TURTLE BAY—President Donald Trump told global leaders on Tuesday afternoon that he is facing “a big decision” on the war with Iran and will “drive them into hell with no chance of survival” if Tehran refuses to compromise at the bargaining table.
“I have a big decision to make,” Trump said on the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?”
“Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?” Trump continued. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
Trump made clear his decision will rest solely on Tehran’s willingness to relinquish its nuclear program, end support for terror groups, and curtail its ballistic missile program. The president suggested that Iran may be stalling peace talks until after America’s midterm elections, but he made clear that the politics of the day will not influence his final decision.
“What they don’t realize is that I’m not running,” he said. “I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn’t even enter my mind.” The United States and Iran, he added, “will definitely get it done. We will get it done one way or the other. It’s going to be done. It’s going to be done fast.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking Tuesday morning on NBC’s Today show, left open the possibility that Trump would meet with Iran’s president on the sidelines of this week’s gathering.
“I don’t think anything is scheduled at this point, but we’re certainly open to something like that, especially if it has the prospects of leading to something positive and ultimately achieving the goal of what this is all about, and that is the fact that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,” Rubio said.
Trump’s keynote U.N. address, a White House official told the Washington Free Beacon, was meant to remind the world that he “is using American Power to confront longstanding challenges and reshape the world to America’s benefit.” From Iran to Gaza and other areas of conflict, “President Trump has acted” to ensure a “safer and more prosperous world for the American People—and a much more powerful America,” the official said.
A large portion of Trump’s speech focused on the United Nations itself and its capitulation to “the far-left agenda of globalist bureaucrats who nobody ever elected.”
“There is no global government, and while I’m president, there will be no global taxes,” Trump said, referring to an aborted bid by the U.N. International Maritime Organization to impose a global carbon tax that would have raised international shipping costs by an estimated 10 to 20 percent.
The president also reserved harsh words for the International Criminal Court, an “out of control institution” run by “an evil group of people.” Trump said the court’s efforts to prosecute American military members and Israeli officials for supposed war crimes will never happen on his watch. He implored all U.N. member nations to “officially resign from this rogue institution.”
The White House official said that Trump’s criticism of the United Nations was aimed at marking a clear line in the sand, one meant to prevent “globalist institutions from infringing on American sovereignty or imposing a radical-left wing agenda on the American People.”
Trump also touted his efforts to combat cartel violence along the southern border and in Latin America, saying his decision to designate these groups as foreign terrorist organizations has cleared the way for America’s military to kill narco-terrorists across the region.
“The cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere, not good people,” he said. “They are enemies at war with civilization, using murder, rape, torture, and extortion as instruments of terror. Like ISIS, they should be killed, exiled, or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release, which is what we’re doing.”
Discussing Russia’s war on Ukraine, Trump revealed his administration is currently “working very closely with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, and we will get that one done.”
“It’s going to happen,” he said, “more quickly than people understand.”
Speaking about the hotly watched emergence of the global AI race, Trump—who has dismissed concerns about artificial intelligence safety as “a hoax”—proposed dropping the “AI” name for one that truly communicates both the dangers and possibilities of the technology.
“Super intelligence” will be the new name used by the United States in all communications going forward.
“The use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake,” he explained. “It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake.”
“From this point forward, all of [the] United States’ documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term, ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’ So it’s ‘super intelligence.’ In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—SI.”
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