UN Week Opens: Burnham Flies Tonight for His First Meeting With Trump
The 81st General Assembly’s high-level week opened with the wars it cannot stop crowding its agenda — and Britain’s Prime Minister flying to New York tonight for tomorrow’s first face-to-face with Mr Trump: interceptors for Ukraine and reopening Hormuz top his asks, with the settlement-sanctions rift and a pending Scottish oil decision in the baggage. Mr Trump meets Xi Jinping on Thursday; the week’s other novelty is a media war — CNN and others suing over White House press bans.
This Assembly assembles more live wars, active chokepoints and first meetings than any in decades, and its bilaterals dwarf its podium: Trump-Burnham, Trump-Zelensky, Trump and the Gulf six, possibly Trump-Pezeshkian — the American president as the week’s single point of failure and possibility, which is itself the system’s diagnosis. For Mr Burnham the stakes are asymmetric: he needs warmth he never sought from a president his party despises, on files — Ukraine’s air defence, the strait, trade — where British households pay for any frost, while his old quotes tour the briefing notes. The “third way” his team briefs — bond without embrace — gets its examination at roughly noon New York time. Watch the handshake’s choreography and the readout’s single adjective — relationships with this president are set in the first minute.