The Korea Times

UN Assembly convenes amid widening conflicts, chaos, 'trust deficit'

Presidents, prime ministers, kings and potentates are convening in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly. The upcoming 81st Assembly not only brings together its 193 member states to discuss and debate global conflict, but also to hopefully try to resolve political and humanitarian crises in what has become a decade of widening chaos, increasing numbers of refugees and resource shortfalls. Traditionally the speeches in the cavernous Assembly hall begin with the presidents of Brazil and the United States; that begins Tuesday and lasts for a full week on what soon seems like endless palaver. Following Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and U.S. President Donald Trump comes the King Abdullah II of Jordan, Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Emmanuel Macron of France and Lee Jae Myung of South Korea. But beyond the formal speeches, it’s on the Assembly sidelines and in unofficial talks and bilateral meetings where amazing combinations of delegates and interest groups present their cases before groups like the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab League, the European U

1d agoBy John J. Metzler

UN Assembly convenes amid widening conflicts, chaos, 'trust deficit'

'Butcher of Bosnia' dies, but legacy lives on in Serbia

A few months ago while in The Hague, I remembered General Ratko Mladic, the gruff Serbian general who I thought might still be alive and serving his life sentence in a nearby U.N. prison for what is legally called “crimes against humanity.” The old U.N. court International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down a tough but deserving verdict and threw away the key for Mladic, the former commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb Army. It turns out that Mladic, the Serbian “Butcher of Bosnia” during the Yugoslav wars, has died in prison in The Hague at 84. Convicted of genocide for the gruesome Srebrenica massacre and a string of other atrocities in Bosnia and Croatia, Mladic emerged as a bizarre Serbian folk-hero whose brash and bravado became a hallmark of the disintegration of the old Yugoslavia. Not surprisingly, Mladic’s upcoming funeral “will receive all the military and state honors,” according to Belgrade’s media. Mladic often boasted he was avenging centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule in the Balkans through his hardline Serbian nationalism. After

Sep 10, 2026By John J. Metzler

'Butcher of Bosnia' dies, but legacy lives on in Serbia

NATO in the aftermath of the Iran war

NATO is once again in the rhetorical cross hairs as the Trump administration has chided some European members for not allowing American aircraft to transit through U.S. European bases. Nor have the Europeans rallied to politically help the United States confront Iran’s blockade of the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Washington’s ire is warranted but its reactions are unnecessary. The high octane rhetoric across the Atlantic is justified given the fact that some NATO allies such as Spain have not stepped up to their treaty obligation and actually closed their airspace to American warplanes. Earlier in the war, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer tried playing the same card. “This is not our war and we're not going to get dragged into it,” he commented early on by restricting the use of British bases to U.S. aircraft which were covered by the NATO alliance. Needless to say, this did not play well with the White House. The political fracas raises the obvious questions. U.S. President Donald Trump warns that the U.S. may leave NATO. The Europeans blink in horror but then the smug distai

Apr 14, 2026By John J. Metzler

Iran’s crisis: We can’t look the other way

We cannot look the other way to the unfolding crisis in Iran. Blood has run in the streets of Tehran and provincial cities as the Islamic regime has turned its vengeance on its own people. Thousands have died in this predictable but avoidable carnage. And it’s not over yet. The world now waits nervously to see whether U.S. President Donald Trump will follow through on threats to topple the reviled Ayatollah Khamenei regime or adopt a “wait-and-see” approach, attempting instead to manage a wounded but still dangerous Islamic Republic. Repression has weakened the opposition, but the regime as well. The country is ready to implode. For nearly half a century, Iran has lived under the yoke of the Ayatollahs and a theocratic regime that has turned back the clock on the country’s future. It has used politicized Islamic dogma to suppress women’s rights, trample human rights, and pursue a brutal agenda of executions and public hangings reminiscent of a darker era. Yet its downfall may stem less from its repression than from a self-inflicted economic collapse and the plunging rial — a

Jan 28, 2026By John J. Metzler

Iran’s crisis: We can’t look the other way

France: The government carousel

PARIS — France has faced a tumultuous autumn. The country has seen the usual strikes and government shuffles, alongside sensational events. These ranged from a high-profile daylight heist at the Louvre Museum to the imprisonment of a former president, marking a particularly disquieting period. Indeed, just a year after hosting the successful summer Olympics in Paris, the country has sunk into the same political miasma of discontent, decay and the grand delusion of spending money, which is not yet created. Everyone seems peeved about something. During the past 18 months, France has had four prime ministers. And this is France — a prosperous European country in the G7, a major player in the European Union and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Why? Because the vanity of the current centrist and globalist President Emmanuel Macron could not please either the right or the left with his policies, but rather emboldened them with his ego. Macron’s reckless gamble of calling early legislative elections last year, hoping to profit from deadlock, turned into a massive miscalcu

Nov 5, 2025By John J. Metzler

UN Assembly shadowed by war clouds, chaos

When the new U.N. General Assembly session opens Tuesday, world leaders and diplomats will be commemorating the 80th anniversary of the global organization established in the wake of World War II to “maintain international peace and security” for future generations. But at its headquarters here on the East River in New York, delegates and staff will be doing far less celebrating than previously planned. Instead, the membership will be confronted by a spate of long-running crises ranging from the Russia-Ukraine war to the war in Gaza and at least a dozen perilous humanitarian crises in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East. Tragically, all these situations are converging at a time when the United Nations itself is financially running on empty due to a continuing budget crisis from late dues payments as well as the organization’s overstretched mandates. A kind of perfect storm plagues the global body, which has grown from the ashes of WWII, expanding from its original 50 member states to 193 today, with its newest member possibly being Palestine. Hot wars Following Russia’s unprovo

Sep 11, 2025By John J. Metzler

UN Assembly shadowed by war clouds, chaos

Ukraine war: Game, set, match?

U.S. President Donald Trump has had it with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Gone are the days where it appeared that the Russians were ready for a negotiated deal or ceasefire in the bloody Ukraine war. Now Donald Trump has openly said that “Putin has been bullsh---ing him” all along about a much-anticipated agreement. Trump’s frustration in trying to stop the bloodletting in Ukraine as well as Russia’s escalation of the war has prompted him to sarcastically warn, “Putin talks nice but then bombs everybody in the evening.” To confront Moscow’s expanding air raids on Kyiv, the Trump administration will send additional U.S. Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine in coordination with NATO. The European allies will pay for the American air defense ordinance being sent to beleaguered Ukraine. Congress is equally prepared to impose tough enhanced “sledgehammer” sanctions on Russia. Bipartisan Senate legislation cosponsored by Republican Lindsay Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal would dramatically upgrade current economic sanctions on Russia and countries trading with it. On the

Jul 17, 2025By John J. Metzler

BRICS, bats and bromides

'Tis that time of the year when the BRICS economic Summit comes round to state the obvious: “We are the rest of the world,” and powerful members of the global developing economies too. So when the 17th BRICS Summit launched in Brazil's Rio de Janeiro, assembling leaders from major emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the obvious question emerged, where were its traditional star members, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin? China's 72-year-old president, Xi Jinping, has used BRICS to reshape narratives about the "global south." Yet, China’s Xi is said to be facing health problems. Beijing’s leader has been conspicuously absent from major events and has cut back his diplomatic schedule, though still meeting with third-tier comrades such as Belarus’s dictator Lukashenko. Xi’s last high profile event was in Moscow during Russia’s Victory Day military parade on May 9. Chairman Xi is facing serious domestic economic problems on mainland China with massive debt, a housing crisis and rising youth unemployment. Many of the economic doldr

Jul 9, 2025By John J. Metzler

United Nations’ 80th anniversary

Amid wars, global strife and mass refugee dislocation, the current state of global affairs is overwhelmed with crises spanning the Middle East to Ukraine and a dozen African conflicts which rarely make the news. The contemporary world situation in many ways resembles the end of the Second World War. There’s a strange sense of deja vu for a time in history most people do not know or would rather forget. From the cauldron and chaos of World War II, a new world organization was created in San Francisco. From April through June 1945, delegates from over 50 countries, led by the Big Four Allied nations — the U.S., U.K., Soviet Union and China — of the still-ongoing Second World War, assembled to form a new organization to maintain international peace and security, promote economic development and create the framework of international law. Given that the United Nations was following the moribund and tragically ill-fated League of Nations, this was a tall order. The U.S. delegation to San Francisco included Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., former Secretary of State Cordell H

Jul 3, 2025By John J. Metzler

Defusing Iran’s nuclear genie

Well, it seems to have started. Israeli airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear research and development sites have ushered in a new phase of the rolling Middle East conflicts, which began when Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages. The conflict now seems to have a momentum of its own. Despite dedicated diplomatic efforts and determined military deterrence to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program, Israel was not willing to take the risk of misreading Iranian efforts to build nuclear weapons in the near future. First, Israeli jets carried out a punishing decapitation operation against the Iranian military. Over a few days, airstrikes killed senior military commanders, including generals of the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the country’s primary military force. Among those killed included Major General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the IRGC since 2019, who was deeply involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program; and Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the Iranian A

Jun 19, 2025By John J. Metzler

John J. Metzler