US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he is weighing either a diplomatic agreement with Iran or its total annihilation, delivering a fiery 37‑minute address to the United Nations aimed at war‑weary American voters.
The threat followed his repeated assertions that, under his leadership, the United States is successfully confronting adversaries and reshaping the global order to its advantage.
Since returning to office for a second term last year, Trump has sent shockwaves through the international system—joining Israel in strikes against Iran, authorizing an armed raid in Venezuela that detained its president, and threatening to seize Greenland by force.
He declared, “While others talk of peace, I have made peace; while others ignore threats, I confront them,” speaking before a hall of world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Despite presenting himself as a peacemaker, Trump issued a stark warning to justify the nearly seven‑month conflict with Iran, which he claimed was launched to prevent Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
He posed the question: “Should we strike a deal that lets Iran rebuild and become a stronger nation, or should we obliterate the Islamic Republic swiftly, denying it any chance to harm people or nations again? Should we push it into ruin with no hope of survival?”
Trump made these remarks less than a week after a UN fact‑finding mission concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe U.S. forces committed war crimes in two strikes on Iran, one of which killed scores of children at a primary school in the southern city of Minab.
He reiterated his belief that Iran would reach an agreement shortly after the November U.S. midterm elections, a contest in which his Republican party risks losing congressional control, partly because of high fuel prices linked to the unpopular war.
‘Military might’
Much of his speech focused on boasting that he has made the United States the most powerful nation on Earth.
He warned that he would deploy the unmatched military strength of the United States to protect Washington’s interests in Latin America and declared that the communist‑run island of Cuba would soon fall.
Cuba has endured repeated nationwide blackouts since the United States imposed a severe fuel blockade on the Caribbean nation in January, leaving millions without electricity.
Members of the Cuban delegation walked out of the hall when Trump referenced his pressure campaign against the island.
He also highlighted an agreement with Greenland that would allow the United States to construct two bases in the Arctic territory, noting that he signed the deal with the leaders of Denmark and Greenland on the sidelines of the UN summit.
The Greenland accord has provoked sharp divisions among long‑standing U.S. allies, including NATO, and revived concerns that Washington may no longer be a dependable partner under Trump.
The volatile president renewed his criticism of what he described as ‘far‑left globalist’ institutions—namely the United Nations and the International Criminal Court—urging other nations to boycott them.
‘Super intelligence’
Trump also rejected calls for international oversight of artificial intelligence, labeling them a globalist plot to dominate the emerging technology.
He announced that the U.S. government will henceforth use the term ‘super intelligence’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’ in its communications, expressing hope that the rest of the world will adopt the same phrasing.
“It sounds much better,” he said, arguing that the new label is “much more accurate”.
He dismissed warnings from AI safety advocates, likening them to climate‑change alerts, which are backed by an overwhelming scientific consensus on human causation.
“Every major technological advance brings challenges, and super intelligence is no exception,” he remarked.
In the days leading up to the UN meetings in New York, leaders from more than twenty nations urged binding safety measures for advanced AI, cautioning that its development could outpace our ability to regulate it.
Both China and the United States, the leading AI powers, have not signed onto those proposals.
Trump told the UN that the United States completely rejects any effort to create a globalist scheme to control artificial intelligence.
UN Secretary‑General António Guterres, meanwhile, called for the United States and China to launch a dialogue on AI’s future modeled after the U.S.–Soviet exchanges during the Cold War’s peak.
“Governments with the greatest AI capabilities bear the greatest responsibility to humanity to establish channels of dialogue, transparency, trust, and cooperation,” Guterres said in his address to the assembly.
“At a crucial moment during the Cold War, strategic rivals recognized the need to manage shared existential risks.”
Trump’s address to the world body was less incendiary than last year’s, when he leveled extraordinary accusations of UN sabotage.
Those claims arose after a New York escalator briefly stopped working and the teleprompter glitched; this year he rode the escalator with Melania Trump without incident and appeared to read his remarks faithfully from the teleprompter.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
