Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where Day 3 of the U.N. General Assembly high-level week brought more fiery speeches and more technological concerns.
Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Two speeches are delivered by leaders whose countries are at war with two different permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the CEOs of leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies address the U.N. Security Council, and World Bank President Ajay Banga talks with FP’s editor in chief.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian made the most of his rare opportunity to criticize the United States on U.S. soil on Wednesday, using his morning speaking slot in New York to retaliate rhetorically against U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to “annihilate” Iran in his speech the day before.
“I had prepared a speech to present to you yesterday,” Pezeshkian began. He then implied that instead, he felt compelled to respond to Trump’s characterization of the Iranian regime as “terrorists” in his Tuesday remarks.
The Iranian president declared that Iranians country were “victims of terrorism,” citing the U.S. and Israeli assassination of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “without any legal framework” as well as the separate U.S. bombings of a school and a sports complex in Iran in the early days of the war.
“Those who are terrorists and train and protect terrorists describe us as such,” Pezeshkian said. “We have only defended ourselves.”
“An open wound.” In addition to hitting back at Trump and the United States, Pezeshkian spent much of his speech criticizing Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to address UNGA on Thursday.
The Iranian president contrasted curbs on Iran’s nuclear program with Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. “The nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran,” he said. “Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions.”
Pezeshkian also criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, describing its actions against Palestine as “an open wound on the conscience of the international community.”
Nukes and deals. One of the few moments when Trump received applause from the chamber the previous day was when he said that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.” But Pezeshkian said that Iran is focused on energy security rather than the pursuit of weapons. “For our country, peaceful nuclear technology is part of our inherent progress,” he said.
“Iran does not accept for nuclear technology to be at the exclusive disposal of some, of a handful,” he added. “We say it clearly: no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”
Trump, who returned to Washington on Wednesday for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, has repeatedly talked up the prospect of a deal with Iran—including in his Tuesday speech—even as he threatens to destroy the country.
The U.S. president told reporters after his speech on Tuesday that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had met with Iranian representatives in New York that same day. Neither side has yet revealed what was discussed, though Witkoff later posted on X that they had “engaged in lengthy talks with the Iranian delegation through the mediators, who shuttled between the two sides throughout the day” and that he hoped the talks would “prove constructive and promising.”
Pezeshkian said in his speech that Iran is ready to negotiate with Trump only in the absence of U.S. coercion. “He must know that the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions, increased pressure, increased bullying. We will never bow our head or bend at the knee,” he said, adding that Iranians are “ready for dialogue and diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force.”
Zelensky’s appeal. Unlike Pezeshkian, Zelensky kicked off his speech by agreeing with Trump. Zelensky approvingly referenced the U.S. president’s Truth Social post in which Trump said that Russia had “lost control of its Diesel Oil Industry” because of the war with Ukraine—a function of repeated Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s energy sector—and called for an end to the “ridiculous and never ending” Russia-Ukraine war.
“I do not know a single world leader who would say otherwise. I do not know anyone who is openly for this war—except one man,” Zelensky said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Zelensky told John yesterday that he is ready for a trilateral meeting with Russia and the United States but that Putin isn’t.)
Zelensky also took a victory lap for Ukraine’s recent battlefield successes, saying that “21 countries in the world have smaller populations than the number of Russian troops lost in just eight months.” He also claimed that Russia has used citizens of 47 different countries to fight its war, including India, Nepal, Ghana, Tajikistan, South Africa, and Yemen.
But he urged U.N. member states to continue supporting Ukraine in its fight as it steels itself for a harsh winter. Zelensky said that while at UNGA, he had signed a new drone deal with Finland and a bilateral security agreement with Australia and added that Ukraine is in talks with Canada. “Ukraine deserves security just as all of you do—every country and every nation,” he said.
The one country whose leader Zelensky expressed regret at not being able to meet with was China. “Unfortunately, we have not had a chance to speak directly with the leader of China, who is in America today, but not here,” he said. “He is someone who can influence Russia, too, more than many, many others can.” (Xi is not attending UNGA.)
Tech talk. AI risks continue to be an undercurrent of this year’s gathering, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—whose companies are at the forefront of both the technology and the warnings about its risks—taking part in a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday.
Both tech leaders called for governments to step in and regulate their technology. “If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve,” Altman said. “At the international level, this will require cooperation.”
Amodei reiterated his (and other industry figures’) warnings of existential AI risk. “For all the differences of the people in this room, we must put aside those differences in order to confront this global opportunity and global threat that is being presented to us at the same time,” he said. “No leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone,” he added. “We commit to working with governments in this room on this urgent work.”
Much of the AI risk conversation was sparked by the cyber capabilities of Anthropic and OpenAI models, with multiple high-profile hacks in recent months raising alarm bells. Rishi spoke about those hacks on Wednesday with Jeremy Fleming at Mastercard’s Digital Ambassadors Forum on the sidelines of UNGA. Fleming is the former head of Britain’s intelligence and cyber agency GCHQ, and before that, he spent three decades at the country’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5.
Fleming said he was “not too surprised” by the hacks, adding that they are “sadly an indictment of those labs and their approach to safety and security.” But he argued that there’s a lot that governments can do from a policy standpoint. “We need like-minded nations to come together with the private sector to start putting down some norms and some standards,” Fleming said.
He also rejected the existential AI panic. “I don’t think that we’re all going to be wiped out tomorrow—I hate that conversation,” Fleming said. “But I think there are going to be points in the future where this capability doesn’t do the thing it was designed to do, and it causes harm.”
World Bank President Ajay Banga, meanwhile, shared a hopeful message of AI’s potential for job creation and economic growth—particularly in emerging markets—in a conversation with FP editor in chief Ravi Agrawal.
“I would argue that in the developing world, applications of AI can look like helping to make an illiterate farmer more productive,” Banga said.
Tomorrow will likely see two separate virtual speeches, with the United States reportedly denying visas to both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Sudan’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. (The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to SitRep’s request for comment on whether those visa bans would be rescinded in time for them to address the gathering in person.)
Both leaders are scheduled to speak after Netanyahu takes the stage earlier in the morning.
FP will host the third and final session of its Health Forum, focused on shaping the future of health.
