Truth-Telling at Turtle Bay

In the history of the United Nations there are tens of thousands of speeches, and most are immediately and deservedly forgotten. Very few are memorable; speeches like Daniel P. Moynihan’s rejection of the “Zionist is racism” resolution of 1975 are rare and are treasured.

The speech Moynihan gave as the Permanent Representative of the United States was instantly famous. At the General Assembly this Fall, a remarkable speech was delivered that has received almost no attention: the remarks of Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei. The speech in the original Spanish can be found here, at the Argentine presidency’s website. The text in English translation is copied below.

Why was Milei’s speech worth remembering? For telling the truth about the United Nations, to an audience that did not want to hear a word of it—and rarely does.

After lauding the early contributions of the UN to world peace, Milei said it had gone off course:

The successful model of the United Nations…has been abandoned; it has been replaced by a model of supranational government of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world.

The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, he said

is nothing more than a supranational government program, socialist in nature, which seeks to solve the problems of modernity with solutions that violate the sovereignty of nation states and violate people's right to life, liberty and property. It has been precisely the adoption of this agenda, which obeys privileged interests, the abandonment of the principles -- outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations -- that has distorted the role of this institution and put it on the wrong path. Thus, we have seen how an organization, born to defend the rights of man, has been one of the main proponents of the systematic violation of freedom, as -- for example -- with the global quarantines during the year 2020, which should be considered a crime against humanity.

Then he names some names:

In this same House that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed bloody dictatorships such as Cuba and Venezuela to join the Human Rights Council without the slightest reproach. In this same House that claims to defend women's rights, they allow countries that punish their women for showing their skin to join the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. In this same House -- systematically -- they have voted against the State of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism.

When it comes to economic development, he lives up to his reputation as a liberal or libertarian:

In the economic sphere, collectivist policies have been promoted that threaten economic growth, violate property rights, and hinder the natural economic process, preventing the most underprivileged countries in the world from freely enjoying their own resources in order to move forward….a toxic relationship has been promoted between global governance policies and international lending agencies, requiring the most neglected countries to commit resources they do not have to programs they do not need, turning them into perpetual debtors to promote the agenda of the global elites.

Milei rejects socialist remedies because they do not work and instead become a threat to freedom:

I would like to issue a warning: we are at the end of a cycle. Collectivism and moral posturing, of the woke agenda, have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the world's real problems….The same thing always happens with ideas coming from the left: they design a model according to what human beings should be -- according to them -- and when individuals -- freely -- act otherwise, they have no better solution than to restrict, repress and restrict their freedom.

This leads to a clear rejection of the UN’s grandiose Pact for the Future, which emerged at its equally grandiose Summit of the Future:

Argentina will not support any policy that implies the restriction of individual freedoms, of trade, or the violation of the natural rights of individuals, no matter who promotes it or how much consensus that institution has. For this reason, we wish to express -- officially -- our dissent on the Pact of the Future, signed on Sunday, and we invite all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in dissenting from this pact, but also in the creation of a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom.

Why not? What does his government want instead:

Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom; those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. Those principles, which guide the process of change that we are carrying out in Argentina, are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.

We believe in the defense of life for all; we believe in the defense of property for all; we believe in freedom of speech for all; we believe in freedom of worship for all; we believe in freedom of commerce for all; and we believe in limited governments, all of them.

Most of the U.N. speeches by foreign ministers, prime ministers, presidents, and kings are dry, boring, recitations that change little from year to year: laud the UN, attack Israel, call for collective efforts on climate change, and the like.  Milei’s was a speech of real principle and courage—rare commodities in the swamps of Turtle Bay.

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Javier Milei, Address to the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, 

delivered 24 September 2024, United Nations HQ, New York, NY

To the authorities of the United Nations, to the representatives of the various countries that make up the United Nations and to all the citizens of the world who are watching us, good afternoon. and to all the citizens of the world who are watching us, good afternoon: for those who do not know, I am not a politician, I am an economist, a libertarian liberal economist, who has never had the ambition to be a politician. I am an economist, a liberal libertarian economist, who has never had the ambition to be a politician and who was who was honored with the position of President of the Argentine Republic, in the face of the resounding

failure of more than a century of collectivist policies. a century of collectivist policies that destroyed our country.

This is my first speech -- in front of the United Nations General Assembly -- and I would like to take this opportunity to -- with humility -- alert the various nations of the world to the path they have been treading for decades and the danger of this organization's failure to fulfill its original mission.

I do not come here to tell the world what to do; I come here to tell the world, on the one hand, what will happen if the United Nations continues to promote collectivist policies, which they have been promoting under the mandate of the 2030 Agenda, and, on the other hand, what are the values that the new Argentina defends. I do want to begin by giving credit where credit is due. The United Nations organization was born out of the horror of the bloodiest war in global history with the main objective that it should never happen again. To that end, the organization set its fundamental principles in stone, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A basic agreement was set down there, based on a maxim: that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Under the tutelage of this organization and the adoption of these ideas -- during the last 70 years -- humanity experienced the longest period of global peace in history, which also coincided with the period of the greatest economic growth in history. An international forum was created where nations could settle their conflicts through cooperation instead of resorting -- instantly -- to arms, and something unthinkable was achieved: the five largest powers in the world were permanently seated1 at the same table, each with the same veto power, despite having totally opposing interests.

All this did not make the scourge of war disappear, but it was achieved -- for the time being -- that no conflict escalated to global proportions. The result was that we went from having two world wars in less than 40 years, which together claimed more than 120 million lives, to having 70 consecutive years of relative peace and global stability, under the mantle of an order that allowed the whole world to integrate commercially, compete and prosper. Because where there is trade, there are no bullets -- Bastiat used to say2 -- because trade guarantees peace, freedom guarantees trade and equality before the law guarantees freedom.

In short, what the Prophet Isaiah wrote and what is read in the park, crossing the street, was fulfilled:

God will judge between the nations and will arbitrate for many peoples; they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning shears. Nation shall not take sword against Nation; they shall know war no more.3

This is what has happened -- mostly -- under the aegis of the United Nations, in its first decades, and therefore, from this perspective, we are talking about a remarkable success in the history of nations that cannot be overlooked. However -- at some point -- and as it usually happens with most of the bureaucratic structures that we men create, this organization ceased to watch over the principles outlined in its founding declaration and began to mutate. An organization that had been intended -- essentially -- as a shield to protect the Kingdom of Man was transformed into a multi-tentacled Leviathan, which seeks to decide not only what each nation-state should do, but also how all the citizens of the world should live. This is how we went from an organization that pursued peace to an organization that imposes an ideological agenda on its members, on a myriad of issues, which make the life of man in society.

The successful model of the United Nations, whose origins can be traced back to the ideas of President Wilson, who spoke of the society of "peace without victory" and which was based on the cooperation of nation states, has been abandoned; it has been replaced by a model of supranational government of international bureaucrats who seek to impose a certain way of life on the citizens of the world. What is being discussed -- this week, here, in New York, at the Summit of the Future -- is nothing other than the deepening of this tragic course that this institution has adopted. Thus, the deepening of a model that -- in the words of the Secretary of the United Nations himself -- requires the definition of a new social contract on a global scale, redoubling the commitments of the 2030 Agenda.

I want to be clear on the position of the Argentine agenda: the 2030 Agenda, although well-intentioned in its goals, is nothing more than a supranational government program, socialist in nature, which seeks to solve the problems of modernity with solutions that violate the sovereignty of nation states and violate people's right to life, liberty and property. It is an agenda that pretends to solve poverty, inequality and discrimination with legislation that only deepens them. Because world history shows that the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch, guaranteeing equality before the law and defending the right to life, liberty and property of individuals.

It has been precisely the adoption of this agenda, which obeys privileged interests, the abandonment of the principles -- outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations -- that has distorted the role of this institution and put it on the wrong path. Thus, we have seen how an organization, born to defend the rights of man, has been one of the main proponents of the systematic violation of freedom, as -- for example -- with the global quarantines during the year 2020, which should be considered a crime against humanity.

In this same House that claims to defend human rights, they have allowed bloody dictatorships such as Cuba and Venezuela to join the Human Rights Council without the slightest reproach. In this same House that claims to defend women's rights, they allow countries that punish their women for showing their skin to join the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. In this same House -- systematically -- they have voted against the State of Israel, which is the only country in the Middle East that defends liberal democracy, while simultaneously demonstrating a total inability to respond to the scourge of terrorism. In the economic sphere, collectivist policies have been promoted that threaten economic growth, violate property rights, and hinder the natural economic process, preventing the most underprivileged countries in the world from freely enjoying their own resources in order to move forward. Regulations and prohibitions promoted precisely by the countries that developed thanks to doing the same thing they condemn today. Moreover, a toxic relationship has been promoted between global governance policies and international lending agencies, requiring the most neglected countries to commit resources they do not have to programs they do not need, turning them into perpetual debtors to promote the agenda of the global elites.

Nor has the tutelage of the World Economic Forum helped, where ridiculous policies are promoted with Malthusian blinders on -- such as "Zero Emission" policies -- which harm poor countries in particular. To policies linked to sexual and reproductive rights, when the birth rate in Western countries is plummeting, heralding a bleak future for all. Nor has the organization satisfactorily fulfilled its mission of defending the territorial sovereignty of its members, as we Argentines know firsthand, in the relationship with the Malvinas Islands. And we have even reached a situation in which the Security Council, which is the most important organ of this House, has become distorted, because the veto of its permanent members has begun to be used in defense of the particular interests of some.

Thus we are today, with an organization that is powerless to provide solutions to real global conflicts, such as the aberrant Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has already cost the lives of more than 300,000 people, leaving a trail of more than one million wounded in the process. An organization that, instead of confronting these conflicts, invests time and effort in imposing on poor countries what, how and what they should produce, with whom they should associate, what they should eat and what they should believe in, as the present Pact for the Future intends to dictate. This long list of errors and contradictions has not been

gratuitous, but has resulted in the loss of credibility of the United Nations in the eyes of the citizens of the free world and in the denaturalization of its functions.

Therefore, I would like to issue a warning: we are at the end of a cycle. Collectivism and moral posturing, of the woke agenda, have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the world's real problems. In fact, they never had them. If the 2030 Agenda failed -- as its own promoters acknowledge -- the answer should be to ask ourselves if it was not an ill-conceived program to begin with, accept that reality and change course. We cannot pretend to persist in the mistake by redoubling the bet on an agenda that has failed. The same thing always happens with ideas coming from the left: they design a model according to what human beings should be -- according to them -- and when individuals -- freely -- act otherwise, they have no better solution than to restrict, repress and restrict their freedom.

We -- in Argentina -- have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this road of envy and sad passions: poverty, brutalization, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom. We still have time to turn away from this course.

I want to be clear about something so that there are no misinterpretations: Argentina, which is undergoing a profound process of change, has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom; those ideas that say that all citizens are born free and equal before the law, that we have inalienable rights granted by the Creator, among which are the right to life, liberty and property. Those principles, which guide the process of change that we are carrying out in Argentina, are also the principles that will guide our international conduct from now on.

We believe in the defense of life for all; we believe in the defense of property for all; we believe in freedom of speech for all; we believe in freedom of worship for all; we believe in freedom of commerce for all; and we believe in limited governments, all of them.

And because in these times what happens in one country quickly impacts others, we believe that all peoples should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether it takes the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. That fundamental idea must not remain mere words; it must be supported in deeds, diplomatically, economically and materially, through the combined strength of all countries, which stand for freedom.

This doctrine of the new Argentina is no more and no less than the true essence of the United Nations Organization, that is, the cooperation of the United Nations in defense of freedom. If the United Nations decides to retake the principles that gave it life and to adapt again the role for which it was conceived, you can count on the unwavering support of Argentina in the struggle for freedom.

You should also know that Argentina will not support any policy that implies the restriction of individual freedoms, of trade, or the violation of the natural rights of individuals, no matter who promotes it or how much consensus that institution has. For this reason, we wish to express -- officially -- our dissent on the Pact of the Future, signed on Sunday, and we invite all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in dissenting from this pact, but also in the creation of a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom.

From this day on, know that the Argentine Republic will abandon the position of historical neutrality that characterized us and will be at the forefront of the struggle in defense of freedom. Because -- as Thomas Paine said -- "those who wish to reap the blessings of freedom must -- as men -- endure the fatigue of defending it."

May God bless the Argentines and all the citizens of the world, and may the forces of heaven be with us.

Long live [redacted] freedom!

Thank you very much.