Trump Touts Foreign Policy Vision in UN Speech Ahead of Midterms

President Trump defends his global policy interventions in front of the United Nations and raises the possibility of further military action in Iran. Plus, a new school starting in San Francisco offers an alternative to college for aspiring tech founders. The students might be building their own company or launching a product or trying to learn how to build an LLM, for example, and a government task force removes more than 700,000 people. It says are fraudulently enrolled in Obamacare. It's Tuesday, September 22nd. I'm Alex Oselev for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. Today President Trump spoke in front of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. In his roughly 35-minute speech, Trump argued that his forceful interventions have made the world a safer place. While others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world. But he also warned other countries that he's prepared to take military action. In Iran, he framed his choice as either striking a deal over its nuclear program or escalating the war to a full-on bombing campaign. Will the deal be made with Iran? That lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? Do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again. Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? For more on President Trump's address and how it's gone over, I'm joined now by WSJ National Security Reporter Alex Ward. Alex, Trump's speech today, how different a tone was this for the President? This was more like a campaign speech, like he was trying to make a case for his leadership for Republicans ahead of the midterms. It also had a bit of a dissonant message. He started saying, "I am the President of peace, I've stopped a war," but then also in the same speech he muses about, "Maybe I should annihilate Iran if they don't make a deal and maybe the government of Cuba will fall and will pressure them. It's just a really split-screeny message to deliver those global politicians. We're not really the audience. It was the American people." I think most of these speeches typically are, and this was very much like, "Hey, Americans pay attention to what I've done." As we just heard, President Trump did talk about Iran and the possibility of future military action, but did he indicate anything about what might happen in other places? So he mentioned Cuba, a decent amount. Cuba has been under strict sanctions by the U.S. Trump, thinks that regime is bad. What Trump would appreciate with the Cubans is for them to basically just surrender to America, become this capitalist society overnight, not going to happen. It wasn't direct in saying like, "America's going to overthrow the regime," but he did say the U.S. was seeking fundamental change, which is a pretty blatant thing to say. Trump likes to say, "American foreign policy follows this peace through strength thing." He's saying, "A strong America, an active America, an interventionist America leads to greater outcomes over time, even if there's pain in the middle." Now, that's, of course, a convenient thing to say during the Iran War, but that seems to be his midterm pitch. I was going to say, shortly before the midterms is timing, is not a coincidence. How did this go over with other foreign dignitaries there? Not great. When he threatened Iran, the Iranian delegation, all but one, left when he said the Cuban regime will fall. They left. Of course, the American delegation was the one that clapped and backed him up, but he didn't get a lot of applause breaks, but it's amazing when you look back at the history of his speeches. This is kind of a place where he just starts roasting people. So you can imagine that everyone sitting in those seats are a little bit on edge. So, after his speech, Trump had a packed schedule of meetings, pull-as-sides with various world leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Gulf leaders. How did those go and what kind of outcome might we expect from some of these meetings? So, these are a bit more pro-forma than anything else. It's never a bad thing when the President and other leaders meet. You can either move things forward or they could bust through some bureaucratic issues. It seemed like the Ukraine meeting went fine if there's one bit of news from it. It's that Trump announced that U.S. and Iranian officials met for three hours on the sidelines, which is significant. It's the first in-person meeting between U.S. and Iranian officials since June. So, again, a weird split screen here in New York. On the one hand, you have Trump saying, "Hey, I might blow Iran to Kingdom come." While apparently at the same time, U.S. and Iranian officials were chatting, so that's just a state of that conflict now. That was W.S.J. National Security Reporter, Alex Ward. Thank you, Alex. Yeah, thanks for having me. President Trump also mentioned in his speech that he had signed an agreement with Denmark giving the U.S. a greater military and business presence in Greenland. Trump promised that the U.S. would soon be building two military bases on the island. Later at the UN, Trump said that he's considering restricting diesel exports in an effort to curb soaring fuel prices. According to oil price information service or opus, a Dow Jones company, the National Average for a gallon of diesel, reached $6.53 today, up nearly $1 over the past months. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is running tests on its East-West oil pipeline, a step towards restoring flows as soon as this week. The pipeline, which had been knocked out by attacks earlier this month, is being tested for structural integrity and pressure. People familiar with the matter say crude exports from the Red Sea port of Yanbu could restart within a couple of days. Saudi Aramco, the state-controlled oil company that operates the line, didn't immediately comment. Reports of the pipeline potentially restarting sent oil prices down today. Brent crude futures ticked lower, ending the day down about 1% and below $100 a barrel. Following oil prices also kept U.S. tech stocks up. The NASDAQ added about half a percent, hitting its second straight record. Other indexes were more mixed. The S&P 500 was flat, while the Dow slipped almost 0.4 percent. Coming up, JD Vance's anti-fraud task force makes one of its biggest moves yet, in cracking down on alleged Obamacare fraud, more after the break. In Washington, a Republican senator called for an investigation of Donald Trump Jr. after the president's son disclosed that he had received a lavish after-party as a wedding gift from a Russian businessman connected to the Kremlin. In a letter sent to the heads of the Judiciary Committee, Utah Senator John Curtis urged the committee to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., also citing his, quote, "active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures." He also encouraged the committee to subpoena former president Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, whose dealings in Ukraine have drawn GOP scrutiny for years. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the journal, Hunter Biden said, quote, "bring it on," adding he's already given more than seven hours of sworn testimony. And Vice President JD Vance's anti-fraud task force is removing hundreds of thousands of people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act's public exchanges, saying those enrollees don't meet eligibility requirements or don't exist at all. Vance and Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said today that their canceling subsidy payments for 760,000 individual accounts that they say are unauthorized and fraudulent enrollments in Obamacare. Cancelations that they say would amount to saving an estimated $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds. It's one of the largest administrative purges targeting individual insurance exchanges since the Trump administration's crackdown on fraud began last year. A report from Cornell University proposes a course correction as the school navigates one of the toughest periods in the history of American higher education. The special faculty committee that wrote the more than 200 page report outlined what it called an unprecedented crisis facing universities thanks to disrupted federal funding and erosion in public trust and rapid AI-led technological change. To combat these challenges, the report authors recommended the University diversify funding sources, embrace a range of ideologies, and develop a new tuition model. Cornell's report follows similar reflections from Yale and Vanderbilt, which criticize the institution's missteps and blind spots. In other education news, venture capital firm Andrews and Horowitz is investing $35 million in a new venture. Other founding partners include Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI. But they're not going in on a tech firm. They're investing in a school—applications for the Horowitz and Dreson Academy opened this week for the founding class to start in fall next year, tuition free at least at first. The San Francisco-based school is intended to be an alternative to a traditional college for students ages 16 to 22. Journal tech reporter Katie Binley has been reporting on this and she's here now with more. Katie, those are some big names in AI that I rattled off. How will this school be run exactly? When bulk of the money is coming from Andrews and then the founding partners are actually not financial backers, they're more like partners who will do things, including provide access to software, compute, and then they're going to also be opening up their offices to the students for learning purposes. plan is to have a lot of project-based. learning where the students might be building their own company or launching a product or trying to learn how to build an LLM, for example. And then there's going to be guest lectures from prominent figures in tech and other industries. As far as tuition, the first class is going to attend for free. That'll be a one-year program for the fall of 2027 and then assuming they get regulatory approval, they will then have a two-year program and that they say will cost unpar with an elite private university. The school is launching at a time when there's a lot of skepticism now of the value of a traditional college education. What kind of alternative does this offer? There is this idea among certain parents that traditional school is really no longer serving their kids. I think it's really hard to say what a young person getting into the workforce really needs right now. I think it's really rapidly changing and what a company is looking for in this moment could be very different in two years. What are skeptics of this school saying? Well, anytime you have a new educational model, researchers will tell you they like to see data behind any kind of program, but I did speak with a dean over at Brown, John Friedman, who has studied the outcomes of higher education. He thought the idea of these lectures coming from presumably prominent people, obviously a clear benefit. Then on the other hand, there's this question of who are you surrounding yourself with. If you are wanting to be a founder or a builder and then everyone in your immediate vicinity who you're in school with wants to do the exact same thing, is that limiting in some ways? He talked about how it just benefits students to be around others who are not on like an identical path to them. That was WSJ Tech reporter Katie Bindley. Thank you, Katie. Thanks for having me. And that's what's news for this Tuesday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Danny Lewis with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Alex O'Sullup for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.