It’s UNGA — the UN General Assembly’s annual gathering that packs world leaders and top diplomats into New York for a few days — and the whipsaw diplomacy in and around UN headquarters may be remembered as the moment this war’s trajectory finally turned.
Or it may not. Seven months in, the fighting has only widened. The question now is whether the backroom talks happening blocks from the General Assembly floor can finally bend that curve, or whether they simply become the latest in the war’s long list of near-misses.
Even as Trump on Tuesday warned the General Assembly that he faced a choice between a deal and annihilating Iran, envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were sending messages via Qatari shuttles to Iranian officials a few blocks away. Trump called it “a very good meeting”, while Gulf leaders huddled with US officials on next steps.
UNGA has produced real openings before. In 2013, then-US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif held the first US-Iran foreign minister contact since 1979 — a tentative sidelines meeting that, almost two years later, became the JCPOA nuclear deal that curbed Iran’s enrichment program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Last year, a meeting on the UNGA sidelines anchored by Trump and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan brought Arab and Muslim leaders together on Gaza and produced a joint declaration underpinning what became the US-brokered ceasefire and hostage-release framework. It represented a more recent template for how the Trump administration has built multilateral cover for a deal.
What makes UNGA week structurally different from ordinary diplomacy is proximity: nearly every relevant player is in Manhattan simultaneously, collapsing weeks of protocol into hallway conversations. This year, the proximity isn’t starting cold, since Iran had already conveyed its response to a new proposal to mediators before the week began, and Qatar has been circulating draft language between the two sides.
Having Trump, Witkoff, Kushner, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and the Gulf states all in the same city at once is the precondition for a breakthrough, however — not a guarantee of one.
A few clear tests will tell us whether this week produced real movement: Iran has signalled it could reopen the Strait of Hormuz within days if Washington eases its blockade and unfreezes assets, which would be a specific, verifiable marker. Will Qatar’s draft surface publicly? Will Araqchi meet US officials again before Iran’s delegation leaves Saturday? And will Saudi Arabia — most exposed by September’s advance by Yemen’s Houthis, yet still absent from the visible diplomatic track — get pulled in?
No matter what gets negotiated in Midtown Manhattan this week, what happens on the ground back in the Gulf has the potential to spoil it all. This war is being fought across multiple active fronts at once — Houthi missiles over the Red Sea, tankers threading the Strait of Hormuz, pipelines and export terminals within easy reach of Iranian-aligned groups — and a single incident on any of them could eclipse the entire diplomatic process.
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