Speech at UN sees Trump threaten Pyongyang – as it happened
8.58pm BST
Closing summary
As the world’s diplomats prepare for a long night of speeches, we’re going to wrap things up for today. The highlights from today’s morning session:
• UN secretary general António Guterres, who took over the international body’s top job in January, began the day by lamenting divisive political discourse and appealing for calmer rhetoric.
• Minutes later, Donald Trump, the second world leader to address the assembly, threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea.
• In a speech that lasted for just over 40 minutes, the US president, who was making his debut speech to the general assembly, railed against the countries he sees as enemies to the US, primarily North Korea and Iran. He did not mention climate change, which is one of the top issues being discussed at this week’s meeting.
• Other leaders, including French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the president of the Switzerland confederation, Doris Leuthard, made critical allusions to Trump’s style of politics. “It’s not walls that protect us, it’s our desire to act,” Macron said.
• The morning session concluded with a strong show of support for Trump from Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu, who complimented the president for taking a strong stance against the Iran deal and being welcoming to Israel.
• Netanyahu also said: “After 70 years, the world is embracing Israel and Israel is embracing the world”.
The Guardian’s Julian Borger is reporting live from the winding halls of the United Nations headquarters in New York all week, and you can follow him here.
Updated at 9.29pm BST
8.48pm BST
For better or for worse, it now appears that on the question of Iran – a long term obsession of Netanyahu – Trump and the Israeli prime minister are completely joined at the hip. For the Israeli prime minister, that certainly helps reinforce his standing on the domestic front, but how much it will help him in persuading other members of the international community, especially co-signatories of the Iran nuclear deal who still support it, is more questionable.
The optics in the region of a US president delivering a speech that could have been written by the Israeli embassy, and Netanyahu’s celebration of that speech, may have unanticipated consequences. Israel may also regret associating itself in the future so closely with such a bellicose and contradictory speech by Trump.
Some similarities were striking with both Trump and Netanyahu make common cause with the Iranian people against the regime in Tehran giving an impression at least – whether true or not – that the speeches were in some way coordinated.
Indeed this was a risk that was warned against by Israeli columnist Chemi Chalev ahead of Netanyahu’s speech, referring explicitly to the suspicion that Israel helped push George W Bush to a war against Iraq.
Israel needed many long years to refute the allegation that, together with its neo-conservative lackeys in Washington, it pushed George W. Bush into the war with Iraq, and this at a time when, unlike Netanyahu, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon maintained
