President Obama Addresses UN
September 25, 2014
United States President Barack Obama, speaking yesterday at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, declared that the Islamic State [of Iraq and Syria] (ISIS) understands only “the language of force” and that the United States will “work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death.” “Today, I ask the world to join in this effort . . . for we will not succumb to threats, and we will demonstrate that the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.” Referring to recent ISIS atrocities, including beheadings, the president stated that this band of radical Sunni Muslim jihadists has forced “us to look into the heart of darkness.”
Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008 and took office in January 2009. He was reelected in 2012. (The White House)
The president noted, however, that the military campaign against ISIS is only the most urgent of a number of challenges facing the international community: from resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine and eradicating the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to forging a unity government in Afghanistan and confronting climate change. The president was particularly blunt in his remarks regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military incursion into Ukraine: “[His] is a vision of the world in which might makes right, a world in which one nation’s borders can be redrawn by another . . .”
A United Nations (UN) General Assembly session brings together delegates from nearly all the world’s nations. The UN works to settle disputes among countries, maintain world peace, and help people better their way of life. (© Mario Tama, Getty Images)
Yesterday’s speech was the culmination of three days of diplomacy personally conducted by President Obama. On September 23, he spoke before more than 120 world leaders during a daylong UN climate summit. Asking for cooperative action on climate change, the president declared that climate change promises to define the next century more dramatically than any other global threat, including terrorism: “No nation is immune . . . We cannot condemn our children and their children to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair.”
Additional World Book articles:
- Joseph Conrad
- Heart of Darkness
- The Middle East: From Fall to Spring (a special report)
- Russia in the Post-Soviet World (a special report)
- Syria: The Roots of the Rebellion (a special report)
