When the United Nations General Assembly chose a theme for its 81st session, it picked words that read like a balance sheet: “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation: A United Nations that Delivers for All.” Delegates took the hint: Zimbabwe’s president spoke of a “trust deficit.” Sierra Leone’s called trust “the currency of multilateralism,” and Kazakhstan’s foreign minister said trust will not reappear without more international cooperation. Repeat a word that often, and it sounds like the recorded voice on a customer-service line, the one that insists your call is important while you wait.
The General Debate ended a few weeks ago. It is a fair moment to ask what the speeches did about the problem they named. The podium does two jobs at once, and the louder one is rarely the more useful.
Two jobs, one podium
The first job is performance, speaking to the cameras. Leaders address voters at home, allies and rivals abroad, and the news cycle. The second is deliberation, speaking to the room: governments introduce ideas, stake out positions, and see who might join them. Neither is new, yet how the Assembly is built explains why performance gets so much room.
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The Security Council is still divided over Ukraine and the Middle East, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said its Gaza plan has yet to be carried out. The Assembly is the one place where every government is guaranteed a microphone, but it cannot bind anyone. Its resolutions carry weight, not force. That makes it a better stage than a decision-making room.
The format sharpens the effect. Speakers get about fifteen minutes, and the sentence most likely to survive is the one that survives being clipped, which favors the insult over the clause. A government with many channels to the great powers can afford a memorable line. Those with fewer options may have no other moment all year to speak on equal terms with the permanent members, and spending it on applause is a poor trade. Most speeches blend both jobs, so the useful question is which part leaves a record.
Speaking to the cameras
Argentina’s Javier Milei offered contempt. He called the General Assembly useless and its members “fatally arrogant parasites,” a striking line from the institution’s own podium—which certainly travelled better as a clip than as an argument.
On 22 September, Donald Trump said he had taken action where others had merely spoken, and asked whether to make a deal with Iran or “annihilate the Islamic Republic”. Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian answered with defiance: in his words, Iran had only defended itself and was not a terrorist state. Yet he also said Iran would not be bullied, but would negotiate. Defiance and an open door can share a speech, and the open door is rarely the part that gets replayed.
Benjamin Netanyahu made the audience part of the act. He opened by addressing the empty seats, telling any remaining “moral cowards” to leave, and later called the delegates who had walked out hypocrites. He also defended the strikes on Iran as a matter of national security.
The clips, shorts, and reels often miss what happens next. The right of reply is where speakers must answer back, and the exchanges show how much the Assembly resembles the Council. Iran, Türkiye, and Qatar each answered Israel. India and Pakistan both used the right of reply on 25 September. Cambodia’s Deputy Prime Minister told the Assembly that conflict with Thailand had seriously eroded trust. Thailand’s PM in turn urged Cambodia to cooperate on border security, then exercised its right of reply to correct the record, by its own account. Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Chad argued over the war in Sudan. Here, disputants must answer each other directly, and the result looks like the Security Council: states talking at each other, with little resolved.
Speaking to the room
Positions and proposals are harder to report. A proposal has no antagonist, so there is nobody to cut to for a reaction. The results show up later, when it is clearer who backs a draft, who stays neutral, and who turns up to the side meeting, long after the cameras have left.
Naoero’s President David Adeang described the bind plainly. Small states, he said, are increasingly pushed to choose between partners and blocs. His country would not choose, and he called that “not neutrality” but “independence.”
Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary and State President To Lam applied that logic on a larger scale, with a core priority being restoring trust through respect for the Charter and international law. He said Vietnam’s tradition of independence and self-reliance supports its strategic autonomy. Placing trust in shared rules rather than alignments lets Hanoi stay on good terms with several capitals at once.
Kyrgyzstan’s president made the most concrete proposal of the week: a permanent public registry in the Assembly tracking how states implement resolutions, with escalating steps for persistent non-compliance. Liechtenstein’s Deputy Prime Minister made a neighboring point: political capital should be spent on peace rather than force.
So, what happened to trust?
Weeks later, the loudest speeches look the least consequential, written for audiences outside the room. The quieter ones came closer to what the banner asked: they described shared problems without assigning blame, put specific mechanisms on the table, and signaled that many governments still want the machine to work.
The Assembly’s president, Khalilur Rahman, closed the debate by saying trust cannot be commanded and must be earned through “consistency between words and deeds.” Between states, trust is not warmth but predictability: you can reasonably expect a government to follow the rules it has publicly signed up to. A speech to the room is a small first step toward that, because it puts a position on the record that others can point back to. A speech to the cameras is on the record too, but it offers little that anyone can check. A stricter test also applies, and most proposals do not yet pass it. The only things that really build trust in a General Debate are the ones that cost the speaker something later, such as a public check on their own implementation or a step that is hard to take back. By that test, the first checkable results are arriving, and they differ in kind.
Naoero deposited its notice to leave the International Criminal Court, and the Secretary-General confirmed receipt the next day. The step is costly and hard to take back, so it meets the second half of the test. It fails the first half because leaving a treaty reduces obligations rather than honoring them. The announcement also came hours after the United States urged all parties to quit the treaty, which complicates the picture of a state standing outside the blocs.
Viet Nam’s evidence is different. A day after Mr. To Lam’s speech, Viet Nam and Canada raised ties to a strategic partnership, built on the UN Charter and rules-based engagement, in line with Ha Noi’s “omnidirectional” foreign policy. The joint statement puts the speech’s idea into a formal document with another government. That gives Ha Noi something specific to be held to, and what it does next will show how far the idea goes.
Kyrgyzstan’s registry is a proposal, not a result, but it is the clearest case of a commitment that would expose its own proposer to later scrutiny. Whether it attracts sponsors will show how far the week’s proposals travel.
Overall, the General Assembly serves more to measure the state of international relations than to move them forward. It cannot create trust—but it shows where trust is weak and what the most exposed states ask for instead.
Among the speakers named here, a loose pattern appears: several states with room to maneuver used the podium for display, while several with more to protect used it to speak about rules. Iran, under heavy pressure, shows that the pattern is not a rule. For the exposed, a common rulebook is a protection that money cannot easily buy. In their speeches, Vietnam and Naoero reached the same place by different routes: declining the choice of camp and appealing to a shared standard. Whether that standard holds depends partly on the strong, and a week of speeches cannot show whether they consult it. Great powers invoke rules when they suit them. Even so, a standard voiced by many small and middle states at once is arguably harder to set aside than one voiced by a few.
A proposal in a general debate is not a decision, and a good paragraph does not mend a security council. But walkouts and rebuttals film well, while registries and rulebooks do not, so a reader who followed only the clips would conclude the Assembly had become pure theatre. It is partly theater, but not only theater. The applause fades within the hour, but the record of what states committed to stays.
