This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ UN

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Annmarie Hordern (0:09)

I think the two biggest issues have to be the two hot wars, the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Zelensky was here, and going into that meeting, the Financial Times had this reporting that when Zelensky was on the phone with the president, the president just kept saying diesel, diesel, diesel. So it's not just the United States, the whole global economy is feeling the heat of rising energy costs.

That was definitely half of what everyone I think was focused on, and the other half was artificial intelligence.

David Gura (0:40)

I'm David Gura, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, a busy week on the world stage. Bloomberg's Annmarie Hordern and Nick Wadhams join me to make sense of what the United Nations General Assembly and a meeting of Presidents Trump and Xi reveal about the changing world order.

Nick and Annmarie were chatting on Thursday morning in the middle of the UN General Assembly and this leader summit that's taking place in Washington. Nick, let's start with the UN, which has been around now for more than 80 years, founded with the subjective of preventing global wars. At this moment, how well-equipped is the UN to do that?

Nick Wadhams (1:19)

I think what you really saw this week was that it is not at all equipped to deal with these crises. I mean, Trump goes to the podium and says he's going to annihilate Iran. I mean, he's done that before with North Korea. He threatened fire and fury in his first term, so it's not exactly new for him to go and-

David Gura (1:36)

Familiar rhetoric.

Nick Wadhams (1:37)

Familiar rhetoric, threatening civilizational erasure of another sovereign state from the podium of the UN was definitely a jarring moment. But what you see is an organization that is essentially helpless to play a role, and then I think also the AI situation.

I mean, Antonio Guterres, the outgoing secretary general, had really wanted to make regulating and putting guardrails on AI a sort of centerpiece of his second five-year term. That was really his big vision. And what you saw yesterday and have seen for years now is essentially the US saying we're not going to cooperate. Trump said in his speech, this is a globalist scheme. So you really see the challenge there. Good terrorists, it essentially means, I think, that they're not going to be able to do anything on it.

David Gura (2:24)

Annmarie, let's dig into the speech that the president delivered. And let me start just by asking you about the rhetoric that he had toward the UN. He has Mike Walz as his ambassador here in New York.

What is the level of engagement that the Trump administration has with the US? How does it think about the body?

Annmarie Hordern (2:39)

Well, I think Ambassador Walz has talked about how they don't want to step away from it, but they want it to function better. They obviously have held up some funding when it comes to the United Nations. I would also say the president's speech, I think we need to take the president's trip to the UN also in entirety.

Yes, the rhetoric was incredibly hot about Iran, talking about annihilating Iran. At the same time, he did offer, which he normally does, another path. He said potentially we can get to a deal. At the same time, his mediators met with the Iranians while they were here. So I think a lot of people were clinging to the fact that it's a lot of bark, but potentially he wants to still have a deal in the end, because why would he allow his own mediators sit down with him? I think he said the conversations were good, at least a start.

Nick Wadhams (3:28)

He said they were productive. To me, there are a lot of ways to read those meetings, because on the one hand, you could argue, essentially, the president wants this thing sewn up ASAP, and he's using the UN and the fact that everybody's descended on the UN to basically try to shake something loose.

David Gura (3:47)

It's like a forcing mechanism.

Nick Wadhams (3:48)

Correct. Challenge there, though, was that once we got a little bit more detail about what actually happened, it seems like this was basically talks about talks, which puts us back in where we've been for months, essentially, since the ceasefire collapsed.

David Gura (4:03)

Let's talk a bit more about AI. It came up in the secretary general's speech that there was this moment on Wednesday when you had the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic testifying before the Security Council.