomatic superstar”. A “hypocrisy” which, taken as a whole, casts a bad light on the work of the General Assembly. The Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzia, echoed this by warning against the President overstepping her authority. When Washington and Moscow agree on an issue within the UN context, it usually raises questions. Nevertheless, this pattern of overreach has run through Baerbock’s entire term in office. Even her nomination was criticised as a party-political ploy to secure a post. Heusgen smugly referred to ‘Operation Abendrot’ in support of a ‘has-been’. Of course, within this context, mean spirited remains mean spirited, no matter who verbalises it. Baerbock’s inaugural mission then sounded correspondingly grandiose: she wanted to “show 8 billion people why this organisation remains important”, as if no one had done so before. Moreover, it was a phrase that sounded less like chairing a meeting and more like personal brand-building.
In her dealings with African states, too, the pattern of using a rhetorical cleaver rather than a graceful foil was repeated. A former president accused Germany of “condescending and disrespectful behaviour” after invitations had gone unanswered for months, whilst CDU politician Gitta Connemann spoke of a “foreign policy underpinned and driven by moralising” which had been perceived as overbearing in the Global South. And Baerbock’s staunchly pro-Israeli stance during the Gaza offensive – she described South Africa’s genocide case before the International Court of Justice as “baseless” and refused to support key ceasefire resolutions – sparked protests from human rights groups barely after she had taken office. As if German national interests (Staatsräson) and objective criticism were suddenly incompatible. As is well known, the irony comes at the end: Baerbock is not returning to Berlin, but is moving to New York City’s prestigious Columbia University to take up a ‘practice-oriented’ professorship in feminist foreign policy. Her successor as President of the General Assembly, Khalilur Rahman, a 72-year-old veteran diplomat from Bangladesh, was elected by 99 of the 193 member states and is likely to lead the office exactly as intended: unobtrusively.
The criticism that can be levelled at Baerbock in all seriousness after twelve months at the helm of the General Assembly is not incompetence in the traditional sense. It is something more subtle: a chronic inability to hold office without overstepping its bounds. Diplomacy thrives on allowing one’s own importance to fade into the background in favour of the cause. In New York, Baerbock proved the opposite, and for that she deserves precisely the title that American diplomacy smugly bestowed upon her: ‘diplomatic superstar’. It was not meant as a compliment. And yet it captures the essence of the matter with astonishing precision.
