German Goads Trump at UN/GA

By | 2026

UNITED NATIONS, September 11 (C-Fam) Annalena Baerbock did not mince words in her final speech as President of the General Assembly. She quite obviously attacked the Trump administration and thanked members of the organization for blocking U.S. efforts to reform the organization.

“Dear Excellencies, dear friends and colleagues, thank you that we took a clear decision together at the beginning of this 80th session, when standing at that crossroads, to not allow these cynics the lack of consensus and the rise of a world in which might makes right, to paralyze this, our organization,” Baerbock said as a new session of the General Assembly opened this week. It was clear to everyone present that Baerbock was referring to the Trump administration.

For the past year, the U.S. government has repeatedly asked European member states to remove controversial issues like abortion, gender ideology, censorship, climate alarmism, and other leftist priorities from UN resolutions. The Trump administration was blocked each time.  The challenge for the administration to achieve any results at the United Nations was and continues to be EU brinkmanship.

The European Union blocked U.S. proposals from being considered, withdrew entire resolutions rather than give the Trump administration a win, and procedurally outmaneuvered the U.S. delegation repeatedly. The Europeans openly asked other delegations to oppose any efforts to roll back any leftist UN policies.

Baerbock gloated, as she emphasized that consensus “should not and never come at the expense of progress, nor of sacrificing the UN values and principles.” She said that even though the U.S. systematically voted against policies it did not support, the GA was not as “polarized or fragmented as many had predicted.” In fact, she underlined how successfully she isolated the United States and led the General Assembly in adopting 317 resolutions over U.S. objections.

“Many votes, with less than a handful or even only one against, underline that the power games of our times and the direct attacks on this dear institution have, in many ways, brought the vast majority of this General Assembly closer together throughout the 80th session, making the GA more united and even stronger than before,” Baerbock said.

Baerbock set out to oppose Trump from the very beginning of her tenure as president of the General Assembly, most visibly, when she pushed adoption of a global health agreement over the objections of the United States in December last year.

The President of the General Assembly is selected at the beginning of each session for a one-year term. He has an outsized say on how the General Assembly conducts its work each year. His office sets the terms of many UN agreements and controls the agenda and calendar of the General Assembly.

The new session of the General Assembly, the 81st session, opened on Tuesday. The new President of the General Assembly is Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh. Rahman is a diplomat who most recently served as his country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He is expected to follow the lead of the Group of 77, or G77, a group representing 127 developing countries, including China, India, and Pakistan. While this means that he may be less radical than Baerbock on social issues, he is nonetheless expected to go along with European brinkmanship of the United States to preserve institutional continuity at the United Nations.

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