Trump threatens to ‘annihilate’ Iran in UN speech with electoral slant

The Donald Trump who spoke at the United Nations on Tuesday is the same one as last year, with some big differences. The U.S. president burst into the September 2025 General Assembly with a furious, fiery speech that attacked multilateral institutions and even accused the United Nations of sabotage over technical problems with the escalators and the teleprompter. This year’s Trump, by contrast, carries the burden of a war in Iran he does not know how to get out of, and an midterm election just six weeks away that looks bad for the Republicans. That is why the Trump of 2026 delivered a shorter speech—around half an hour, compared with last year’s 57 minutes—that sounded more like a campaign rally in which he insisted that Americans live in the best of all possible worlds, defending his highly controversial decision to drag the country into a seemingly endless war in the Middle East of the kind that he once heavily criticized.Attacking Iran was, Trump said, a decision he felt compelled to take to preserve world peace. “while others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them,” he said.The challenge he now faces is either “annihilate” the Islamic Republic or reach an agreement. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” he asked, then offered a more reassuring picture about reaching a deal after the elections.The problem with that timetable is that it sounds familiar. Trump and his administration first said the war would last a few days, then a few weeks, and later a few months. The conflict is about to enter its seventh month and there is no sign on the horizon of an immediate end: if anything, the recent intervention by Yemen’s Houthis points to an escalation of the war.The harshest blow to the international order in his speech was directed at the International Criminal Court, an institution that has long been in this administration’s crosshairs despite the fact that the United States is not a member. Trump urged the court’s member states, whose headquarters are in The Hague and which is responsible for trying crimes against humanity and genocide, to leave it “immediately.” The declaration comes amid several reports suggesting Washington is preparing sanctions aimed at financially choking the ICC and making its operation impossible.On Latin America, this General Assembly showed both sides of these new times. Post-Maduro Venezuela, now led by Delcy Rodríguez, whom Trump is scheduled to meet on Tuesday, is being presented as the model to follow. The president boasted about the deal announced in September for Washington to acquire 20% of the South American country’s oil reserves. “It was a 48-minute war. And we paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times…That’s the old -fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?,” he said in a hall just a 20-minute drive from the Brooklyn jail where former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro has been held all year.The counterexample is Cuba, which Trump threatened in very explicit terms, insisting his administration seeks “fundamental change” in the regime. “It is an absolutely failed state. It is failing like never before and it will eventually fall,” he continued. As Trump spoke, Venezuelan exiles in New York protested Delcy Rodríguez’s visit in a square near the UN. Miguel Martínez, a 34-year-old Venezuelan broadcaster, held up a sign showing Rodríguez flanked by two DEA agents. “This is a representation of how Venezuelans want the future to be. She is the new face of this regime, the representation of Venezuela’s dictatorship over so many years.”Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition