UN General Assembly
2025

I now give the floor to His Excellency Mr. Espen Bart Eide, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Norway. Mr. President, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, Eighty years ago, against the backdrop of the Second World War, world leaders gathered in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. This once-in-a-generation moment brought the idea of the United Nations to life. Let us imagine for a moment that we are there, in San Francisco, in 1945, as the UN was negotiated. Generations who were at my age would have experienced the First World War, the short-lived Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression of the 1930s, fierce trade wars, the rise of fascism and Nazism, the Second World War, the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb. And all of that in their own adult life. If events like these constitute your life experience, you do not believe that the world is a rose garden. Those who shaped the United Nations were not guided by naive idealism.