The United Nations General Assembly is dominated by pomp and platitudes. World leaders take turns at the podium, pleading their case to the assembled grandees, calling for cooperation and usually bemoaning an institution that has failed to live up to its potential.
Since Donald Trump became the president of the United States, those sessions have become more lively and dyspeptic, with attendees treated to the spectacle of the leader of the world’s leading superpower bemoaning his lack of recognition, threatening the annihilation of another state and claiming that international law is a fiction and “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Closer observers of the U.S. president will not be surprised by any of those statements; they are regular comments and complaints of his. They, along with the rest of the world, however, will have been taken aback by his threat to “annihilate the Islamic republic” if it refused to reach an agreement with him, although reports a few hours later that his team was talking with Iranian officials may convince them it was merely a negotiating tactic.
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