The UN is, if not quite a punchline, at least not an institution with oodles of heft in 2026. Maybe it never was, really; as far as preventing international conflict goes, it was broken to begin with.
At the same time, the leader of the free world showing up to the body’s annual General Assembly and going on one about the various wars he has started without so much as a how-do-you-do to the international community is a fresh strain. Most of President Donald Trump’s Tuesday address to the congregation was devoted to self-congratulation about American aggression. Pride of place was given to the Iran War, of course, with the usual invocations of the Iranian nuclear program, the Beirut barracks bombing, and the 72,000 Iranians the president is currently alleging the regime has killed in the past year. (A few weeks ago, while Trump was speaking to Fox News’ Trey Gowdy, it was only 50,000, which suggests that Trump is more annoyed than usual about the war.) We got to hear about the sinking of the Iranian navy, the destruction of radar installations, and the great success of the American efforts to escort oil tankers out of the Strait of Hormuz.
The nub of it: Will there be a deal, or will Trump “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”
“Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” mused the president. “But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to. They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they don’t realize is that I’m not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide, and I’ll be here for two and a half years.”
A solemn thought. There is something to it—there is a segment of Iranian policymakers who think a midterm defeat is going to hobble Trump’s ability to wage the war, which is, for them, dangerously misguided. Even if the Democrats blow the doors out, it is unimaginable that they will have a veto-proof majority, even if they wanted to start exerting congressional war powers (a very unlikely hypothetical). But so much for Iran; the more programmatically interesting section of the speech was the discussion of our Venezuelan caper.
In addition to repeating all the usual rah-rah stuff about the military operation itself (I, for one, was surprised to learn that apparently Caracas is considered an impregnable fortress, “flawless against attack”), Trump touted the recently announced deal for rights to Venezuelan oil reserves.
“It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made,” said Trump. (For whatever it’s worth, the administration’s public position at the time was that it was “not a war.”) Then, with a smirk: “To the victor belong the spoils.”
Here perhaps is the purest expression so far of this administration’s foreign policy schema; it’s nice to have it out there, even if it’s a little hair-raising. The going theory around the editorial office is that, in the period of American hegemony (or empire, if you’re feeling shirty), our political class has deprecated actual national interest in favor of international ideological projects. Well and good. But the upshot is not actually that the United States has been insufficiently predatory in its behaviors, but that imperialism is inherently at odds with the American project in its ideal form. An idealistic empire is bad, but you can maybe get people to go along with it. Nakedly predatory empires tend to have a much shorter shelf-life. And things tend to go poorly for their governing powers after the empire is gone: Ask the Germans, or the Assyrians, or, if you really want to make the point, the Athenians—the Delian League is perhaps not a great blueprint for the post-Cold War world system. If the decline of American hegemony is determined by material factors—a good bet—ticking everyone off on the way out is perhaps not the best way to insulate American interests in the post-hegemonic world. If your plane is going down, you can try to land it, or you can keep flying until it crashes.
The man himself appears to have made his decision. The main foreign policy portion of his speech—before he moved on to insisting on calling artificial intelligence “super intelligence” and talking about the “transgender utilization [sic]” of children—wrapped up with some threatening noises aimed at Mexico and especially Cuba, which is apparently the source of all ideological dysfunction here at home. If it’s working so well so far, why give it up?
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