By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) - When President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations a year ago, he touted the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites just months earlier as "totally obliterating everything" and said he had brought peace between Israel and Iran.
Returning to the world body on Tuesday, Trump will face a deeply skeptical audience increasingly rattled by six months of war between US forces and an emboldened Iran, growing regional instability and a nuclear threat that
has not disappeared despite his claims.
Though battered militarily and economically, Tehran has remained defiant, obstructing oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and in recent days gaining new leverage as its Houthi allies in Yemen tighten their grip on a Red Sea chokepoint, further spiking global energy prices.
The lightning advance by the Houthi militants has put Trump in an ever-tighter bind over the unpopular conflict, dealt a blow to US ally Saudi Arabia and exposed the limits of Washington’s ability to protect its regional partners.
Most European and Asian allies have spurned Trump's demands for assistance in a conflict he launched without consulting them and which has had damaging fallout for their economies.
And with US gasoline prices high and his approval ratings low, Trump could pay a price in November’s midterm elections when his Republican Party’s control of Congress is at risk.
“We are seeing what happens when a president launches a war of choice without anticipating the unintended consequences,” said Aaron David Miller, a former adviser on Middle East policy to Republican and Democratic administrations.
In Trump’s speech to the annual gathering of heads of state and government in New York, he is likely again to frame as a victory a military campaign he promised would be over in weeks.
The conflict has instead hardened into an uneasy stalemate that has failed to achieve Trump’s shifting goals while depleting the Pentagon's missile stockpiles.
Trump’s problems have only deepened since Houthi fighters overcame Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, sweeping down the Red Sea coast and seizing islands at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a crucial shipping corridor that allows Iran to further threaten global oil supplies.
In response to Reuters' questions, a senior Trump administration official said the US is focused on security interests such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the Red Sea "while empowering our regional partners to take the lead in managing and resolving regional security challenges."
DOUBTS ABOUT NUCLEAR CLAIMS
Iran took up only a small portion of Trump’s speech at last year's UN General Assembly.
He recounted how, three months before, he had sent B-2 bombers to drop 30,000-pound bombs that “demolished” Tehran’s uranium enrichment capacity. However, experts determined the strikes had only seriously set back the program.
“No other country on Earth could have done what we did,” Trump said.
The US president – who campaigned on a vow to avoid foreign military entanglements - also presented himself as a peacemaker, repeating claims to have ended conflicts around the world, including a 12-day war between Israel and Iran in 2025, and again insisted he should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Events since then stand in contrast to his remarks.
Trump joined Israel in striking Iran on February 28, citing what he said was an imminent nuclear threat to the US. Experts have disputed his claim that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, which Tehran has always denied seeking.
But Trump underestimated Iran’s resilience, analysts say. Despite airstrikes that killed many of Iran’s top leaders, it has hit back at Gulf neighbors and the US bases they host.
At the same time, Iran has retained a stockpile of near-weapons-grade highly enriched uranium believed buried by the US strikes in June 2025.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump alone had “possessed the courage” to confront Iran over its nuclear program, that he had achieved all his objectives and Iran's economy was being crippled by stepped-up sanctions and a US maritime blockade.
Trump, meanwhile, has rebuffed Saudi pleas for direct military intervention against the Houthis, who agreed to a ceasefire with the US last year.
This has dented confidence about US security guarantees among Gulf states, whose doubts had already been fed by Trump’s decision to go to war over their objections, analysts say. He plans to meet Gulf leaders on the UN sidelines next week, Axios reported.
TRUMP'S DILEMMA
The dilemma for Trump is that while the US can ill afford to have the Houthis close a second major shipping corridor, he is reluctant to undertake a dangerous new mission for a US military stretched by the fighting against Iran.
US officials met the Houthis last weekend in Oman, where the group said that while it was targeting Saudi shipping it had no intention of attacking American vessels, according to five people familiar with the matter.
“The US clearly has (military) capacity challenges but even so the cost of inaction here is likely to intensify tensions among Gulf allies,” said Jonathan Panikoff, a former deputy national intelligence officer on the Middle East.
The Houthis’ sudden re-emergence as a regional threat has further complicated Trump’s efforts to find a way out of the conflict.
With the war grinding on in a seventh month, the US is mired in a battle of attrition while Trump tries to intensify economic pressure on Tehran.
Trump, who has offered shifting timelines, told reporters on Wednesday that “hopefully we are towards the end.”
But analysts warn that the conflict is likely to drag on well past the midterm elections.
“Iran isn’t about to let him off the hook here while they have so much leverage to damage him in the midterms and make him a lame duck,” Brett Erickson, a geopolitical analyst and managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors, wrote on X.
(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis)
