Argentine President Javier Milei used his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to deliver one of his harshest attacks yet on the international body, calling it a “useless organization that serves only to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-meaning bureaucrats.”
It was Milei’s third consecutive appearance before the General Assembly since taking office in 2023, and the third time he has used the platform to condemn the institution. He structured his speech around three areas of criticism: what the U.N. should have done but did not, what it should not have done but did anyway, and concerns about the organization’s approach to artificial intelligence.
Milei’s Charges Against the U.N. on Security and Human Rights
Milei opened his critique by invoking the U.N.’s founding principle that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, calling those “noble words, whose spirit I fully share.” He then declared, “It is time to recognize that this sacred covenant has been broken.”
He accused the organization of allowing chaos and violence to flourish while protecting the wrong parties. “Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their duty, and instead, they allowed chaos, violence, and international terrorism to prevail,” Milei said. The so-called defenders of human rights supported bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women to death in the streets.” He also charged the U.N. with voting “systematically against Israel, while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa.
Milei separately condemned Iran’s Islamic regime over its attacks against Israel, stressing that Argentina continues to demand justice for two terrorist attacks it suffered in the 1990s carried out by Iran through its proxy group Hezbollah. He also accused the U.N. of ignoring Argentina’s long-running territorial dispute with the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands. Citing a decades-old U.N. resolution calling on both countries to avoid unilateral actions, including the exploitation of natural resources, Milei asked, “What is the point of a resolution if, for decades, the other party can act in a manner contrary to it, and that resolution remains unchanged in the archives, yet powerless in the face of reality?” You can read more about Milei’s U.N. General Assembly speech and his broader foreign policy positions in full detail.
The U.N.’s ‘Bureaucratic Leviathan’ and the AI Question
On the question of what the U.N. should not have done, Milei accused the organization of building a “bureaucratic leviathan dedicated to dictating how the world’s nations and its citizens should live.” He described the result as a mix of “anarchy and tyranny,” imposing control on liberal democracies that follow the rules while remaining impotent against dictatorships and terrorist groups that do not.
He singled out the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda, criticizing its contents on economic regulation, gender policy, environmentalism, and migration. He also attacked the global response to the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the U.N. of promoting forced lockdowns that “destroyed jobs, ruined the education of an entire generation of children, and cost the lives of millions.” Those policies, he said, were a “global experiment for social control disguised as science.
Argentina’s Invitation to the World’s Free People
On artificial intelligence, Milei said he shares President Donald Trump’s view that the West must lead in developing the technology, arguing that AI can transform medicine, education, and governance. While caution is warranted, he said, fear of AI “under no point of view must automatically turn into obedience.”
Milei closed by inviting “the free men and women of the world, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, the creators” to look toward Argentina. “No nation is guaranteed a place in history; it is built generation after generation, through hard work, freedom, and the will of a people who refuse to accept that their best days are behind them,” he said. He ended, as is his custom, with the words: “May God bless all the peoples of the world. May God bless the Argentine Republic. May the forces of Heaven be with us, and long live freedom, damn it!”
