BICOM

US President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time yesterday. During his maiden speech at the UN Trump warned of the threat posed by Iran, calling it a “rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos”.

Trump said that the world could not let a “murderous regime” continue to destabilise the Middle East while also “building dangerous missiles” and that the US “cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear programme”. Trump reiterated his previous statement that “the Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” And that the deal “is an embarrassment to the United States”.

President Trump also reinforced the message he had delivered during his visit to Saudi Arabia, saying that “we must deny the terrorists safe haven, transit, funding and any form of support for their vile and sinister ideology. We must drive them out of our nations”. He said it was time to expose and hold responsible countries who support and finance terror groups.

In response to the speech Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented: “In over 30 years in my experience with the UN, I never heard a bolder or more courageous speech. President Trump spoke the truth about the great dangers facing our world and issued a powerful call to confront them in order to ensure the future of humanity.”

However not all world leaders shared this view, or Trump and Netanyahu’s position on the Iran deal. In his own address to the UN General Assembly French President Emmanuel Macron called the Iran nuclear deal a “solid, robust agreement that verifies that Iran will not build a nuclear weapon”. He said that “to reject it now without proposing anything else would be a grave error, and not respecting it would be irresponsible”. France is one of the P5+1 countries that negotiated and signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in an interview after Trump’s speech that “everyone will clearly see that Iran has lived up to its agreements and that the United States is therefore a country that cannot be trusted”.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi also addressed the General Assembly where he encouraged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to make peace, arguing that the successful peace treaty between Israel and Egypt 40 years ago could serve as an example of how to do so.