UN General Assembly | Contempt for the United Nations

US President Donald Trump delivers a speech during the general debate of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York. Photo: IMAGO/Marek Ladzinski International relations can be so easy when your name is Donald Trump. Either Iran would agree to an agreement with the USA or the country would be destroyed. The US President made this announcement, which was easy for children to understand, before the United Nations General Assembly, where heads of state and government from all over the world meet every year. "I am faced with an important decision: Will an agreement be concluded with Iran that will enable it to rebuild itself and become a much larger nation?" he said questioningly to the group of state representatives present and immediately offered the alternative: "Or do I destroy the Islamic Republic - and quickly - so that it never has the chance to kill people and destroy countries again?" If Iran chooses war, the republic will end up in "hell, with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness, or subsequent generations”.

Nobody now counts the occasions on which Trump threatened complete destruction of its war enemy Iran. Can, do you have to take him seriously? Of course, he didn't get an answer in New York as to which of the two options he should choose. The majority of the Iranian delegation members had already left the UN plenary hall.

Before the start of the UN general debate, the Iranian government had signaled its willingness to negotiate; after Trump's speech in New York, there was even a meeting between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the two US emissaries Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. At the same time, the Iranian Armed Forces General Staff spoke of “hostile statements and threats” by the US President against Iran and called them an “instrument of domestic political propaganda”. It doesn't sound as if the regime in Tehran is willing to simply swallow offers from Washington. The end of the war and with it the opening of the Strait of Hormuz remain a long way off.

Trump also used the New York stage to finally shut down international criminal justice in the form of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The US government's declared goal is to dismantle the World Criminal Court, which was achieved with great effort, through sanctions against employees and through the apparently planned cutting off from the global financial system. "I call on all states that are members of the International Criminal Court to immediately withdraw from this unscrupulous institution," he said in his speech to the UN General Assembly. Washington will "never allow US soldiers or anyone else to be investigated by an anti-American court or paraded in show trials," he added.

The imperialist acting great power USA cannot tolerate any limitation of power, especially not by judges and prosecutors who want to prosecute war crimes committed by US soldiers. It is surprising that the US President even made his way to the UN general debate, because the US has nothing but contempt for the United Nations and international law.

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