There are diplomatic speeches, and then there are Javier Milei speeches. The Argentine president arrived at the United Nations General Assembly and proceeded to tell the organisation hosting him that it had become a "useless organization" serving a caste of "fatally arrogant parasites" masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats. One suspects this was not quite the language anticipated in the UN protocol handbook.
But beneath Milei's theatrical language was a serious argument about what the United Nations was created to do, what it subsequently became, and whether international organisations can accumulate enormous bureaucratic authority while repeatedly failing at the tasks that originally justified their existence.
Milei began with first principles. The UN was supposed to uphold international law, defend the sovereignty of nations and provide a forum in which disputes could be resolved through cooperation rather than war. He said he accepted those principles completely. His charge was that the institution had broken that original bargain.
Those responsible for collective security had failed to provide collective security. Institutions supposedly devoted to human rights had accommodated dictatorships with atrocious human-rights records. International terrorism persisted, wars continued and resolutions accumulated while frequently proving incapable of changing events on the ground. That produced one of the central questions of Milei's speech: what is the value of an international resolution if countries can ignore it for decades without consequences? Whatever one thinks of Milei, that question deserves an answer.
The United Nations is certainly not literally useless. Its agencies conduct humanitarian relief, vaccination programs, refugee assistance, food distribution, peacekeeping and numerous other activities around the world. In many emergencies, UN organisations perform work that would otherwise have to be performed by governments or charities.
But Milei's argument concerns the enormous gap between the UN's aspirations and its capacity to enforce them. The organisation speaks in the language of universal principles while operating in a world of sovereign states with radically different interests, political systems and moral standards. The contradiction is built into the institution.
The UN Charter speaks about human rights and fundamental freedoms, yet governments with dreadful human-rights records remain members of the organisation and can participate in its machinery. The Security Council is supposed to maintain international peace, yet its permanent members possess vetoes precisely because the organisation could never have existed without recognising the realities of great-power politics. The UN therefore contains an unavoidable tension between moral universalism and political reality.
Milei thinks the institution has responded to that failure in exactly the wrong way. Unable to impose order effectively upon dictatorships, aggressors and terrorists, it has instead expanded its ambitions into areas where governments are easier to influence. The result, in his account, is what he calls a bureaucratic Leviathan increasingly concerned with telling countries how their economies, environmental policies, migration systems and social institutions should operate.
His description was characteristically colourful. The UN, he argued, had created a mixture of anarchy and tyranny: weakness towards actors that violate fundamental rules combined with increasingly intrusive demands upon liberal democracies that generally obey them. This brought Milei to one of his familiar targets, the UN's 2030 Agenda.
The Sustainable Development Goals adopted by UN member states in 2015 cover poverty, health, education, gender equality, energy, economic development, inequality, climate, consumption, institutions and international cooperation. Supporters regard them as voluntary objectives around which countries can coordinate efforts to improve human welfare.
Milei sees something much darker: an ideological program that allows international bureaucracies to push governments towards economic regulation, environmental intervention, particular social policies and approaches to migration that voters within individual nations may never have independently chosen. The dispute therefore goes beyond whether a particular Sustainable Development Goal is sensible. It concerns sovereignty.
Who decides how Argentines, Australians or Britons live? For Milei, the answer should overwhelmingly be Argentines, Australians and Britons through their own national political institutions.
International cooperation is legitimate when nations voluntarily cooperate to solve genuinely international problems. It becomes something different when international institutions begin establishing norms that governments then return home and present to their citizens as international obligations or unavoidable global standards.
Milei's preferred international order is consequently not isolationist. Indeed, he explicitly said Argentina would continue participating in multilateral forums because some problems genuinely require countries to work together. His distinction was between cooperation and subordination. "We believe in alliances and, before anything else, in nations," was the substance of his position, and that may be the most important idea in the entire speech.
Milei is not arguing for a world without international cooperation. He is arguing for international cooperation conducted by sovereign nations rather than a gradually emerging system of international governance standing above them. His speech therefore belongs to a much older argument about the proper limits of international institutions.
An international organisation begins with a narrow task that almost everybody considers reasonable. It hires staff, establishes departments, commissions reports, creates committees, develops standards and discovers additional problems requiring international solutions. Each new problem justifies another program, each program develops constituencies interested in its continuation, and temporary initiatives become permanent institutions.
The bureaucracy eventually acquires its own language, priorities and worldview. At that point the institution is no longer merely coordinating sovereign governments. It is attempting to influence how those governments govern. To Milei, that is precisely what went wrong with the UN.
His argument becomes particularly interesting when he turns to artificial intelligence. AI is almost the perfect issue for international bureaucratic expansion because its risks genuinely cross national boundaries. Advanced AI systems developed in one country can operate globally. Cybersecurity threats ignore borders. Autonomous systems can interact with financial markets, communications networks and military systems across jurisdictions.
There is therefore a perfectly respectable argument for international coordination. Milei's fear is that coordination will become control. The same institutional reflex that produced sprawling regulatory ambitions elsewhere could now be applied to the most important emerging technology of the century. Governments and international organisations may invoke safety while constructing bureaucratic structures that determine who may develop AI, what systems may be deployed and which innovations are considered acceptable.
Milei's libertarian answer is predictable: innovation should not be strangled by bureaucrats claiming to protect humanity from hypothetical dangers. One need not accept his entire position to recognise the question. How much authority should unelected international institutions possess over technologies that may profoundly shape national economies and societies?
Australia should pay attention to that question. Australian governments have become comfortable with international policy frameworks, whether involving climate, health, migration, digital regulation or other areas. International cooperation can obviously be valuable, but Australians should still ask whether policies are being adopted because Australian voters want them or because political and bureaucratic elites have embedded themselves within international networks where particular policies have become conventional wisdom. Democracy becomes rather thin if the important decisions are progressively elevated beyond the electorate.
There is, however, a delightful contradiction in Milei's UN performance. Having spent part of his speech explaining that the organisation was ineffective, bureaucratic and incapable of enforcing its own principles, he then complained that it was not doing enough to advance Argentina's position on the Falkland Islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas.
Milei accused the organisation of looking the other way while Britain continued controlling the islands and while the Sea Lion oil project proceeded in disputed waters. Britain naturally sees the matter very differently. It maintains British sovereignty over the Falklands and argues that the islanders themselves have overwhelmingly demonstrated their desire to remain British.
Milei rejects applying self-determination in that way to the islanders and argues that the sovereignty dispute should be negotiated between Argentina and Britain. The disagreement will not be settled here, but politically the episode illustrates the eternal problem of international institutions. Governments frequently complain that the United Nations interferes too much when it opposes their policies and complain that it is useless when it fails to support their policies. Milei is hardly the first leader to discover that tension.
Nevertheless, his broader challenge remains. After eight decades, what exactly should the United Nations be? If it is principally a meeting place where sovereign states cooperate when their interests coincide, its ambitions should be comparatively modest.
If it is supposed to become something approaching a system of global governance, then enormous questions of democratic legitimacy arise. Who elected it? Who can remove its bureaucrats? Who determines its ideological assumptions? What happens when citizens of individual nations reject the policies international institutions recommend, and at what point does international cooperation become international administration?
Milei has supplied his answer: return to the original bargain. Let nations remain nations. Let international institutions facilitate cooperation where cooperation is genuinely required. Stop transforming every international problem into justification for another layer of permanent bureaucracy, and stop pretending that officials operating far from national electorates possess some superior democratic authority to determine how ordinary people should live.
His rhetoric about "parasites" will naturally dominate headlines because it was designed to. But the more substantial challenge lies underneath the insult.
The United Nations was created because sovereign countries needed somewhere to talk before they started shooting. That remains an extremely useful function. Whether humanity also needs an enormous international bureaucracy progressively concerning itself with economics, migration, environmental policy, social policy, digital regulation and artificial intelligence is a different question altogether. But from this beginning the UN has devolved into a proto-world government, attempting to undermine national sovereignty, so it must go.
Milei walked into the headquarters of that bureaucracy and gave his answer: not global government, but cooperation among nations. For all the fireworks, that distinction was the intellectual centre of his speech.
https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2026/09/23/javier-milei-blasts-u-n-as-useless-arrogant-parasites-at-general-assembly/