World Leaders Converge at UN General Assembly Amid Mideast Crisis and AI Concerns

Each autumn, the world's nations send their leaders to New York to speak across their differences — but the 81st UN General Assembly opens under conditions that make even the performance of unity difficult. With Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Iran's Ebrahim Pezeshkian all expected to attend, the gathering arrives not as a forum for consensus but as a mirror of the fractures defining global politics in 2026. The Middle East remains in active crisis, artificial intelligence has become a new arena of geopolitical contest, and the multilateral institutions built to manage such tensions are