(AfriquesPlus) - Sen. Bernie Sanders used the eve of the United Nations General Assembly to deliver one of the most expansive addresses of his career, speaking Monday evening at Riverside Church in Manhattan, a building whose pulpit carries some of the twentieth century's heaviest political and moral weight.
Sanders opened by situating himself squarely within that lineage. He noted that Nelson Mandela worshipped at Riverside just five months after walking free from 27 years in prison, arriving to thank Americans who had organized against apartheid. He then recalled that it was from that same pulpit, in 1967, that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his landmark break with the political establishment of his day, condemning the Vietnam War despite the personal and political risk of stepping outside the civil rights lane for which he was known.
Riverside Church, an interdenominational Gothic-style cathedral on Manhattan's Upper West Side completed in 1930 with funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr., has long served as a platform for dissenting voices on foreign policy and social justice, hosting not only King's "Beyond Vietnam" address but decades of activism tied to labor, civil rights and anti-war movements. Sanders leaned on that history to frame his own remarks, arguing that King's warning against what he called the "giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism" is, in Sanders's words, "even more true today."
Sanders argued that the United States now spends more than $1 trillion a year on the military even as roughly 800,000 Americans are homeless and 85 million lack adequate health coverage ; a pattern he said is being replicated worldwide as governments raise defense budgets while ignoring basic needs. He called for ending U.S. involvement in what he described as President Trump's war in Iran, cutting military support for the Netanyahu government over its conduct in Gaza, pressing for an end to the war in Ukraine, and condemning continued backing from the United Arab Emirates for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan's civil war.
Citing UN Secretary-General António Guterres's recent identification of runaway artificial intelligence, the climate crisis and deepening inequality as the world's defining existential threats, Sanders devoted much of his address to a fourth danger he said receives too little attention: the concentration of wealth and power in a small global elite. He said the wealthiest 1% in the United States now holds more wealth than the bottom 94% combined, and cited figures showing Elon Musk alone controls more wealth than the poorest 53% of American households.
Sanders extended the argument globally, referencing data on wealth concentration in Britain, Russia and across Africa, and argued that far-right political movements from the United States to Germany to the United Kingdom are being funded in part by billionaire donors exploiting economic anxiety through anti-immigrant rhetoric.
He also renewed calls for international guardrails on artificial intelligence, suggesting that a meeting this week between Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping should be used to begin negotiating limits on advanced AI development. He closed with a warning on climate change, pointing to record global heat and a fatal glacial flood in Nepal last month, before urging his audience toward collective action against what he called the era's defining choice between "greed" and "justice and decency."
The address, delivered on the eve of the UN General Assembly's opening in New York, comes as Sanders continues to position himself as a leading voice for a progressive foreign-policy agenda distinct from both the Trump administration's approach and traditional Democratic Party orthodoxy.
