President Donald Trump addresses the opening of the United Nations General Assembly at its headquarters in New York City on September 22, 2026.Kyle Mazza/CNP/Zuma
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President Trump’s rambling, combative speech Tuesday to the United Nations General Assembly saw him return to his most serious quagmire yet—the war in Iran—telling world leaders that he was considering completely destroying the country as a means to end the conflict he launched alongside Israel in February.
“Do I 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?” Trump pondered aloud, claiming that Iran’s leadership had rejected multiple peace deals with the US.
He said little about the terms of those offers—and nothing about the US and Israel’s explosive role in the Middle East, from Iran and the Gulf to Gaza and beyond.
The Center for International Policy’s Matt Duss, a former Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser, said in a statement that Trump’s threats were “dangerously unhinged” and “must be unequivocally rejected.”
“Such rhetoric is not merely reckless, it is a criminal threat of genocide against an entire nation,” Duss wrote. “U.S. lawmakers and U.S. partners around the world should condemn Trump’s remarks.”
The president again framed his demand as centering on Iran’s nuclear program, despite offering up a shifting litany of goals and terms on which he’d end the war across the last seven months, and implied that scorched earth was the only alternative. But American operations in Iran have brought an uncompromising government to power, limited the Iranian president’s power to enforce any deal, and made nuclear containment on the level of the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action virtually impossible for the indefinite future.
But it’s the tens of thousands of people who have been killed since the first US-Israeli strikes in February, and the communities whose essentials like food, water, and energy continue to be destroyed, who have faced the worst consequences—and who didn’t earn a mention in Trump’s speech beyond the threat of complete destruction.