In February 1998, with the United States preparing to bomb Iraq over Saddam Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad. The risk of failure was high: he did not have a formal mandate to negotiate, the Americans were skeptical, and Hussein was unpredictable. He had been secretary-general for barely a year. At the eleventh hour, he met Hussein at the Republican Palace and negotiated an agreement that was endorsed by the Security Council on March 2, 1998, in Resolution 1154. His visit to Iraq prevented a military escalation—at least for a while.

Much has been written about what the next occupant of the 38th floor must do to restore the organization’s relevance. One piece of advice is as simple as it is effective: go to the hard places where the UN is most needed and treat failure as an option.

Two recent studies based on a data set of secretary-general travel between 1997 and 2021 provide a systematic quantitative analysis of its impact. The first, published in the Journal of Peace Research, finds that countries that the secretary-general visits show significant subsequent improvements in human rights conditions. A companion study by four of the same authors finds that aid donors increase their commitments to visited countries.

These findings are an important confirmation of what any UN staff member who has served in the field already knows. Secretary-general visits matter, and their absence is also noticed. These visits are valuable not only for quantitative achievements such as human rights advancements or increased funding; they are also essential for building relationships and reputation—the secretary-general’s “soft power.” This is work that takes time and effort and cannot be done in an instant when it is needed at a time of crisis.

Travel has important symbolic value, too. When 17 UN staff were killed in a bombing in Algiers in 2007, Ban Ki-moon flew to the city within a week, visited the bomb site, met staff and the families of the dead, and brought back to New York the tattered flag that had been flying outside the UN offices at the time of the attack. He did the same when a terrorist attack killed five UN staff in Kabul in 2009 and when the Haiti earthquake struck in 2010, killing more than a hundred staff and many thousands of Haitians. The UN community noticed, and so did the world.

Not all secretary-general travel is equal. Visits to multilateral conferences and summits are important for the purpose of institutional representation but typically carry limited risk and reward, with the occasional exception, such as Ban’s role in facilitating the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. State visits and bilateral diplomatic engagements occupy a middle tier: they build the relationships and political capital that sustain the secretary-general’s authority and make crisis diplomacy possible when it is needed. The third category—visits to active crises and UN operations—is the rarest and the most consequential. The first two are largely choreographed and politically safe; the latter can be unpredictable and risky.

An analysis of the travel records of the last three secretaries-general, conducted by this author using the data of the above-mentioned publications, together with publicly available UN travel records to extend it until May 2026, reveals a different approach by each of the last three incumbents. The analysis excludes visits to the United States and Switzerland, where the UN’s headquarters are located, to allow a cleaner comparison.

Annan made 379 visits across his ten-year tenure, including 89 to sub-Saharan Africa, where most UN operations are located. Ban conducted 542 visits, including 84 to sub-Saharan Africa. Guterres undertook 278 visits through May 2026, the final year of his tenure, including 41 to sub-Saharan Africa. COVID-19 does not explain the gap. Even discounting two years of pandemic restrictions, Guterres averaged two-thirds of Ban’s pace and nearly 10% less than Annan’s overall—and in sub-Saharan Africa, where most UN operations are located, he visited 40% less frequently than Annan and 37% less than Ban, even after removing the peak COVID years from the calculation.

Like his predecessors, Guterres has demonstrated the value of high-stakes travel. His April 2022 visit to Moscow, where he met Vladimir Putin and secured agreement in principle for the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to evacuate civilians from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, showed what such travel can achieve.

Yet the data also shows how rarely he has chosen to attempt it. As secretary-general, Guterres has not visited South Sudan, Sudan, Kosovo, Cyprus, or Western Sahara, all of which hosted a long-standing UN presence during his tenure and were visited by his predecessors. In fact, he has made no visits to peacekeeping operations in sub-Saharan Africa in his second term. Nor did he travel to East Africa in 2023 when Sudan collapsed into chaos, Syria following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, or Southeast Asia in 2025 during the Thailand–Cambodia conflict. After the Iran war started in February 2026, he conducted his response entirely from New York apart from one short solidarity trip to Lebanon.

The contrast between Guterres and his predecessors runs throughout their tenures but is sharpest toward the end. Both Annan and Ban travelled most in their final years. Annan made 70 visits in 2006, and Ban made 80 in 2016. Guterres has moved in the opposite direction, peaking in his first year with 55 visits in 2017 and declining thereafter. In 2026, his final year, he made 13 visits through May 30th, less than half the rate of either predecessor.

There is no clear justification for this decline. Secretary-general travel requires no governing body approval, so it should not be affected by growing geopolitical fractures. Travel has also become easier since 1997 when the deputy secretary-general post was established to manage the organization during the secretary-general’s absence. Adverse security or political conditions should not preclude travel either. When visiting a certain country is impossible, a determined secretary-general can go to another country in the region instead. Facing a crisis in South Sudan in July 2016, Ban flew at the last moment to Kigali to directly lobby heads of state at an extraordinary summit of the East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). When the door is closed, a determined secretary-general can find a window.

Actions speak louder than words. To be sure, the secretary-general’s words matter. But travel is a quantifiable measure of a secretary-general’s level of effort at the job—a proxy for how hard they are trying to make a difference. From their first day in office, the next secretary-general will be judged in part on where they travel, how frequently they do so, and whether they continue to travel on high-stakes missions after their first inevitable failures.

Annan understood this. The agreement he negotiated in Baghdad in February 1998 collapsed by the end of the year. Hussein resumed blocking inspectors, and the US and UK bombed Iraq in December 1998. The crisis Annan had traveled to avert was merely postponed. But no serious analyst of that period argues he should not have tried. The attempt mattered. The willingness to put your name and reputation on the line in a situation where failure is an option—that is the job.