At UNGA, no global statesman, just local politicians
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is meant to be nations talking amity and comity. What we get is influencers talking to their own timeline in the language of the reel. The UN General Assembly has become an assembly of Insta clips.
This week in New York City, leaders of some 190 countries came to address the world and ended up addressing the vote bank. Turtle Bay was the set. The audience was in Ohio, Buenos Aires, Ankara and Lahore. Domestic politics is running hot almost everywhere, and a viral clip now matters more than containing a virus or a war.
Donald Trump opened the batting. The hall is in New York, after all. He told the world he had "a big decision to make": a deal that lets Iran rebuild, or "do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly?" He also said he expects a deal after the midterms, which tells you which assembly he was really speaking to. Not the General one. The electoral one. Fine for a campaign promo. From the podium built to stop the next world war, it is something else if not frightening.
Then Javier Milei, the chainsaw president of Argentina, walked into the house and called it "a useless organisation whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats". Baarat mein aaye, khana khaye, dulhe ko gaali de diya gift mein. Why fly across the world only to call the house useless? Because the clip did the rounds as "the man who shredded the UN to its face". Mission accomplished. Argentine fanboys are cheering. Another goal-maker after Messi.
Benjamin Netanyahu walked in to a walkout. The Palestinian mission asked for one, scores of delegates obliged, and the hall emptied faster than a multiplex showing Toxic. He called them "moral cowards" and invited anyone still lingering to leave too. Last year, Israel itself counted 77 countries absent. This year nobody bothered counting. The walkout is now an annual fixture. Netanyahu nyet nyet. Both sides went home happy. The walkout countries got the empty-chair photo and called themselves brave. He got the lone-lion-in-an-empty-hall shot. Diplomacy lost. And worse, he used the opportunity to show off the notorious pager that Mossad used to hit Hezbollah commanders. That was below the belt.
The UNGA is where warring parties are supposed to find a meeting ground. Instead, the walkout has become the new handshake. The American delegate walked out on Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian a day earlier. Nobody listens, everybody leaves, and everybody is proud of it. At the Security Council, Poland's Radosaw Sikorski turned on Russia's Sergey Lavrov: "You can still kill a lot more people, but you cannot win." They were meant to talk about how not to keep killing people.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan did what Erdogan does every September: play leader of the Muslim ummah, a century after the caliphate was abolished. He raked up Kashmir, calling for "all disputes, including the Kashmir issue" to be addressed under UN resolutions. This was weeks after Turkey signed the Mecca joint defence pact with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Everyone knew it was coming, and who it was for. Ankara and Islamabad, via New York.
Shehbaz Sharif takes the podium on Friday. Meanwhile, his last year's speech is doing the rounds again, captioned as if the Pakistani PM warned that his terrorists would wreck New York and London if he had not kept them busy at home. What he actually said in 2025 was: "Had these terrorists not been encountered by us, they would have been roaming on the streets of New York and London." The wrong caption travelled farther because it sounded right. That is the point. With Shehbaz and Pakistan, the world is ready to believe the worst. Pakistan, by the way, has slashed the size of its UNGA delegation as an austerity measure. Even the performance has a budget now, thanks to the war in the neighbourhood. When does Pakistan not have one? Hmmm.
Purists will say the Assembly was always a theatre. Fair. Khrushchev and the shoe, 1960. Castro for four and a half hours the same year. Chavez sniffing sulphur in 2006 because "the devil came here yesterday". Gaddafi flinging the Charter in 2009. Netanyahu's cartoon bomb in 2012. Our own VK Krishna Menon going nearly eight hours on Kashmir. That was the Security Council, and he at least had the decency to faint.
Those were aberrations, which is why they made news. Today, aberration is the agenda. Then a leader performed for the hall. Now the hall is a backdrop, like the Vidhana Soudha, used for a pre-wedding shoot.
Antonio Guterres gave his last address this week and told the big powers their power is not as super as they think. The session theme was "Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation". The transformation has been managed well enough, from talking shop to war room. Trust, less so.
The UN is broke, squeezed by the same members who lecture it. The Secretary-General is on his way out. Seven candidates are in the queue to commandeering the leaking ship. The Palestinian president spoke by video because the host country denied him a visa. The Israeli prime minister was not arrested, as threatened, in New York by the mayor of New York City, and he can thank Trump for that.
The house built after two world wars to talk peace now rents the podium for annihilation, parasites and walkouts.
Diplomacy used to be the art of saying the harshest thing in the softest words. At the 81st General Assembly it is the art of saying almost nothing, in the harshest words, as loudly as possible, to the crowd back home. The language of the rally has eaten the language of the hall.
This year again, the General Assembly generally assembled to a generally useless end. Not because Milei said the UN was useless. Because the week proved him right. Milei sur mera tumhara.
Kamlesh (Kishore) Singh is News Director at India Today Group Digital, and one of India's more reliably unreliable opinion columnists. He is also a regular calumnist. Three decades in newsrooms carried him through the Asian Age, Today, CNN-IBN, Metro Now, and Dainik Bhaskar before this current innings, teaching him everything an editor needs to know, including when to break the rules. Off the desk, he moonlights as Tau on Aaj Tak Radio's weekly podcast Teen Taal, and keeps his satire for India Today's opinion pages.
