A few blocks south of where I sit, the 70th General Assembly just opened in the U.N.’s glass slab on Manhattan’s East Side, where something of consequence occurs once in a very great while. All week I have thought of the 68th G.A. two years ago at just this time, when Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s recently elected president, extended a reformist’s hand with an offer to negotiate an agreement governing his nation’s nuclear activities.
That was of consequence, plainly. Remember the telephone call President Obama put through just as Rouhani, having taken the podium to near-universal approval, was in a limousine on the way to Kennedy for his flight back to Tehran? Remember Netanyahu’s pathetically retro appeal to paranoia and how embarrassingly out of step the Israeli prime minister was with, more or less, the entire assembly? High diplomatic drama.