Milei Tells the UN to Its Face: A ‘Useless Organization’ of ‘Fatally Arrogant Parasites’

Most world leaders who take the podium at the United Nations General Assembly speak in the careful, padded language of diplomacy. Argentine President Javier Milei did the opposite. On Wednesday, at the opening of the 81st General Assembly in New York, he told the institution, to its face, that it had become “a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”

It was Milei’s third General Assembly address since taking office in December 2023, and his harshest. He has criticized the UN before. This time he delivered something closer to an indictment.

“What is lacking is consequences”

Milei’s central charge was that the UN has broken the founding bargain it was created to keep. The body that was supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights, he argued, instead “allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish.”

He went further: the alleged defenders of human rights, he said, have “sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.” The UN, in his telling, never runs short of statements. “There’s no shortage of words or resolutions; what is lacking is consequences.”

He also attacked what the UN has grown into: a “bureaucratic leviathan devoted to deciding how the peoples of the world and their citizens should live,” pushing what he described as a gender agenda, environmental extremism and unchecked immigration. He closed that argument with a line from the economist Ludwig von Mises: “Good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings.”

Israel and the double standard

For supporters of Israel, the most important passage was the one about the General Assembly’s voting record. Member states, Milei said, have systematically voted against Israel while remaining “silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa.”

That is not a fringe complaint. By the watchdog group UN Watch’s count, the General Assembly has for years adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than against every other country in the world combined, while regimes that jail dissidents, persecute religious minorities and fund terror groups sit on the same councils that judge the Jewish state. Milei named the pattern out loud from the one stage built to hide it.

He also restated where Argentina now stands: “unequivocally aligned” with the West, the United States and Israel. He condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel. Coming from Argentina, the country where Iranian-backed terrorists bombed the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA Jewish community center in 1994, killing 85 people in the second attack alone, that alignment is not abstract.

COVID, the WHO and the Falklands

Milei also took aim at the UN system’s role during the pandemic, describing forced lockdowns as “a global experiment in social control disguised as science” and the reason Argentina has withdrawn from the World Health Organization.

He used part of his time to press Argentina’s longstanding claim to the Falkland Islands, which Argentines call the Malvinas, calling it “a national cause” and accusing the UN of looking the other way despite General Assembly Resolution 31/49, which urged both sides to avoid unilateral changes while the dispute remains open. He said Argentina “rejects as illegal and illegitimate” British licenses for oil exploration in the surrounding waters.

Why it matters

The speech echoed criticisms President Trump has leveled at the organization from the same podium, and it signals something that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago: a growing bloc of elected leaders willing to say plainly that the UN’s institutions have been captured by the very regimes they were meant to restrain.

American taxpayers have long been the UN’s largest funder. Milei’s question, why the free world keeps bankrolling an institution that shelters its enemies, is one Washington should be asking too.

An organization that funds itself off the free world just got called a parasite to its face, and nobody in the room could say he was wrong.