Hello from Melbourne,
In today’s Irregular, we step back from the headlines and into the words themselves: the speeches of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.
We have spent much of the past week doing something that diplomats, intelligence officers, and foreign correspondents have done for generations: sitting in the great hall of the UN, or hunched over a desk watching the feed, reading the transcripts, listening and re-listening, replaying the speeches of world leaders as they came thick and fast in New York.
The General Debate week at the UN General Assembly is theatre and ritual. But it is also something more: a moment when the world, however fractured, still gathers in one room.
It is in that room where the small absurdities of global politics take on their human form. Schadenfreude at Donald Trump’s teleprompter failing mid-sentence. The deliberate walkouts when Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage (contrasted with the raucous applause from at least some in the chamber when he boasted of Israeli intelligence triumphs). The thunderous ovations for causes that resonate with the majority world, but rarely find space in Western news cycles. The way certain leaders command the room, and the way others are tolerated with polite indifference.
Want the speeches in full? We’ve compiled every world leader’s address to the UNGA — free for paid subscribers.
These reactions are not mere sideshows. They are signals. They are reminders that diplomacy is a human craft, where performance and perception carry as much weight as policy papers.
The UN, for all its flaws, remains a remarkable institution. It has never been the guarantor of peace and human rights that its charter promised. As my colleague Michael Feller wrote yesterday, its Security Council is paralysed, its agencies sprawling, its bureaucracy often maddening. Yet to dismiss it is to miss its singular role: there is no other place where presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers from every corner of the earth gather to speak in their own voices.
The UN is not a world parliament, but it is the closest thing we have to a world town hall (apologies Elon Musk: it’s not X), a place where leaders tell us what they believe matters most – to their people, their region, and to the fragile order that still binds states together.
Listening to these speeches, in their original form, is not a luxury. It is the primary material of international affairs.
Too often, we consume geopolitics through the filter of headlines: what one leader said about another, which line was clipped for its sensationalism, which phrase lent itself to outrage or applause. The media selects for novelty, scandal, or conflict. What it misses – what it inevitably misses – are the subtler signals: the choice of words, the omissions, the tone, the metaphors repeated across speeches, the issues leaders return to again and again.
To read only the coverage is to watch international politics refracted through the distorting lens of newsworthiness. To read the speeches themselves is to glimpse the world as leaders want it to be seen.
This is why diplomats read primary sources obsessively. In foreign ministries, the exact words of leaders are combed through for hints of intent, for signs of softening or hardening positions, for what they reveal about internal debates. Intelligence analysts spend their nights drafting briefs that parse speeches line by line, noting changes from previous years, connecting the rhetoric to potential shifts in behaviour.
This is not because words are perfect predictors of action – they are not. It is because rhetoric, repetition, and framing matter. They shape what countries feel bound to defend, where they might bend, and what priorities they elevate above all others. Further, they offer clues to what might happen in what often feels like a very unpredictable world.
This year’s General Assembly carried the usual blend of bombast and diplomacy, grievance and aspiration. But beneath the rhetorical flourishes, there was an unmistakable seriousness.
Leaders spoke of war in Ukraine and Gaza, of climate catastrophe, of artificial intelligence, of development finance and food insecurity. The leaders of the Global South pushed hard on inequality and demanded reform of international institutions. The great powers used their platforms to justify themselves and accuse their rivals. What they said revealed not only national interests but the state of the world itself: fractured, multipolar, less confident in cooperation, more inclined to confrontation.
Consider the Pacific. Fiji’s Prime Minister spoke movingly of an ‘Ocean of Peace,’ a phrase that at once evokes poetry and strategy. He reminded the world that the Pacific has been both a theatre of war and a testing ground for nuclear weapons, its peoples bearing scars that still linger. The ‘Ocean of Peace Declaration,’ adopted just weeks ago by Pacific leaders, is more than a slogan. It is a regional attempt to frame the Indo-Pacific not as an arena of great-power rivalry but as a shared space of sovereignty and dignity.
You will not find this on the front page of the New York Times. But if you read the speech itself, you hear a small state staking its claim to agency in a world where its very survival is threatened by rising seas. That matters.
Or take climate change, the issue most consistently raised by vulnerable states. The Pacific pleaded with the G20 to pay their share. “Those who shoulder the blame must foot the bill,” Fiji said bluntly. The ICJ’s advisory opinion on climate liability was invoked as a legal cudgel. And calls for loss and damage funding were repeated with increasing urgency.
Skip the headlines, read the words themselves. Upgrade for access to our complete UNGA 2025 compendium.
None of this is new, but in the cadence of the speeches, you can hear the frustration thickening, the patience thinning, the legalistic turn from moral appeal to binding obligation. And, we must remember, when leaders of small island states talk this way, they are not just venting; they are preparing the ground for the next COP, for litigation, for a reshaping of norms.
On war and peace, the hall was divided, as it has been since 2022. Ukraine’s allies — well, most of them — spoke with righteous clarity about sovereignty and aggression, demanding accountability and pledging continued support. Russia’s allies muttered about double standards, colonial legacies, and Western hypocrisy. Israel’s Prime Minister used his time to defend his war in Gaza and to broadcast – quite literally – threats through intercepted Hamas telephones, daring them to release the remaining hostages. Some in the room applauded, but most had already walked out.
The speeches captured not just policy but posture, not just action but performance. And in that performance lies the truth of where the world stands: fractured, angry, yet bound to perform its grievances on the same stage.
From Africa, leaders demanded a louder voice. They pointed out, as they do every year, that the Security Council remains an anachronism. They spoke of debt crises, of illicit financial flows, of the need for a fairer international financial system. Their speeches, often ignored in Western commentary, reveal the priorities of a continent that will account for a quarter of the world’s population by 2050. To miss these voices is to miss the shape of the future.
Latin American leaders, too, used the stage to highlight inequality, to push for climate justice, and to condemn sanctions and foreign interference. Brazil spoke of a multipolar world that must not repeat the hierarchies of the past, while Mexico invoked its tradition of non-intervention. These are not marginal notes. They are signals of how the hemisphere will position itself in a global order no longer scripted by Washington alone.
World leaders, especially from advanced economies, spoke much about technology. They called for governance of artificial intelligence, warning of risks to democracy, jobs, and even survival. It was a reminder that geopolitics is no longer just about territory and tanks, but about algorithms and data — a topic I will return to in a few weeks.
Almost by definition, the fact that world leaders are speaking about these issues means they really matter.
And yet, try finding these speeches.
Most, but not all, are eventually published on the UN website. Some appear quickly, others take days. Many are only available in the language they were delivered in. The formatting is inconsistent, the fonts archaic, the navigation clunky. To piece together a complete picture, you must click and click again, opening dozens of tabs, copy-pasting into your own files. There is, astonishingly, no single repository where one can simply read all the speeches of a given year in English, in a common format.
In a world saturated with information, this is a strange deficiency.
So we decided to do something about it.
Leaders’ Digest
We have compiled, translated where necessary, and formatted into a single document all the speeches of the 2025 General Assembly. It is a compendium of the world’s voices: from the most powerful presidents to the smallest island states, from the usual great-power theatrics to the quiet persistence of those rarely heard.
It is, in our view, a valuable service – not because the UN deserves uncritical reverence, but because what is said there matters.
It matters because leaders use the stage to set out national priorities. When a president devotes half of his or her speech to climate change, that signals domestic and diplomatic direction. When a foreign minister calls for reform of the international financial system, it tells us where they will push in negotiations. When a prime minister highlights humanitarian aid, or denounces sanctions, or champions sovereignty, it is both rhetoric and roadmap.
The General Assembly may not decide, but it shapes. It sets the narrative frame within which decisions are made in smaller, more consequential rooms later in the year. Diplomats call this the start of ‘summit season.’ After UNGA comes APEC, COP, ASEAN, and the cascade of regional gatherings that dominate the global calendar through November. Positions staked in New York often harden in those forums. Promises made at the podium are rarely walked back weeks later. And so the speeches at UNGA are not the end of the story; they are the opening chapter of the season that follows.
Consider the Sustainable Development Goals. Leaders’ references to them are not idle. They reflect the degree of political energy left for a project that is faltering. Or take climate change: what is said at UNGA foreshadows how tough or token the negotiations at COP will be. Or humanitarian crises: the attention they receive in speeches is often a proxy for how much support they will command in pledging conferences.
In short, to listen carefully at the General Assembly is to see the road ahead more clearly.
This is why we believe it is important not to rely on the second-hand summaries. Yes, the news is useful for immediacy, but it is reactive, selective, and often sensationalist. By contrast, sitting with the speeches themselves requires patience, empathy, and a critical ear – the very disciplines of diplomacy. It forces us to hear leaders in their own terms, however disagreeable, however self-serving, however dull. That discipline, we would argue, is essential not just for diplomats but for anyone who wants to understand international affairs beyond the headlines.
For businesses, this matters because the rhetoric of leaders foreshadows policy. Tariffs and sanctions, regulatory shifts, new alliances, development financing: all of these are telegraphed in leaders’ words. For citizens, it matters because these speeches reflect how their governments see the world, what they want others to believe, and how they position their country in the great debates of the age. And for policymakers, it matters because it is the shared record of what has been promised, and promises in international politics create their own momentum.
We also believe it is important because the world has changed.
In a unipolar era, one might have dismissed much of what was said at the UN as theatre. Today, in a multipolar world, where no single culture or narrative dominates, where power is diffused and contested, where cooperation is fragile, what is said in that hall matters more than ever. It is a cacophony, but it is our cacophony, and to ignore it is to blind oneself to the reality of global politics.
For those who care enough to read the primary sources, we’ve done the hard work. Subscribers get them all.
So we have made the compendium available. For our paid subscribers, it is included as part of your subscription. For those who read us for free, you can purchase it on its own for $99 (simply email us).
But our recommendation is clear: for $190 (less 25% before the end of September), you receive the compendium and, for an entire year, five sharp daily analyses of the world’s most important developments with forward-looking assessments of their business, economic, and financial implications. Why buy the book when you can have the library?
And if you’re not ready to commit for a year, you can also start with a $19 monthly subscription — though the best value by far is annual.
By now, no doubt you will have realised that Geopolitical Dispatch is not a newsletter in the casual sense. It is modelled on how governments brief their leaders — concise, rigorous, and strategic. It is designed for leaders in business and policy who need clarity in a world of noise.
If you have been reading us for free, this is the moment to upgrade. The compendium is a one-off resource; Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily map. Together, they give you what governments themselves seek: a disciplined way of seeing the world as it is, and as it might become.
In the meantime, we will continue to do what we do every day behind the scenes in preparing Geopolitical Dispatch and advising our clients – listening carefully, reading closely, interpreting honestly, and presenting clearly, with minimal fluff and maximum puns.
In the end, the words of leaders matter. They matter not because they are always true or intelligent, but because they shape what follows. To read them is to understand not just the present, but the possibilities of the future. That is why we have spent this week reading, listening, and compiling: so that you, too, can hear the world in its own words.
Best wishes,
Damien
Free readers: this is where today’s Irregular ends. Paid subscribers get the full UNGA 2025 compendium below — every leader’s speech translated and formatted — plus our daily analysis of global events. Upgrade below to keep reading.
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