Argentina

To the authorities of the United Nations, to the representatives of the member countries, and to all the citizens of the world following this summit closely, good day.

Last year I stood before you in this very assembly and presented a new orientation in foreign policy for Argentina. We maintained that a return to the ideas of liberty was imperative — to the immortal principles that uphold the dignity of life, the liberty and property of every individual under the law — and the need for international cooperation to have as its purpose precisely to secure them.

However, I warned that the UN had strayed from its true course in recent decades. The successful model of the United Nations — one that spoke of the need for peace without victory and that was founded on cooperation among nation-states — has been replaced by a model of supranational government run by international bureaucrats seeking to impose upon the citizens of the world a predetermined way of living.

This is how we went from an organization that sought to mediate peace among equals to an organization that seeks to decide not only what each State or Nation must do, but also what each individual must do in every corner of the planet.

We believe in the original purpose of this body. We believe there are global problems that require dialogue and international cooperation to be solved. But to achieve that, we must reject these overreaches that so often accompany noble agendas — as we said last year, we will never go along with the curtailment of individual or commercial freedoms, nor with the violation of the natural rights of the citizens of member States; and, over the past year and a half, we have voted accordingly.

I say this knowing full well that many do not share my words, because — as I have always said — it is better to speak an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie.

Along these lines, today I want to speak to you about a specific problem facing all modern countries. Right now, all around the world, a contradiction is emerging between the present and the future — a problem of a political, economic and philosophical nature, on whose answer the destiny of all humanity hinges.

If we put it in terms of comfort and discomfort, as I have framed it, the entire world seems to be stuck in the comfort of the present, disregarding the consequences this may bring in the future. Since discomfort costs votes and power to whoever takes it on, leaders prefer to do everything within their reach to preserve the inherited status quo, even at the cost of future consequences — they set the future on fire to keep the present warm.

In this way, contemporary States have entered into a dynamic that is very difficult to reverse, in which the incentives — both of the population and of politicians — point toward privileging the distribution of today's wealth over the generation of tomorrow's wealth.

At every moment, decision-makers face the choice of either preserving the legacy entrusted to them or destroying it. This legacy may be accumulated wealth, productive capacity, laws, or anything that serves the common good. Generally, if they burn through their legacy, if they opt for comfort, they will reap great benefits in the present, but suffer even greater costs in the future. If I use up my savings today, I lose them for tomorrow; if, on the other hand, they preserve them, they preserve growth and prosperity both for themselves and for future generations.

In other words, it is necessary to find a balance so that today's bread does not mean tomorrow's hunger, and so that we can guarantee a sustained increase in well-being — something we economists call economic growth. That growth may sometimes feel slow, and may sometimes be momentarily checked, because progress is never linear.

But it is precisely its long-term consistency that has systematically revolutionized the world and lifted billions out of poverty. The difference between growing at 0% and growing at 2% over the long term is the difference between stagnation and prosperity. We Argentines know a great deal about this, being the only country in the region that has not grown over the last fifteen years.

On the legal plane, the condition for growth is the sanctity of property and of the free market, which is nothing other than free cooperation among equals. Because without property rights, there is no saving; without saving or the ability to freely exchange it, there is no investment; and without investment, no growth is possible.

But it is not in the individual interest of the politician to respect these principles, because it is precisely in the expansion of the State, at the expense of citizens' freedoms, that the politician gains power. That is why it will always be profitable for the politician to sacrifice the future on the altar of the present, because consuming accumulated capital generates momentary well-being, and that momentary well-being generates votes. But in exchange, he is sacrificing a future of greater growth, making accumulated wealth ever smaller over time.

The greatest manifestation of this is found in those countries that display an orgy of increased public spending, since the State does not create wealth — it steals it, it destroys it. In this scheme, the politician gains power in two ways: he legitimizes himself democratically and obtains more resources to spend. In other words, the politician has a double incentive to foster this intergenerational betrayal, because, even though everyone loses in the future, in the present he gains more than anyone.

In this sense, a great man is one who plants trees whose shade he knows he will never enjoy; one who fells the trees that others planted in order to build his own seat of power is a miserable man. In short, he is a contemptible man.

This is the great evil and the great trap to which almost every nation is, little by little, succumbing, because when this process moves forward, growth stalls, and when growth stalls, the demand for redistribution intensifies. Then the populist politician shouts louder, appealing to envy and resentment. The end result of this process is watching young people left helpless, smothered under the weight of a State they know is there only to exploit them.

Unfortunately, measures of fiscal expansion, monetary expansion, and the expansion of state power over that of individuals form a pattern that is repeating itself in every country, especially in those that make up the free world.

But the problem is not only one of economic policy; we also see it when equality before the law is violated, or when the doors are opened indiscriminately to immigration for political reasons. Contrary to what immigration actually is, in this case, it would amount to invasion.

And the bodies of international cooperation, of which this organization is a part, are no strangers to this problem either. Over the years, this organization has gradually taken on functions foreign to its founding spirit. It has gone on creating layer upon layer of bodies, agencies and programs, until reaching a hypertrophy of administrations that are largely ineffective in solving the problems for which they were created. In this way, the responsibilities of the UN keep growing, the contributions received from member Nations keep growing, and the tangible results this organization has had to offer the world have shrunk.

Added to this cocktail of crossed incentives is the fact that, unlike national heads of state, in international organizations no one is truly held accountable for failing to solve a problem. This contradiction between grand objectives and meager results has eroded the prestige of this house, and of others. Without going any further, the poor results of the 2030 Agenda bear witness to what I am describing. What persists in practice is a cycle of structures that get recycled, resources that multiply, and goals that get rescheduled.

For this reason, Argentina decided at the time to withdraw from this process, because we saw in this agenda a poor use of scarce resources, for purposes we did not share, with the effect of distracting attention from the real difficulties of a world headed toward stagnation.

It is my duty to warn against this evil, because in Argentina we lived through it to its natural consequences. We reached the end of the comfortable road that comes from turning one's back on the future — that is, we come from a future that, for you, has not yet finished arriving. And I want to tell you that you are still in time to avoid it. Because no society can survive if it burns the future to warm the present.

In my country, we learned a very valuable lesson the hard way: for decades, future flows were mortgaged in order to distribute stock in the present. In 2023, we finally reached the long-run outcome of a hundred consecutive years of doing things wrong, of passing the bill from hand to hand until there was no one left to pay it. And all of that — added to what I told you before — ended up bankrupting our State.

As a result of that implosion, over the past year and a half we faced the enormous task of managing extreme scarcity. And today, for the first time in decades, we are doing what needs to be done for the future to be better. And the only formula for that is to do the opposite of what was done in the past.

Opposed to this is the rest of the political class, which demands that we do the same as they did — which also dragged us into decline: mortgaging the future to satisfy present demands. They want us to apply what they did a thousand times and what brought us to this point, but I want to make it clear that Argentina today has a Government that has decided to take the right path, even if it is the most difficult one — because the prosperity and progress of our people can no longer be postponed.

We are not, however, the only ones making the difficult decisions this historic moment demands. President Trump, in the United States, also understands that it is time to reverse a dynamic that was leading the United States toward catastrophe, and we know that a catastrophe in the United States is a global catastrophe.

His firm and successful policy in terms of putting a stop to illegal immigration makes that more than clear. He understands that he must do what is necessary, even if many do not like it, before it is too late. In other countries, for example, it is already too late for this decision.

Not only that, but he is also carrying out an unprecedented restructuring of the terms of international trade. A task of titanic proportions that strikes at the heart of the global economic system, because this system was preying on the industrial heart of his country and plunging it into an unparalleled debt crisis; moreover, he is carrying out a cleanup of the institutional capture of the American State, because leftist factions had infiltrated it that worked against any reform program, however necessary it might be.

These kinds of challenges, which both President Trump and I are tackling, have a common denominator that every country in the world, and even supranational organizations, must confront: they must find a way to recover an interest in the future and not succumb to the temptation of attending only to the present. This is something the great nations of the West practiced for a long time, and that we need to recover. We must return to basics; we must recover a sense of what is a priority, together with recovering a sense of doing what is difficult and right over what is easy and comfortable.

As I said before: this is also true for the various international bodies that have gradually incorporated this way of operating into their ecosystem. I believe I speak for everyone in saying that we would like the UN to lead this paradigm shift, returning to the foundations that made it the great organization it once was.

That is why I would humbly like to offer this Assembly four principles that we believe can be useful in pursuing this goal:

1. Principle of the essential mandate. The core mission of the UN is to preserve international peace and security; everything else must be conceived as complementary to that end. The strategic management and the resources of this institution therefore need to adhere to those priorities, not to others.

2. Principle of international subsidiarity. The UN should intervene on an issue only when it is evident that the problem demonstrably exceeds the capacities for national action; in all other cases, the initiative should be returned to the States, which are the ones that possess democratic legitimacy and are accountable to their peoples.

3. Principle of institutional diligence. Just as Argentina has begun a process of optimizing the State by eliminating redundant structures and returning resources to taxpayers, we understand that the UN needs a similar path. That means carrying out reliable audits, closing down ineffective programs, consolidating agencies into single bodies, and financing conditioned on verifiable results.

4. Principle of regulatory simplification and rationalization. Peace is not merely the absence of conflict; it requires prosperous societies. International cooperation must not become an obstacle to economic growth and the generation of opportunities. For this reason, we should only support initiatives that do not restrict the capacity of States to unleash their productive forces, attract investment, and promote trade, which are the most successful path to reducing poverty.

We believe these four principles would be of great value in redirecting this organization, so that it can endure and produce tangible results over time.

In closing, I want to raise four sensitive matters of vital importance to the Argentine Republic.

First, I want to reiterate our legitimate and inalienable claim to sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia, the South Sandwich Islands, and the surrounding maritime areas, which remain illegally occupied. Despite the eighty years that have passed since the creation of this organization, colonial situations such as this remain unresolved. We therefore invite the United Kingdom to resume bilateral negotiations in accordance with Resolution 2065 of this same General Assembly, together with all the subsequent resolutions that accompany it.

Second, I want to state once again my condemnation of the fundamentalist expressions of violence that still exist and spread throughout the world. In Argentina we already suffered this horror with the attacks on the Israeli Embassy and on AMIA in 1992 and 1994 respectively. That is why we urge the international community to strengthen legal cooperation to ensure that Interpol's red notices are respected, and that those responsible for these atrocities can be brought before Justice, helping us finally heal this painful wound in our country's history.

Third, we are witnessing an unacceptable escalation of political violence by the left at the global level — violence that in Argentina we know very well. It is unacceptable to resort to force where reasons fail. That is why we emphatically condemn these actions, which undermine the basic norms of democratic coexistence.

Fourth, the situation of the Argentine citizen Nahuel Gallo, abducted and arbitrarily detained in Venezuela, with no charges, no legal or consular assistance — in plain words, a forced disappearance. We demand that the Government of Venezuela release him immediately, and we call on the international community to support this legitimate demand, in defense of the most basic principles of international law and human dignity.

Finally, we reiterate our demand for the immediate release of the hostages who remain held captive in Gaza.

Finally: may God bless the free world, may the strength of Heaven be with us. Thank you all very much.