Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

On September 22, in the hall built to spare the world another industrial slaughter, the President of the United States asked whether he should make a deal with Iran or “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.” He said it in the first person. He said the midterms would decide the timing. He called himself a man of peace. The Cuban delegation walked out when he promised that their “failed state” would fall and that “freedom” — meaning Washington and little Marco Rubio at the State Department — was on the way. The Iranian diplomat sat still. That is the 81st General Assembly in one scene: the empire talking through their overlord with a flamethrower, and a room that has spent eighty years learning when to clap.

Trump’s line was the old American sermon with the volume stuck on eleven. America is back. America is stronger. America has acted while others talked. Iran is the number one sponsor of terror. Cuba is a corpse that has not yet signed the death certificate. The Western Hemisphere is a yard again: no threats permitted, “to the victor belong the spoils,” Venezuela already cited as proof. Gaza, in his telling, is a war he ended on the sidelines, hostages home, thousands saved. Ukraine, in the same breath, is a file to be closed when convenient — tell Putin to finish, keep the pipeline of shells and piety open until the next appropriation. The United Nations is a backdrop for the 250th birthday of a country that has spent many of those years vetoing the people under the rubble.

Two days later the sequel arrived by tail number. On Thursday, September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu flew in to address the same Assembly (the speech not yet given as of this writing). The Wing of Zion — the official Boeing with the biblical nickname, as if the Book of Samuel were a flight plan — left Israel on a path the trackers made public: Greece, then Italy, then France, then a line drawn south of Ireland so Dublin would not have to pretend it had not seen the plane. Greece, Italy and France are parties to the Rome Statute. On November 21, 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and then–defense minister Yoav Gallant. The judges found reasonable grounds that both men bear responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity — murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts — committed against civilians in Gaza. The warrants remain in force. Those governments did not have to open their sky. They chose to, as they have chosen before. Ireland was treated as a risk. Rome, Athens and Paris were treated as a corridor. That is international law as Europe practices it: binding when a Russian general might land, optional when the passenger is the prime minister of the genocidal weapons laboratory. Emma Fourreau called it a France that humiliates itself. She was being kind. It is a continent that will lecture the Global South on the Charter and then file a flight plan for a man the Hague has already named a wanted war criminal.

Washington’s answer to the warrant was not a legal brief. It was a wrecking operation. The United States never joined the Rome Statute. Under Trump the refusal became a campaign: sanction the prosecutor, sanction the judges, sanction the rapporteur, treat the Court as a hostile NGO that had forgotten its place. Officials who investigated Americans or Israelis were put on lists. Francesca Albanese was punished for naming corporate accomplices and calling for an arms embargo. The Assembly of States Parties was leaned on until the prosecutor’s office itself became a scandal the White House could point to. The message to every capital that still pretends to honor The Hague is simple: the ICC is legitimate when it looks east, a circus when it looks at Gaza or at U.S. personnel. Delegitimizing the Court is not a side hobby. It is how a wanted man lands in New York, walks into the General Assembly, and speaks as if the warrant were a rumor.

The knee-bending was not subtle. Denmark arrived to sign, on the UN’s own carpet, a Greenland “security” pact that Trump advertised as permanent American control over the island’s defense and “all other needs.” Mette Frederiksen called it good for NATO and Europe and said her red lines had been respected. Sovereignty, in the Danish translation, now means the right to smile while the overlord takes the keys to the Arctic. That is not an alliance. That is a small social-democratic state discovering that the price of the American umbrella is submission— and that the same umbrella has been raining cluster munitions and empty slogans on the Donbas for four years while Copenhagen lectures the Global South about rules.

Venezuela’s new face — Delcy Rodríguez, received as interim captain of a country the Pentagon has already treated as a spoil — was scheduled into the same week’s handshake circuit. Lula, speaking first as Brazil always does, said the quiet part without the smile: Brazil does not fit in anyone’s backyard. Neocolonial raids for oil and minerals are anachronisms. The Venezuelan people deserve to define their own destiny. He said it knowing the midterms in the United States and his own election in October are being run under the same shadow: Washington as neighbor, not as god.

And then there were other speeches that still remembered what the building was for:

King Abdullah II of Jordan told the Assembly that the international community had chosen for decades to manage the question of Palestine rather than resolve it. Temporary violations became permanent. Permanent became policy. Forced displacement in the occupied West Bank, he said, is a war crime. Gaza’s so-called ceasefire still killed children by the hundreds. Israel’s “expansionist appetite” is now a regional threat; its “sense of impunity has reached terrifying levels.” If international law can be ignored for decades, what is the law worth? Israel’s foreign ministry answered by scolding the king and reaching for the biblical map. That is the Disunited Nations in miniature: a monarch states the obvious and the occupier treats the Charter as an insult.

Pedro Sánchez of Spain named the genocide Netanyahu is still perpetrating in Gaza, recited Spain’s arms embargo, and called for a Security Council that is not a private club of judges in their own case. He warned of “selfish, ignorant and cruel” forces. He did not need to point. The room knew the address. The Wing of Zion did not ask Madrid for a corridor. It did not need to. The Latin corridor of NATO was enough.

Emmanuel Macron, in what he billed as a farewell, called Trump’s Gaza “peace” a spectacle of shame. Not one humanitarian corridor reopened, he said. Recognition of Palestine without action is a paper the cynics already laugh at. Look at the West Bank. The law of the jungle or a civilized society — that was his frame. Fair enough, and hypocritical enough to curdle the marble. France recognized a state while remaining inside the same European weapons and energy circuit that fed the slaughter in Gaza for three years — and while authorizing, again, the overflight of the man under warrant. The same France, the same Brussels, the same London that discovered overnight that international law is sacred when the tanks are Russian and optional when the bombs are American-financed and Israeli-aimed. Ukraine became the civilization test. Gaza became a management problem. Volodymyr Zelensky — the tv comedian president Washington dressed as a nation, the most expensive client in CIA-adjacent stagecraft since the last color-coded “revolution” — is flown from summit to summit as living proof that Europe still has a spine. The spine is a billing address. The war is a graveyard that has eaten a generation of Ukrainian and Russian conscripts so that NATO could pretend the 1990s never ended and so that German and Italian factories could keep two ledgers: one for Kyiv, one for Tel Aviv. Shame is cheap when the factories stay open and the sky stays open for the Wing of Zion.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put the institution on trial. This, he said, is the most critical moment for the United Nations. The Security Council holds the world hostage by failing to do its job. He named the genocide of women and children by Netanyahu’s government. He named the persecution of the International Criminal Court. And he named Francesca Albanese. She is the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 — an independent mandate, not a staff job, created to report what governments would rather not hear. The United States sanctioned her for doing it: for writing that Israel is responsible for one of the cruelest genocides of the modern era, for naming corporate accomplices, for calling an arms embargo by its proper name. Lula said she must not be silenced for telling the truth. He said that hunting the Court and its officers is an invitation to impunity. The hall applauded. Applause is not a veto override. It is, for a day, a refusal to pretend the rapporteur is the problem. Netanyahu takes the same podium with the warrant still sitting in The Hague and the jet on American concrete. That is the joke the Charter is expected to swallow — and the joke Washington has spent two years trying to make official policy.

Christophe Cotteret’s film “Disunited Nations” follows Albanese through that machine. The UN was born with the partition of Palestine in 1947. The question the film asks is whether it will die of the same fate. From New York to Geneva the camera finds an organization that can count the dead and cannot stop the killing, because five governments treat the Charter as optional when the victim is Palestinian — and treat it as scripture when the victim can be sold as a NATO frontier. Craig Mokhiber, who left the UN human rights office rather than launder that optionality, has said the quiet part for years: the “settlers” are not settlers; they are colonial mobs; the “clashes” are pogroms; ending their impunity is the duty of anyone still willing to use the word law. Impunity now has a tail number and a sanctions list. Ramzy Baroud has written the other half: Gaza as laboratory of incremental, then open, elimination, and the UN as the hall where the experiment is recorded in the minutes and not halted.

China and Iran are not saints of multilateralism. They are the weights the room can still feel. Iran sat through a threat of national annihilation and did not offer the podium a confession. China does not need to shout in that hall. Its existence as a pole that cannot be sanctioned into a backyard is the fact Trump’s hemisphere doctrine is written against. The empire’s problem is not that Beijing gives speeches. It is that the old monopoly on consequence is gone, and the genocide — like the endless, rotting war in Ukraine — has advertised the monopoly’s moral vacancy.

What the week revealed is not a debate between isolationists and internationalists. It is a caste system. The United States speaks of annihilation and calls it a decision. It sanctions the Court that named the starvation. Denmark signs the Arctic over and calls it NATO security. Rubio works the Cuban file like a family inheritance. Europe weeps on cue for Kyiv, issues press releases for Rafah, and clears the sky for a wanted man. Macron scolds the peace that does not feed anyone and stamps the overflight. Jordan and Spain and Brazil say genocide, war crime, backyard, rapporteur. The Security Council remains a locked room. Palestine remains the issue on which the United Nations has been most consistently, most shamefully, most structurally disunited — from partition to the present veto, from refugee agency budgets slashed as punishment to a special rapporteur treated as a terrorist accessory for writing the reports the Charter required. Ukraine remains the issue on which the same United Nations is allowed to perform seriousness, so long as the performance never asks who expanded the alliance to the doorstep and who cashes the reconstruction contracts.

Trump did not invent that history. He only said it without the translator. Annihilate or deal. Failed state. Permanent control. Spoils. The midterms as a war clock. Little Marco at the desk. A client actor in khaki for one front, a biblical ethnocracy for the other, arriving on the Wing of Zion through airspace that was supposed to mean something, to a city whose government has spent two years trying to make The Hague unmentionable. The Disunited Nations took notes. The children still dying under the cracked buildings of Gaza, and the conscripts still in the mud of a war Europe will not end, do not need the notes. They need the states that clapped for Albanese to do what the film already showed they will not do unless they are forced: stop the weapons — all of them — close the sky to the war criminal, defend the Court instead of helping Washington bury it, break the veto, and stop calling an overlord’s tantrum the international community.