Iran’s President Heads to New York, a First for a Nation at War With the U.S.

President Masoud Pezeshkian had combative words for the United States before he departed Iran to attend the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

By Leo Sands

With the United States and Iran locked in a dragging conflict, President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran was traveling to New York on Tuesday to attend the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

Analysts say it will be the first time that a leader whose country is at war with the United States sets foot on U.S. soil to address the U.N. gathering. Just before departing Iran, Mr. Pezeshkian had referred to his host country for the next few days as the “enemy” in combative remarks carried by state media.

“They cannot use force to compel people to submit,” he said of the United States, accusing it of repeatedly violating truce agreements and using its military to strike homes and hospitals and “commit atrocities” in Iran and beyond.

Mr. Pezeshkian is scheduled to address the U.N. gathering on Wednesday — speaking after President Evariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi and before President Santiago Peña of Paraguay — in what experts say will be a historic moment.

“The leader of a country actively engaged in direct military hostilities with the U.S. has not addressed the U.N. before,” said Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin. He noted, however, that other anti-American leaders — including Yasir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fidel Castro of Cuba — had spoken at the gathering before.

Thomas G. Weiss, a political scientist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York who specializes in the United Nations, said that leaders of countries hostile to Washington had attended the General Assembly during moments of geopolitical tension, including Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union in 1960.

“But these weren’t during active, shooting wars,” he said. “I’m surprised, frankly, that the Iranian president is being allowed in,” he added.

The State Department said last week that as the host country, the United States had permitted Iran to send a core delegation to attend the U.N.’s largest annual meeting.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was among those granted a visa. In a statement posted on social media on Tuesday, he said he was in New York to shore up support on the world stage despite the “state of war” between the United States and Iran.

As well as meeting with other world leaders, Mr. Pezeshkian would meet with “intellectuals, members of the media and Iranian and non-Iranian scholars” during his time in New York, Mr. Araghchi said. The State Department typically restricts the movements of the Iranian delegation, prohibiting its members from traveling without permission beyond a limited area of Midtown Manhattan, where the U.N. headquarters are located.

Leo Sands is a correspondent for the Breaking News Hub of The New York Times based in London.