Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

On September 22, in the hall built to spare the world another industrial slaughter, the President of the United States asked whether he should make a deal with Iran or “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.” He said it in the first person. He said the midterms would decide the timing. He called himself a man of peace. The Cuban delegation walked out when he promised that their “failed state” would fall and that “freedom” — meaning Washington and little Marco Rubio at the State Department — was on the way. The Iranian diplomat sat still. That is the 81st General Assembly in one scene: the empire talking through their overlord with a flamethrower, and a room that has spent eighty years learning when to clap.

Trump’s line was the old American sermon with the volume stuck on eleven. America is back. America is stronger. America has acted while others talked. Iran is the number one sponsor of terror. Cuba is a corpse that has not yet signed the death certificate. The Western Hemisphere is a yard again: no threats permitted, “to the victor belong the spoils,” Venezuela already cited as proof. Gaza, in his telling, is a war he ended on the sidelines, hostages home, thousands saved. Ukraine, in the same breath, is a file to be closed when convenient — tell Putin to finish, keep the pipeline of shells and piety open until the next appropriation. The United Nations is a backdrop for the 250th birthday of a country that has spent many of those years vetoing the people under the rubble.

Two days later the sequel arrived by tail number. On Thursday, September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu flew in to address the same Assembly (the speech not yet given as of this writing). The Wing of Zion — the official Boeing with the biblical nickname, as if the Book of Samuel were a flight plan — left Israel on a path the trackers made public: Greece, then Italy, then France, then a line drawn south of Ireland so Dublin would not have to pretend it had not seen the plane. Greece, Italy and France are parties to the Rome Statute. On November 21, 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and then–defense minister Yoav Gallant. The judges found reasonable grounds that both men bear responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity — murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts — committed against civilians in Gaza. The warrants remain in force. Those governments did not have to open their sky. They chose to, as they have chosen before. Ireland was treated as a risk. Rome, Athens and Paris were treated as a corridor. That is international law as Europe practices it: binding when a Russian general might land, optional when the passenger is the prime minister of the genocidal weapons laboratory. Emma Fourreau called it a France that humiliates itself. She was being kind. It is a continent that will lecture the Global South on the Charter and then file a flight plan for a man the Hague has already named a wanted war criminal.

Washington’s answer to the warrant was not a legal brief. It was a wrecking operation. The United States never joined........

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