US President Donald Trump has turned his speech at the United Nations General Assembly into a frontal attack on China, which he has once again accused of having spread the coronavirus in the world by lying, according to the President of the United States , on its dangerousness and incidence. “The United Nations must hold China to account,” said the Republican during the high-level conference, which is held virtually as a result of the pandemic.
The first to speak on Tuesday was the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro . The second, Donald Trump. Then came his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Later it was the turn of Russian Vladimir Putin. The last speeches of the morning (according to local time in New York) will be for the Iranian president, Hasan Rohan?, and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.
For six hours, the first debate of the UN General Assembly will give voice to the main players on the world geopolitical board; a table where the multilateral strategy is conspicuous by its absence and that stages the hyper-leadership of some leaders facing each other. As demonstrated by the continuous tensions between Beijing and Washington, which outline a scenario reminiscent of the Cold War , with Russia as a destabilizing factor in the West; the Turkish challenge in the eastern Mediterranean; or the announcement of the US Administration to impose new sanctions on its Iranian enemy.
For the first time in the 75-year history of the UN, world leaders will not face each other live, at the organization’s headquarters in New York, but due to the pandemic it will be a succession of previously recorded speeches of a duration maximum of 15 minutes. This unusual format, which does not give rise to improvisations, will have as one of the main themes the global management of covid-19, a pandemic that has already left almost a million deaths around the planet.
?Climate calamity looms. Biodiversity is collapsing. Poverty grows again. Hate spreads. Geopolitical tensions are escalating. Nuclear weapons remain on a sensitive trigger alert. Technologies have opened up new opportunities, but also new threats. The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the world. We can only face them together, ?said the UN Secretary General , Ant?nio Guterres, of Portugal, during the inauguration ceremony that commemorated the 75th anniversary of the multilateral organization.
An act to which only one diplomat from each country was allowed to enter, with few journalists, the meeting rooms turned off, the cafeterias closed, no huddles of international delegations in the corridors of this tangle of plants and offices that is the headquarters of the UN , based in the East River of Manhattan.