NEW YORK — Donald Trump stood before the world's diplomats on Tuesday and delivered a blunt ultimatum to Iran: make a deal, or get annihilated.
Speaking to a standing-room-only United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. president said he faced a "big decision" — strike the Islamic Republic again or chase a peace deal — and left little doubt about which lever he was willing to pull.
"Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?" Trump thundered from the green marble podium. "Do I drive them into hell?"
One lonely Iranian in the room
For all the fire and brimstone, a single member of Iran's delegation sat through the speech — watching on as the U.S. president framed the conflict as a test of "peace through strength" and warned he could wipe Tehran's regime off the map if it didn't bend.
Trump insisted the war he launched alongside Israel in February had stopped the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear bomb. He predicted a deal would land "right after November's elections" — a nod to the U.S. midterms that colored much of an address that sounded, at times, more like a campaign rally than a diplomatic set-piece.
Then his team sat down with Tehran
Here's the twist: even as Trump was talking annihilation, his envoys were quietly doing business with the Iranians a few corridors away.
U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held a three-hour meeting on the sidelines of the General Assembly — brokered through a Qatari mediator who shuttled between the two sides all day.
"They successfully completed a round of discussions that we hope will prove constructive and promising."
Asked how it went as he left the UN building, Witkoff flashed a thumbs-up. Iranian officials said Tehran's conditions included an end to the war on all fronts and a halt to U.S. "acts of aggression."
It was coercive diplomacy in its purest form — threaten overwhelming force in the chamber, keep the back-channel open down the hall.
No global government, no apologies
Trump used the world's biggest stage to torch the very idea of global governance.
"There is no global government," he declared — accusing the UN of pushing a "far-left agenda of globalist bureaucrats who nobody ever elected" and vowing to protect American sovereignty with "unmatched" military might.
He warned the U.S. would not tolerate threats anywhere in the Western hemisphere, took a swipe at Cuba as a "failed state," and claimed Havana was cultivating ties to left-wing groups inside the United States — including Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America. The Cuban delegation appeared to walk out as he spoke.
Ukraine, AI and a Greenland deal
On Russia and Ukraine, Trump was bullish: "We're working very closely with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, and we will get that one done," he said. "It's going to happen, I think, more quickly than people understand." Secretary of State Marco Rubio was set to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New York on Wednesday.
On artificial intelligence, Trump rebranded the technology on the spot — insisting it should be called "super intelligence" because "the use of the word artificial makes it sound fake." He vowed the U.S. would not surrender its lead to China.
And in a signature transactional flourish, Trump signed a deal with Denmark and Greenland to expand the U.S. military footprint on the North Atlantic island — reaffirming Greenland's sovereignty while granting Washington broad access to its airspace and territory.
A whirlwind of handshakes
It was a day of relentless diplomacy around the speech. Trump huddled with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, South Korea's President Lee Jae Myung and leaders from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres — giving his farewell address — had warned earlier that "the fault lines in our world are widening" and urged superpowers to recognise "that their power isn't so super."
Trump's answer, from the same podium a short time later, was unmistakable: watch me.
