Biden’s goodbye address to the UN coming on Tuesday

Laura Rozen notes that Joe Biden’s scheduled speech to the UN General Assembly on September 24 will be his last to that forum:

“This is obviously Biden’s farewell appearance at the General Assembly,” Richard Gowan, UN Director at the International Crisis Group, said in a call with journalists on Monday previewing next week’s events.

“I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. President will get a mixed reception here,” he said. “I think that other UN members do recognize that Biden and his team did restore a lot of US-UN cooperation in 2021 and 2022…But I think there’s also been an underlying sense of Biden himself and his immediate foreign policy circle as being not that interested in the UN. And obviously, the U.S positioning over the ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024 burnt a huge amount of goodwill.” [my emphasis] (1)

Last year, Biden Addressed the General Assembly on September 19, around three weeks before the October 7 attack in Israel. That speech was generally boilerplate about the need for world cooperation and the ability of countries to overcome even deep differences. But this short passage sounds a bit like a message in a bottle from a long-ago time:

Similarly, the groundbreaking effort we announced at the G20 connect India — to connect India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel will spur opportunities and investment across two continents.

This is part of our effort to build a more sustainable, integrated Middle East. It demonstrates how Israel’s greater normalization and economic connection with its neighbors is delivering positive and practical impacts even as we continue to work tirelessly to support a just and lasting peace between Isr- — the Israelis and Palestinians — two states for two people. (2)

It's worth noting that this approach to Middle East stability and peace was in many ways a continuation of the Trump policy reflected in the Abraham Accords deal. And, unfortunately, Biden seems to have largely continued the Trump diplomatic approach of building a partnership between Arab nations and Israel that would allow Netanyahu’s policy of totally neglecting real efforts for an Israel-Palestine peace agreement while building stable relationships with Arab autocracies.

That hasn’t worked out so well, as we see in the daily news as Israel’s longest war continues with no obvious end in sight.

Biden had campaigned on renewing the Iran nuclear non-proliferation agreement from which Trump had withdrawn. But he never did. Although Rozen notes:

On Iran, while the Biden administration its initial two years in office intensively engaged in negotiations to try to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that Trump quit in 2018, the effort petered out, after Iranian leaders did not accepted a painstakingly negotiated updated draft deal in August 2022. Then Iran was riven by months of the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests following the death in September 2022 of a young Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police over how she was wearing her headscarf.

The massive attack by Iran-backed Hamas on Israel last October 7 that killed over 1,200 Israelis and subsequently escalated tensions between Israel and Iran and Iran-backed proxies over the past months has further made visible U.S. diplomacy with Iran a domestic political pariah, particularly in a US election year.

She also notes that the new Pezeshkian Masoud Pezeshkian will be making his UN debut as he balances the desire for a new nuclear nonproliferation agreement, Iran’s sales of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, and Netanyahu’s spreading war in the Middle East. One must wonder if Iranian leaders, facing a serious war with nuclear-armed Israel and (if Netanyahu gets his wish) with the US, aren’t reflecting on the experience of Ukraine, which briefly held nuclear weapons in the beginning of its post-Soviet independence but gave them up.

And hanging over the scene is the possibility of Donald Trump soon becoming President again.

In the live presentation of the 2023 General Assembly speech itself, Biden had a a number of somewhat slurred words. (3) But it was generally well-delivered and showed no obvious signs of mental impairment. Although presumably he was reading from a teleprompter, which he will presumably (hopefully) be doing this week.

More than 130 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are slated to speak along with dozens of ministers, and the issues from the summit are expected to dominate their speeches and private meetings, especially the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan and the growing possibility of a wider Mideast war.

“There is going to be a rather obvious gap between the Summit of the Future, with its focus on expanding international cooperation, and the reality that the U.N. is failing in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan,” said Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group. “Those three wars will be top topics of attention for most of the week.” [my emphasis]

And, yes, there is a serious war going on in Sudan, as described by this recent PBS Newshour documentary: (5)

Notes:

(1) Rozen, Laura (2024): U.S. pre-elections diplomatic limbo. Diplomatic <https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/us-pre-elections-limbo> 09/17/2024. (Accessed: 2024-323-09).

(2) Remarks by President Biden Before the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. White House website 09/19/2023. <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/09/19/remarks-by-president-biden-before-the-78th-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york-ny/> (Accessed: 2024-323-09).

(3) Watch: Biden addresses U.N. General Assembly. CBS News YouTube channel 09/19/2024. <https://youtu.be/hxok6DpK5lI?si=NUb0hpCtXRAPOXU8> (Accessed: 2024-323-09).

(4) Lederer, Edith (2022): Outlook gloomy as world leaders gather in New York for U.N. General Assembly. Los Angeles Times 09/22/2024. <https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-09-22/world-leaders-are-gathering-in-new-york-for-the-u-n-general-assembly-the-outlook-is-gloomy> (Accessed: 2024-323-09).

(5) Inside Sudan’s civil war -- Watch the full documentary. PBS Newshour YouTube channel 09/16/2024. <https://youtu.be/aSU9u-GlRMs?si=lqYaRdhjpx91HXd0> (Accessed: 2024-323-09).