WASHINGTON — President Bush, often a main attraction at U.N. General Assembly meetings, is sharing the spotlight this week with candidates, the crisis on Wall Street and world standoffs with Russia, North Korea and Iran that will play out long after he is gone.
His farewell address to the world body Tuesday will stress the need for multination diplomacy, but it comes at a time when many of these collective diplomatic ventures he has championed are stuck in reverse.
A prickly North Korea is backing away from pledges to abandon nuclear weapons. A Palestinian-Israeli peace pact before Bush leaves office is highly unlikely. Violence is flaring in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran is pursuing its nuclear work in defiance of U.S. and international demands. The West is trying to restrain an increasingly aggressive Russia that drew condemnation for its recent invasion of U.S.-backed Georgia.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who also will be in New York, stepped up his anti-U.S. rhetoric, exclaiming Sunday that his nation’s military would “break the hand” of any aggressor that targets his country’s nuclear facilities.
In his speech, Bush will talk about ways that the U.S. and international organizations can more effectively confront problems, such as getting quicker deployment of peacekeeping forces in Sudan — something that U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Had ley describes as “glacially slow.”
“He’ll talk about the need to focus on results,” Hadley said.
Bush also is meeting with political dissidents, attending an event on food security and talking about free trade with leaders in the Western Hemisphere. The president’s chats with foreign leaders also will be peppered with talk about the U.S. financial crisis on Wall Street — just a few miles from the U.N. headquarters — that has rocked world markets.
