In UN speech, Trump threatens to ‘annihilate’ Iran if no deal reached

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran if diplomatic efforts to end his nearly seven-month-old war do not succeed. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, he also touted both his peacemaking record and an increasingly belligerent U.S. foreign policy stretching from the Middle East to Venezuela to Greenland.

Trump presented the past year as proof that military force and economic pressure could resolve conflicts that diplomacy had failed to settle.

“As president of the most extraordinary nation in history, I have no interest in leaving dangers to grow for another day,” he declared. “I do not believe in letting problems fester; they only become harder to solve. So while others have talked, I have acted.”

The leading example of this approach, Trump said, was Iran, which, in his telling, has rejected Washington’s diplomatic overtures that had pushed Trump to take military action with Israel in June 2025 and then launch a much larger-scale war beginning at the end of February.

“I have a big decision to make,” Trump said of the current status of the war. “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before (…) Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly?”

Trump has made several similarly dark threats against Iran during the conflict, but they have done little to alter Tehran’s negotiating position, and the two sides appear stuck in a standoff, with some fearing that the operation is doomed to become another American “forever war”.

The president, however, predicted that the two sides will reach an agreement after November’s midterm elections, because “it doesn’t make sense for” Iran not to.

“They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election, what they don’t realize is that I’m not running,” he added, saying that national security questions, not political considerations will drive his calculus. But the war does seem to be affecting the president’s popularity. A recent poll by CNN shows that opposition to Trump’s approach to the war continues to grow, with only 26% saying that they support the president’s approach, and nearly 80% saying he is not doing enough to bring the war to an end.

Trump blasted the “cowards and traitors” who say that U.S. munitions stockpiles are dwindling to a dangerous extent. The Congressional Budget Office recently found that it could take five years to replenish them.

Elsewhere, Trump said he would “continue to seek and end the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine,” while threatening to use the “enormous” new tariff authorities granted to him by the Russia sanctions package that passed Congress last week. He also said that he would sign the recently announced deal with Denmark and Greenland that would increase the U.S. military presence in Greenland later Tuesday.

Trump closed his remarks by downplaying the growing worries over artificial intelligence’s threat to humanity, instead presenting the race to “superintelligence” as part of a competition with China.

“Whoever wins superintelligent wins,” he said. “That’s the group that wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way.”