Argentine President Javier Milei told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, 23 September 2026, that the world body has become a “useless organisation”, accusing it of sheltering a bureaucracy that has drifted far from the purpose for which it was founded.
Milei made the remarks in New York during the general debate of the 81st session, his third address to the assembly since taking office in 2023. According to the account published on the UN’s own news service, he said he intended to speak in a “constructive spirit” about three things: what the organisation was meant to do but failed to do, what it did despite lying outside its remit, and its approach to artificial intelligence.
The Argentine leader began by praising the ideals behind the institution, describing its founding commitment to resolving disputes peacefully and protecting human dignity as “noble words”. He then argued that the body had abandoned them, telling delegates that “in practice, that sacred covenant has been broken”.
From there his language sharpened. The UN, he said, “has become a useless organisation whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats”. He accused it of allowing chaos, violence and terrorism to spread, and of failing in its duty to guarantee collective security and human rights.
Milei also faulted the organisation over Argentina’s long-running claim to the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory that Argentines call Las Malvinas. He accused the UN of “looking the other way” on the dispute. Argentina has for years maintained that Britain is flouting a UN resolution calling on both sides to avoid unilateral action over the islands, which the two countries fought a war over in 1982. Britain administers the territory and holds that its residents have the right to determine their own status, a position rejected by Buenos Aires.
He extended the criticism to the UN’s conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, describing the restrictions of that period in severe terms, and objected to what he called the promotion of a “gender agenda, environmental extremism and unchecked immigration”. Much of his complaint centred on the argument that the organisation has built a bureaucracy that reaches into decisions he believes belong to sovereign governments. “Those who follow the rules receive no reward for doing so, while those who break them face no repercussions whatsoever,” he said.
The speech fits a pattern rather than marking a departure. Milei used his addresses in 2024 and 2025 to deliver similar attacks on global governance and what he terms its “woke” agenda, and he remains among the closest allies in Latin America of United States President Donald Trump, who has himself pressed a sovereignty-first line at the same forum.
That alignment was visible off the podium the same day. The governments of the United States and Argentina announced the launch of what they call the Andes-Atlantic Corridor, a joint initiative to modernise the infrastructure linking Argentina’s mineral-rich northwest and its Vaca Muerta energy basin to Atlantic ports and Western markets. According to the joint statement issued by both governments, the corridor covers transport, energy, minerals and digital infrastructure, and is intended to expand oil, gas and critical mineral exports through investment in rail, waterways, ports, pipelines and power.
The US State Department described the arrangement as the first Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment corridor in the Western Hemisphere. It was launched on the margins of the assembly’s high-level week by US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Argentine Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno. The department’s fact sheet said the plan aims to unlock billions of dollars in investment and to strengthen supply chains for lithium, copper, oil and gas, though it did not attach a single headline cost to the programme.
The corridor builds on a run of financial cooperation between Washington and Buenos Aires. In October 2025 the US Treasury announced a 20 billion dollar currency swap arrangement with Argentina, of which the Treasury later said only 2.5 billion dollars was drawn before being repaid in full in early 2026. The new corridor turns that support towards infrastructure and resource development rather than currency stabilisation.
For Nigerian readers, the exchange carries a familiar theme. Argentina, like Nigeria, is an economy rich in energy and minerals that has struggled to convert those resources into steady growth, and Milei’s argument that development should be driven by private capital and sovereign decision-making rather than multilateral direction echoes debates heard across many developing economies about the value of institutions such as the UN and the international lenders that work alongside it.
The UN has not issued a point-by-point response to the speech, and the assembly’s general debate allows heads of state to set out national positions without formal reply from the body. What is confirmed is the content of Milei’s address, delivered from the assembly podium and recorded by the organisation itself, and the announcement of the US-Argentina corridor the same day. How far the corridor advances, and whether it delivers the investment its backers project, will depend on financing decisions and project approvals still to come.