UNITED NATIONS — Last year, it was “a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”
This year, expect “a healthy dose of continuing to call out the ridiculous” from President Trump during his address at the United Nations General Assembly, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Trump chided members of the international peacekeeping body in his 2025 speech for providing only “empty words” that “don’t solve war” and is expected to rebuke the UN on Tuesday for accusing the US of war crimes.
“The Human Rights Council, which is a separate part of the UN in Geneva, but still part of it … years ago had a George Floyd commission, and then just released a report … saying that US service members may have allegedly engaged in war crimes in Iran,” Waltz explained.
“We have to remind people that, even when we have civilian casualties — and I’m not saying that’s the case, I think it’s still under investigation by the Pentagon — but even when we have them, it’s unintentional and it’s incidental as part of a conflict, as opposed to the Iranian regime machine-gunning 40,000 of its own people in the span of three or four days,” he said.
“The fact that these parts of the UN continue to make that kind of ridiculous moral equivalence just overshadows in some cases the good work that it’s doing,” added Waltz.
The US ambassador to the UN is also anticipating that Trump will discuss the importance of preserving the nation’s sovereignty, the “out of control” judiciaries like the International Criminal Court, and an “America First” foreign policy that’s led to reforms of the UN budget.
“And then back to basics, right?” Waltz said. “He’s trying to cut these peace deals around the world. It’s not easy, whether it’s on Ukraine or Azerbaijan or Armenia, and he needs the UN to focus on that. … That’s what the UN was invented for.”
There’s also going to be UN Security Council meetings on the Ukraine-Russia war and on artificial intelligence (AI).
Trump is scheduled to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday in hopes of bringing about the end of Russia’s war against Kyiv — a sitdown that follows strikes against many of Moscow’s diesel refineries.
“This ridiculous and never ending War with Ukraine must be ended. The whole World suffers as 25,000 people, mostly soldiers, are being killed each month. What a shame!” the president posted on his Truth Social Monday.
US officials are also hosting bilateral talks with dozens of other countries, while continuing to seek a resolution to the conflict with Iran that has paralyzed international shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite the slow work of diplomacy in resolving those conflicts, Waltz said that there are successes in the past year that deserve to be celebrated by the president and his administration as well.
“Last year, there were hostages in Gaza, bombs dropping, aid not flowing,” the ambassador noted. “Now, we have the Board of Peace … Palestinians trying to govern the place; you have an international stabilization force; it’s all UN-endorsed.”
“We need one place in the world, especially with a president that puts diplomacy first, where everyone can come and talk,” he added, “and it’s once a year, the only place in the world where you get over 150 prime ministers, presidents, all their foreign ministers.”
Waltz also touted the Trump administration’s success in having cut the UN’s budget for the first time in history, with more than 190 countries agreeing and more than $1 billion saved so far.
