Meeting/Event: Argentina - General Debate, 81st Session
Date: 23 September 2026
Categories: Meetings & Events > General Assembly

The Assembly will now hear an address by His Excellency Javier Gerardo Milei, President of the Argentine Republic.
I request protocol to escort His Excellency and invite him to address the Assembly.
Mr. President, Heads of State, representatives of the peoples of the world.
Today I address you for the third time as President of all Argentines.

When we took office of a country in ruins, on the brink of the worst crisis in its history, one thing was clear to us from the outset: we had to confront our problems with absolute honesty.
Lying to ourselves in order to feel better was going to get us nowhere.
It's always preferable to tell an uncomfortable truth than a comforting lie.
So believe me when I say that I know what I'm talking about when, in a constructive spirit, I point to the problems facing this organization which purports to guide states and arbitrate between them.

In that regard, I want to talk about three issues today.
First, what this body should have done and failed to do.
Second, what it should not have done but did anyway.
And third, its position in the face of the advent of artificial intelligence.

Seventy-eight years ago, this House declared that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights— noble words whose spirit I fully share.
To that end, it undertook to uphold international law, defend the sovereignty of nations, and provide a forum in which conflicts could be resolved through cooperation rather than immediately through the force of arms.
That was the original purpose, the contract that we all signed.
But today, regrettably, it is time to acknowledge that, in practice, that sacred covenant has been broken.

That's to say, it's become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a cast of fatally arrogant parasites, masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.
I would remind them of what Mises said: good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings.
Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their task.
Instead, they allowed chaos, violence, and international terrorism to flourish.

The alleged defenders of human rights have sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.
They have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa.
And as if that were not enough, an organization established to defend the territorial sovereignty of its members decided to look the other way with regard to the situation of the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia Islands, South Sandwich Islands, and the surrounding maritime areas.
For us, the Malvinas are a national cause.

I repeat: the Malvinas for us are a national cause.
They are also a test of the gulf that can exist between the words of international institutions and the reality upon which they purport to act.
Fifty years ago, this very Assembly adopted Resolution 3149, which calls on parties to refrain from introducing unilateral modifications while the dispute remains unresolved.
Fifty years on, the situation has not changed, yet unilateral modifications continue.

Today, the Sea Lion Project is moving toward oil extraction on the Argentine continental shelf in the North Malvinas Basin, under British licenses that Argentina rejects as illegal and illegitimate.
Any such activity not authorized by the Argentine Republic in this regard constitutes an unlawful act under both international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and Argentine domestic law.
That is why I wish to ask a question: what use is a resolution if, for decades, the other party can act in direct contravention of it, while that resolution remains intact in the archives but powerless in the face of reality?
There's no shortage of words or resolutions.

What is lacking is consequences.
Because an institution that cannot ensure that its words carry weight in the real world loses the most important thing of all: its authority.
In these circumstances, those who follow the rules receive no reward for doing so, while those who break them suffer no repercussions whatsoever.
That's why the Malvinas are not merely an issue between Argentina and the United Kingdom.

They also raise a question regarding the ability of this organization to enforce its own resolutions.
Argentina has taken note of that reality, and in the face of the unauthorized exploitation of our resources in the disputed area, we've acted.
We've submitted formal notes of protest.
We've availed ourselves of the legal remedies at our disposal.

We've imposed sanctions on the companies involved and their suppliers.
And we've submitted a national sovereignty defense bill to Congress.
For far too long, Argentine governments opted for a rhetorical defense.
We have chosen a peaceful, practical, and effective defense.

I repeat: we have chosen a peaceful, practical, and effective defense.
I also wish to reiterate our position regarding the population of the islands.
As this very Assembly has determined in numerous resolutions, the principle of self-determination does not apply in this case, since the population was implanted by the occupying power on a territory whose sovereignty is in dispute.
That principle exists to liberate colonized people, not to legitimize situations arising from colonization.

If the United Kingdom maintains a selective interpretation of the principle of self-determination with regard to the Malvinas Islands, it must also explain how it reconciles that position with the debates on self-determination taking place within its own territory.
Once again, we call on the United Kingdom to resume negotiations with a view to finding a peaceful solution to the sovereignty dispute, as required by international law.
We also reiterate our invitation to proceed without delay to an exchange of views with a view to resolving the issue concerning the aforementioned dispute over the exploitation of our natural resources.
And I want to say something more to the global energy sector.

Waka Mwertha represents a historic opportunity, with the potential to become one of the major players in the energy sector in the decades ahead.
Come, invest, develop it with us.
But there's a limit to this invitation.
We will not remain indifferent to those who exploit resources under illegal foreign occupation.

Argentina's position is clear.
Today I have come to tell you that Argentina is not going to sit around waiting for the UN and the international community to live up to their own mandate.
We're going to take matters into our own hands.
For far too long, Argentina managed its own decline.

We managed poverty.
We managed isolation.
We managed irrelevance.
We grew accustomed to debating how to divide up what remained, rather than asking ourselves how we could grow again, how we could rebuild what we had lost.

That's over.
We've already lost too much.
We do not want to lose it again.
That's why we've embraced free enterprise capitalism.

We're opening our economy up to trade and investment.
We're advancing in the development of our strategic resources.
We've embraced the technological revolution, and we are rebuilding our military capabilities after decades of neglect.
We've also made a geopolitical choice.

We have unequivocally aligned ourselves with the West, with the United States, and with Israel, countries with which we share a deep affinity of values and strategic complementarity.
That is why we condemn the attacks by the Iranian regime against the State of Israel.
We have designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization and continue to seek justice for the two terrorist attacks perpetrated on Argentine soil in 1992 and 1994.
We have decided to cooperate with the world, but to do so standing tall, in the understanding that only a nation that is politically relevant, economically influential, and militarily respected can truly be a master of its own destiny.

Mr. President, just as I have shown you how the UN failed to do what it was supposed to do, now I want to tell you how it has excelled at what no one asked it to do, and what it should never have been doing.
Because alongside that failure, they have built a bureaucratic leviathan devoted to deciding how the peoples of the world and their citizens should live.
This amounts to a curious mixture of anarchy and tyranny, impotence in the face of those who break the most basic rules, such as bloodthirsty dictatorships and terrorist organizations, coupled with Orwellian control and impositions on liberal democracies that abide by the rules.
We saw this with the Millennium Agenda.

We saw it with the 2030 Agenda, with economic regulation, gender agendas, environmental extremism, and unchecked immigration.
And every time they failed, rather than reviewing the model or apologizing, they doubled down, as they are already doing with the 2045 Agenda, which, I say now, will fail.
But perhaps the most serious example, the one that forever should shame this organization, is quite another.
That is how they managed the pandemic.

During the pandemic, bodies under the auspices of this House put themselves before scientific evidence and the sovereignty of nations and promoted forced lockdown policies throughout the world that ruined jobs, that ruined the education of entire generations of children, and cost the lives of millions of people who died alone without basic medical care.
Where some allege a public health policy error, we see a global experiment in social control disguised as science.
And when a state wearing public health blinkers deprives its population of the right to work, to receive an education, and to bid farewell to their dead, this results in millions of unavoidable deaths, there is a word for it: genocide.
That happens in many countries, including Argentina, which boasted of being the World Health Organization's star pupil.

And that is why we decided to leave the World Health Organization.
Added to that is something more subtle but equally damaging: the psychological terror instilled by the state.
For years, citizens around the world were told that they should be afraid.
Afraid of their neighbors, of the air they breathe, of leaving their homes.

That fear wasn't a mere side effect.
It was the chosen instrument of their government.
The problem is that emergencies eventually pass.
Fear passes.

Generations move on.
But the institutions and powers created on the pretext of those alleged emergencies remain.
And if for a moment we allow ourselves to believe that the lesson had been learned after so many failures, the arrival of artificial intelligence demonstrates quite something else.
The printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internet— every great technological revolution has been accompanied by fears about what it would destroy, particularly jobs.

There is no doubt that this is one of the most effective ways of instilling fear in human beings, given the role of work as a means of subsistence.
Take the Industrial Revolution as an example.
When it began, the world was home to some 800 million human beings.
If, in keeping with the Luddites and the perennial pessimists, employment had at best remained constant, then, given that the world's population has since increased more than tenfold, the global employment rate today would be at 90%.

That is absurd, something that few of us few seem to have stopped to consider, perhaps except perhaps those of us with a passion for reading Borges, who love his approach for testing an idea by taking it to its logical extreme.
Ultimately, these technological advances have not only failed to produce any of the catastrophes, but in addition, all of these ended up bringing an end to what human beings were able to do.
Today, we have built machines that are able to carry out tasks that only a few months ago seemed out of our reach.
Where we many see a threat, we see a new frontier: artificial intelligence, or superintelligence, as Donald Trump said, can double our productivity in a way that we do not yet comprehend.

To invoke Adam Smith, artificial intelligence will be the pin factory of the 21st century, and much more besides.
It can transform our economies, our medicine, our education, even the way we govern.
That calls for prudence, yes.
But prudence doesn't mean fear.

Moreover, under no circumstances should fear automatically translate into obedience.
Indeed, the dystopian scenarios commonly invoked to instill fear and justify state control make no sense from an economic standpoint.
The answer lies with Adam Smith.
Artificial intelligence, like the division of labor in the case of the pin factory, is an accelerator of productivity growth.

Smith noted, however, that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.
Growth will therefore be constrained by its counterpart in genuine demand, without fiscal deficits or spurious money creation.
But that's not all.
Those projects must also be financed, and that should be done with the resources of human beings.

That is, their initial endowments and level of wealth, which correspond to the side of the market.
Moreover, the purpose of producing more is to achieve a higher level of consumption.
Yet the satisfaction generated by consumption increases at a decreasing rate, while the loss of satisfaction involved in surrendering leisure in order to produce more rises disproportionately.
Consequently, the point at which the gain from greater consumption is equal to the loss of leisure brings the system to an equilibrium, leaving no room for dystopian terror.

That is why, when we hear that the state should control artificial intelligence, we should remember something basic.
The state is not an abstract creature.
It is made up of people, officials, and bureaucrats.
Granting it control over innovation means granting some people, in the best and most naive of cases, the power to limit what everyone else can create.

History gives us reason to scrutinize such power carefully.
For centuries, fear over tomorrow has been used as an argument for restricting freedoms today, always with the same promise: give us a part of your freedom and we will protect you from this new threat.
We will apply a different principle.
In the face of uncertainty, we propose determination.

In the face of fear, courage.
In the face of decline, ambition.
And in the face of resignation, we propose optimism.
That is why I tell you that when it comes to artificial intelligence, Argentina will stand at the forefront of freedom.

We have the critical minerals, the energy, the talent, and the capacity to compete at every link in that value chain.
And we want to become the most competitive place in the world in which to develop it, with a cutting-edge legal framework, a commitment not to regulate preemptively, a commitment not to regulate preemptively, limited liability for companies operating with AI agents, and tax incentives.
Because artificial intelligence is not geopolitically neutral.
The West must lead the development of this technology to ensure that it is consistent with our fundamental libertarian values, namely respect for life, liberty, private property, and the notion of human dignity.

In that regard, we fully share President Trump's vision.
Mr. President, we are living through one of those strange moments in history when one world begins to disappear before the next has finished being born.
These are dangerous times, but they are also extraordinary times.
Because during long periods of stability, nations manage the world they have inherited.

During periods of transformation, some have the opportunity to build the world that is to come.
Argentina wants to be one of them.
We will continue to participate in multilateral fora in good faith, because some problems mean that we need to work together.
But we mustn't confuse cooperation with subordination.

We believe in alliances, and above all, in nations.
Argentina speaks from the experience of a country that knows its own mistakes.
We know the cost of isolation.
We know the cost of destroying a currency.

We know the cost of turning the state into a permanent obstacle to human initiative.
For a century, we tried almost every conceivable way of preventing our own greatness, and we survived.
Not unscathed, but we survived.
Perhaps that is why today we understand something that other nations may forget: decline is not destiny.

It is the result of repeated decisions.
And if a course can be chosen, it can also be changed.
And that is what Argentina is trying to do.
We have the energy that the world will need.

We have food.
We have critical minerals.
We have human talent.
We have the South Atlantic, and we are a natural gateway to Antarctica.

And we have something that for far too long we lacked: the will to transform our potential international power.
We want an Argentina that is prosperous, influential, and powerful.
Not to subjugate others, but to be free.
Not to conquer others, but so that our destiny may be decided by Argentines themselves.

That is why I say to the free men and women of the world, to scientists, entrepreneurs, and creators, to those who have dreamed of a land where they can make a new beginning: look south.
There you will find a vast land of fertile fields, oil, minerals, and human talent.
A land that has welcomed millions who crossed oceans in the hope that their children would live better lives than they had, and who built one of the most prosperous nations on Earth.
We have a responsibility to live up to that legacy.

We do not know exactly what the world now being born will look like, but we do know what kind of nation we want to be when it arrives: a free nation, a prosperous nation, a sovereign one, a nation capable of defending what is its own and open to the world.
A nation unafraid, once again, to utter a word that for far too long seemed forbidden: greatness.
No nation is guaranteed a place in history.
It is built generation after generation, through work, through freedom, and through the determination of a people who refuse to accept that their best days are behind them.

We believe that Argentina still has a great story ahead of it.
And we have decided to go out and claim it.
May God bless all peoples of the world.
May God bless the Argentine Republic.

May the forces of heaven be with us.
And long live freedom, damn it.
On behalf of the Assembly, I wish to thank the President of the Argentine Republic.