EVERY SINGLE FUCKER IN THAT ROOM KNEW WHO HE MEANT

Saturday in New York, the arse end of the general debate, when the big names have flown home and the hall is half junior diplomats and half interns keeping their bosses’ seats warm. A Norwegian in a sensible suit walks to the rostrum and opens with a quote from an Italian communist.

Espen Barth Eide is not a shouter. Norway’s foreign minister has the delivery of a bloke reading the safety card before takeoff. Which is exactly why what he did over the next nineteen minutes worked so bloody well. He described the President of the United States to 193 countries, line by line, and never used the name. Putin and Israel got named. The third bloke got described so precisely that the room filled in the blank on its own, and the interns didn’t even look up from their phones.

Withheld dues and a sanctioned court, a shut strait and a war with no end in sight, all delivered in a Nordic monotone by a man who thinks a strongly worded footnote is a knife fight, and it landed harder than anything the shouters managed all fucking week. He didn’t give Washington a spray. He gave it an invoice, itemised, and read it into the record.

▶️ Eide opens with Gramsci’s “time of monsters”, written in one of Mussolini’s prison cells.

THE TIME OF MONSTERS

The quote is from Antonio Gramsci. Mussolini’s regime locked him up in 1926 and he spent the rest of his short life filling notebooks in a cell, which is where the line comes from. What he actually wrote was that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born, and in between you get morbid symptoms. “Monsters” is the popular translation, and for a room with this many in it, the popular translation is the honest one.

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

Eide told the assembly that Gramsci’s monsters were the dark political and ideological phenomena of the 1930s, and that Gramsci’s worries were not unwarranted, because his era ended with the Second World War. Gramsci’s monsters had a real Mussolini. Ours has the wax-museum Mussolini, and he’d stood at the same rostrum on Tuesday, big-noting himself to the same room, four days before a Norwegian walked up and quietly described what the wax was covering.

Then the foreign minister did the thing Nordic diplomats do when they have decided to be dangerous. He got very calm and very specific.

He calls it a triple crisis. The rules are being ignored while the money is withheld, and the institution itself has bloated into 23 separate UN organisations squatting in the average developing country. From where I’m sitting in the Blue Mountains it looked more like one crisis with a golf cart and a Truth Social account, and the foreign minister of Norway seemed to think so too, because every example he reached for pointed the same direction.

THE BLOKE NOBODY NAMED

Here is the tell, and it is the whole piece.

Vladimir Putin gets named twice. Eide describes the “special military operation that would be over in days or maybe weeks” and notes it is now well into its fifth year, which is the diplomatic way of saying the Kremlin’s cowboy builder quoted a fortnight and is still on site with the roof off in year five, and the client’s paying for the fucking tarps.

Israel gets named. Not the man, the state, but named.

The third one gets a description so complete it functions as a name: major contributors withholding payments, calls to dismantle the International Criminal Court, a Gulf war paired with Ukraine as the second example of might over right with the aggressor left blank on purpose, a pump-price list that starts in Minnesota, and a Greenland deal praised for “fully respecting their sovereign rights”, which is the kind of compliment you only pay to someone who spent the better part of two years refusing to rule out taking the fucking place by force.

That asymmetry is standard practice for small NATO countries. You name the adversary. You describe the ally. Everyone in the building has the decoder ring and nobody in Washington can lodge a complaint about a sentence that doesn’t contain the word “Trump”. It’s the same trick a tradie uses when the client’s mate is a dickhead. You don’t say the mate’s a dickhead, you say “someone on site has been moving the string lines”, and the client goes quiet because he knows.

There’s a bonus in it for a Norwegian. Norway is the country that gave the English language the word for a bloke who sells out his own side to a strongman, and on Saturday its foreign minister spent nineteen minutes describing the Quisling of Queens without once needing the surname. Vidkun would have been proud of the craftsmanship, if not the target.

The bloke nobody named is the most described man in the speech. Gramsci’s laziest monster, the one so obvious the philosopher wouldn’t have bothered sketching him, and the Norwegian didn’t need to either.

▶️ The Strait of Hormuz, the petrol pump list, “international law is not a menu”, and the Russia-and-Israel line that had the room nodding.

NOT A FUCKING MENU

Eide used freedom of navigation as his case study, and he chose the Strait of Hormuz to make it. Freedom of navigation is currently in the care of a taxidermied lifeguard who bombed the pool twice and now won’t take the seven-day plan to reopen it. With the Strait shut, energy prices climb and supply lines snap a long way from the Gulf, Eide said, and then he listed where that pain lands.

“From petrol pumps in Minneapolis to Oslo, from Cape Town to Mumbai.”

He could have started that list anywhere on earth. He started it in Minnesota.

Minneapolis.

That is a foreign minister telling American voters what the war their president won’t end is costing them at the bowser, in a sentence engineered to be clipped for American television. And the bloke who could open the Strait tomorrow by taking a proposal that was already on the table has decided, per this week’s reporting, that the bombing resumes after the midterms instead. The petrol pumps in Minneapolis can wait for the electoral calendar, and so can every servo from Perth to Peoria, because a tinpot with a tee time has an election to lose first.

Then the line that got the loudest response of the day.

“International law is not a menu you can choose from at will. It must be upheld universally. When we condemn Russia’s clear violation of international law in Ukraine, it is equally important to speak out on Israel’s violations of the same rules in Palestine.”

Two days earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu had stood at that same rostrum and watched dozens of delegations file out before he’d cleared his throat. He called the empty seats “moral cowards” and told the rest that bombing Iran was one of the easiest decisions he’d ever made. He also claimed the leaders who’d just walked out thank him privately, which is coming the raw prawn with a room that has literally left you talking to the furniture. The host country had already refused the Palestinian president a visa, so Mahmoud Abbas addressed the hall by video like a bloke dialling in from the car park.

Into that room Eide dropped the double standard and named it for what it does.

“Double standards quickly translate into no standards at all.”

Which is the entire foreign policy of the United States in one fucking line. Condemn the Russian and shield the Israeli, and put the court on a sanctions list for noticing the difference. Not a menu, said the man from Oslo, and every delegation that had walked out on Thursday understood he’d just described the same gutless wonder they had.

THE DUES-DODGER OF MAR-A-LARDO

“Major contributors are withholding or delaying payments.”

The UN’s biggest assessed contributor is the United States, on the hook for 22 per cent of the regular budget and just over a quarter of peacekeeping. In 2025 it stopped paying altogether. This year the UN has been warning members of “imminent financial collapse”, the 2026 budget got cut by 15 per cent, and close to 2,900 UN jobs went in the bin.

A week before Eide spoke, Washington wired $827 million to the UN and the staff cheered because it meant their salaries would clear past September. That payment left the United States still owing about $4.2 billion. That is the Dues-Dodger of Mar-a-Lardo settling a slice of the tab on the way into the venue so nobody bars the door, then walking to his seat with the rest of the bill still in his arse pocket. The tightest arse ever to owe four billion dollars, and he still wants a round of applause for the deposit.

For a developer whose unpaid contractors were a newspaper investigation years before he was ever a president, the United Nations is just the latest bloke holding an invoice. He treats it the way he treated the marble guys. Take the delivery, then argue about the bill until the other bloke gives up or goes broke. The difference is that the marble guys couldn’t lose their vote in the General Assembly, and the Charter says a member two full years in arrears can.

Eide’s answer was to put Norway’s own money where his mouth was. One of the ten largest donors to the UN, he said, and prepared to use that funding to push reform, because Norway believes in “investing in the UN”. Norway banked its oil money instead of pissing it up the wall, to the tune of about $2.4 trillion US at last count, which cut up for every Norwegian, babies included, comes to around $430,000 US each, or north of $650,000 Aussie. That is a country with about as many people as Sydney, sitting on a fund roughly 570 times what Washington owes the UN, telling the richest country on earth that the bill is the fucking bill.

▶️ “Norway resoundingly rejects the calls for dismantling the International Criminal Court”.

BRICK BY FUCKING BRICK

“Norway resoundingly rejects the calls for dismantling the International Criminal Court.”

Nobody says “calls for dismantling” by fucking accident. In July, Marco sold-his-soul-long-ago Rubio announced Washington would dismantle the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary”, then wrote an op-ed describing the court as a racket run by “smug globalists”, which is pure bullshit-artist copy from a bloke whose own boss runs a racket with a gift shop. Before that, the administration had sanctioned the court’s prosecutor and his two deputies, and then went after eight of its judges as well, mostly over the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and the Afghanistan investigation. Three of those judges are now suing the United States in a New York courtroom, the first time sitting ICC judges have ever sued Washington, and they’re doing it just to keep their bank accounts open, because the shonkiest administration in living memory decided the judges were the fucking crooks.

Putting a judge on a sanctions list for signing a warrant is standover-man stuff. It is what a bloke collecting for a bikie gang does to a shopkeeper, and it is now the foreign policy of a Secretary of State who once described Trump as a con artist and now works as the Con Artist’s Caddie, bag on his shoulder and tongue on the boot. Which leaves the Demolition Contractor of Foggy Bottom swinging the wrecking ball outside the only permanent court on earth that tries people for genocide, and doing it to protect two clients: a prime minister with a live warrant and a president with 34 felony convictions of his own. Blind Freddy could see the conflict of interest. Rubio saw a promotion.

That is the part the room heard when Eide said “calls for dismantling”. A convicted felon has put a court on a sanctions list. The only convicted felon in history to sanction a courtroom, and he did it from the Oval Office with a Sharpie, which is a dog act even by the standards of a bloke whose whole career is dog acts with a letterhead. The convict-in-chief has tickets on himself the size of the docket in Manhattan, and every judge who ever ruled against him got the domestic version: a tantrum on Truth Social and a spray at anyone who reckons the law applies to him. The ICC got the export model.

Norway, for the record, does the other thing. When the ICC’s own prosecutor was found to have committed serious misconduct, Norway voted with the majority in July to sack him, 82 to 13. That is what taking a court seriously looks like. You fund it and you police it, and when your own prosecutor is found to have crossed the line you turf him out yourself. You don’t put its judges on a list next to cartel accountants because they signed a warrant your mate didn’t like, and you don’t send a drongo in a State Department lanyard out to threaten the wrecking ball because your mate in Jerusalem is worried about which airports he can still land at.

TWENTY-THREE

Here is where the MAGA reader is going to feel a little tug of agreement, and I want him to notice the trap before he steps in it.

Eide was brutal about the UN’s own bloat. “Over time we have added excessive complexity.” Every new challenge gets a new agency and every new idea gets a new fund, each with its own secretariat and payroll. Ten human rights treaty bodies and eleven secretariats for environmental treaties, by his count. On the ground, twenty-three UN organisations in the average developing country, and more in the fragile ones.

“Are we improving delivery or just creating more fragmentation and duplication?”

He wants overlapping agencies merged and the “turf battles” between member states stopped. He wants the next Secretary-General to be “bold and transformative”, and he said “she”, in a hall where the job has been held by nine blokes in a row. He even had a go at the Security Council for having no permanent African seat. That’s a reformer with a chainsaw who’d rather use the scalpel, and he brought fricken receipts.

Which is the trap. Because the bloke nobody named agrees with every one of those criticisms, and his answer to them is to stop paying and sanction the court. Idi Amin of Applebee’s stood at that same rostrum on Tuesday and told the world how the place ought to be run, which is roughly what the original did in 1975. Eide’s answer is to keep paying and use the cheque as leverage, on the principle that the owner of the pub gets to fix the pub, and the bloke who did a runner on the tab gets to fix nothing. “Tough love”, he called it. The reformer pays his dues. The deadbeat just calls himself one, and duds the fucking bar on the way out.

A WORD FROM THE OTHER HEMISPHERE

I’ll say the quiet bit for the Aussie readers. Norway is five and a half million people with a sovereign wealth fund the size of God’s super and an economy that runs on oil and not pissing it up the wall. Australia is twenty-seven million people with an economy that runs on iron ore and pretending we’re not that bloody close to Asia. Both countries are mid-sized and quids in, and both are, as Eide put it, “particularly dependent on common international rules”.

“Smaller countries like my own, and in fact the vast majority of this assembly, are particularly dependent on common international rules.”

That is us. That is every truckie wearing Hormuz at the bowser and every trawler doing the diesel maths and coming up rooted, because Perón of the Prawn Cocktail would rather have a war on the telly than a deal on the table. When the rules go, the big countries do as they please, the Veto with a Comb-over most of all, and countries our size cop the bill. Norway’s foreign minister said that in plain English to all 193 of them. Ours mumbles it in a dialect only DFAT can read, in a register so pissweak you could balance a schooner on it, which is why it took a bloke from Oslo to make our case better than the mob we pay to do it.

Eide stayed polite. He praised the Greenland deal as good diplomacy, which it was, once the threatening bloke pulled his head in. He found room for the Himalayan floods and for the AI line I want stapled to every parliament wall on earth: “the danger is not technology, the danger is technology without accountability”. He found room for democratic backsliding and “authoritarian and exclusivist sentiments within member states”, and he said the way a country behaves abroad “reflects on their domestic politics”, which is as close as a Norwegian gets to saying the rot starts at the top and the top is wearing a red cap with a furphy on it.

▶️ The closer: “The time for reports has passed. The time for action is now. It is our turn to face the monsters of our time”.

OUR TURN

He finished where he started, and he finished on the founders.

“They did not build the United Nations because they believed mankind was perfect. They built it because they understood mankind is not.”

Then the line the Viking got right.

“The time for reports has passed. The time for action is now. It is our turn to face the monsters of our time.”

I’ve read a lot of UN speeches this week. Most of them are a man reading a country’s brochure. This one was a man reading a charge sheet, and the accused had $4.2 billion in unpaid dues, a sanctioned court, a strait he could reopen with one phone call, and a deal in Greenland that only counts as diplomacy because the alternative was an invasion. Eide didn’t need the name. The name was the only thing missing from the speech, and its absence was the loudest sound in the hall.

So I’ll supply it, since Oslo can’t.

Donald Trump is the monster in that speech. Every symptom Gramsci warned about, a foreign minister catalogued on Saturday without raising his voice, while the world’s most described deadbeat sat on a golf course somewhere treating the account like every other invoice he’s ever been handed. The UN is not a menu and the court is not optional. The bill is the bill, and the rest of us are done paying for a bill-skipping, court-sanctioning cunt who thinks the entire post-war order was a subcontractor he could dud.

Now is the time of monsters. A Norwegian just told 193 countries which one to fucking look at.

IFLA ~ Time For Coffee ~ Maizy & Gman

THE AUSSIE-TO-YANK WORD WIZARD: TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN, VIA THE PUB

The Aussie dollar is shithouse, the Strait’s shut and the Yanks are in charge of the mood, so this glossary comes free of charge, which makes it the only thing in this piece nobody’s in arrears on.

Arse end: The far, unglamorous end of anything. The arse end of a debate is Saturday afternoon, after the leaders have gone home.

Arse pocket: The back pocket of your pants. Where the rest of the bill lives.

Big-noting: Talking yourself up in front of people who didn’t ask. Tuesday at the rostrum.

Bloke: A man. Neutral, until it’s followed by “nobody named”.

Bowser: A petrol pump. Where Minneapolis and the Blue Mountains meet.

Come the raw prawn: To try it on with someone who can see straight through you. Telling a room that walked out on you that its leaders thank you in private is the reference case.

Cowboy builder: A tradesman who quotes low and never finishes. Comes with the roof off in year five and a special military excuse.

Dickhead: An idiot. A client’s mate who moves the string lines on site is the reference case.

Did a runner: Left without paying. Works on a bar tab or a UN assessment.

Dog act: A low, treacherous move. Sanctioning a judge for signing a warrant qualifies, letterhead or not.

Dud: To cheat or short-change someone. If you got dudded, you paid full price for half the job. Subcontractors know the word.

Fortnight: Two weeks. What a cowboy builder quotes for a job that takes five years.

Frickin: What Americans say when they want to swear but suspect Mommy is still in the room. The verbal equivalent of decaf. Down here we never bothered with the training wheels: if a thing is frickin annoying, it is in point of fact fucking annoying, and we will tell you so at full volume in front of your children and your pastor.

Gutless wonder: A coward with a title. Uses a sanctions list where a spine should go.

Having a go: Criticising someone, usually to their face. Eide had a go at the Security Council. Politely.

In the bin: Thrown out. Where 2,900 UN jobs went in the 2026 budget.

On site: At the job. “Someone on site” is how a tradie names a dickhead without naming him.

Pissing it up the wall: Wasting money as fast as it comes in. Norway did the opposite with its oil and now has a fund the size of God’s super.

Pissweak: Feeble. The register of a foreign policy statement you could balance a beer on.

Quisling: Not ours, Norway’s. Vidkun Quisling ran the country for the Nazis and his surname became the English word for a traitor to his own side. Borrowed here with thanks, because the man it fits was born in Queens.

Schooner: A beer glass, three-quarters of a pint. Steady on an Australian foreign policy statement.

Servo: A service station. Perth to Peoria, same queue, same problem.

Shithouse: Terrible. The exchange rate. Also the week.

Smoko: The morning tea break on a work site, where the real politics gets discussed.

Spray, a: A tirade. Eide didn’t give one. He gave an invoice, which is worse.

Standover man: A thug who collects money by intimidation. Sanctions on judges, translated.

String lines: The taut lines a builder sets out to keep everything straight. Move them and the whole job goes crooked, which is why the client goes quiet.

Superannuation: Compulsory retirement savings, “super” for short. God’s is the Norwegian oil fund.

Tab: A running bar bill. The one Washington settled a slice of on the way in.

Tight-arse: A miser. The tightest one ever to owe four billion dollars.

Tinpot: A small-time dictator with a big-time opinion of himself. Now available with a tee time.

Truckie: A truck driver. The first Australian to feel the Strait of Hormuz.

Whingeing: Complaining, at length, about something you can’t change. Sydney and traffic. Washington and the invoice.

IF YOU SEE ONE: FUCKING RUN!