NEW YORK — President Trump will step to the podium at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday facing the most openly skeptical audience of his second term, as the war his administration launched against Iran grinds into its seventh month with no resolution in sight.
Trump is expected to claim victory on two fronts at once: as a wartime commander who says he has degraded Iran's nuclear program, and as a global peacemaker who expanded the Abraham Accords and brokered a fragile calm in Gaza. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told reporters the speech would center on "the administration's handling of international conflicts" and the continuing threat from Tehran's nuclear ambitions, previewing a message that allies and analysts say is increasingly hard to square with events on the ground, according to reporting on the run-up to the address.
A War Without an End Date
The conflict began September 1 with American strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets in southern Iran, part of a shift away from the White House's "Economic D-Day" sanctions strategy and back toward direct military action, according to a summary of the September strikes. A ceasefire reached in April and a June memorandum of understanding meant to end the fighting both collapsed within weeks, and the truce formally expired in August. Iran has since retaliated with missile and drone strikes on U.S.-linked bases in Jordan, Bahrain and Iraq, while Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen have kept up attacks of their own, including a ballistic missile intercepted over Riyadh last week and continuing clashes reported as recently as Monday.
What was supposed to be resolved in weeks has instead become what one former U.S. Middle East policy adviser, Aaron David Miller, described bluntly:
We are seeing what happens when a president launches a war of choice without anticipating the unintended consequences.
Aaron David Miller, former State Department Middle East adviser
The toll is now measurable well beyond the battlefield. Oil markets have gyrated on repeated threats to the Strait of Hormuz, the Pentagon's precision-missile stockpiles have been strained by months of continuous strikes, and gas prices at home have climbed at a politically inconvenient moment — six weeks before a midterm election in which control of Congress is on the ballot.
Allies Withhold Their Support
European and Asian governments, largely left out of the decision to strike Iran in the first place, have so far declined White House requests for material help with the campaign, deepening long-simmering doubts in Europe and the Gulf about the reliability of American security commitments. A senior administration official said the current phase of the operation is focused on "ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea" while shifting more responsibility to regional partners, while White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly maintained that Trump had shown "the courage" to confront Iran's nuclear program and had achieved his objectives.
Independent analysts describe a stalemate rather than either outcome. Daniel Forti of the International Crisis Group, who has tracked the administration's messaging on the war, said the unpredictability itself has become a defining feature of the moment:
No one knows what Trump is going to say, not even Trump's speechwriters.
Daniel Forti, International Crisis Group
Forti and other UN-watchers expect Trump to lean hard into his record as a dealmaker even while defending an open-ended military campaign — a balancing act that will be tested immediately in the hall, where the annual gathering of world leaders is arguably more anxious than at any point since the war began, according to accounts of the administration's planning for the speech.
Trump will also face fresh friction over the security arrangement Washington struck with Denmark last week granting the U.S. what officials called "permanent" control over defense of Greenland, an agreement that further unsettled a NATO ally already uneasy about the administration's approach to the alliance.
What Comes Next
After his remarks, Trump is scheduled to meet separately with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez — a sequence of sideline meetings that will offer the clearest early signal of whether Tuesday's speech shifts any ally's posture. Trump has separately floated both an expanded air campaign against Iran and the possibility of the first US-Iran summit since the war began, leaving open the chance that the coming days bring either a dramatic escalation or the first real diplomatic opening in months. For now, officials on both sides of the aisle in Washington say they expect the war to still be underway when voters go to the polls in November.
