On Tuesday, Donald Trump made his début on the world stage—on the same elegant green-marble dais, donated by Italy after the Second World War, that he had mocked in a 2012 tweet as ugly. “The 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me,” Trump wrote. “I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.” Trump’s thoughts about the United Nations were bigger—and badder—this time around.
“Major portions of the world are in conflict, and some, in fact, are going to hell,” Trump declared. He vowed to “totally destroy” North Korea if it didn’t abandon its nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles that deliver them.
He came close to calling for regime change in “reckless” Iran, for policies that “speak openly of mass murder, vowing death to America, destruction to Israel, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.” Trump called the nuclear deal—brokered by all the veto-wielding nations of the world body—“an embarrassment” to the United States, implicitly insulting the European allies that initiated the effort and the Security Council, which unanimously endorsed it.
He implied a willingness to use military action in Venezuela “to help them regain their freedom, recover their country, and restore their democracy.” He blasted Cuba and took sharp digs at China and Russia.
The President also delivered a few campaign-style zingers—like his pledge to “crush loser terrorists.” About North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump pronounced, “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
Trump reportedly insisted, over aides’ objections, that he keep the reference to the Elton John song in his speech. The line is sure to become part of U.N. lore—along with the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s quip, in 1987, “Remember, President Reagan, Rambo only exists in the movies,” and the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s insult, the day after George W. Bush’s 2006 U.N. speech, “The devil came here yesterday, and it smells of sulfur still.”
For a body more accustomed to nuanced diplomatic speak, and now yearning for leadership in an unsettled world, Trump’s bellicose speech was his America First doctrine on steroids. Indeed, he opened his remarks to leaders from almost two hundred countries with a litany of his achievements since Election Day. “Our military will soon be the strongest it has ever been,” he boasted.
One of Trump’s most curious and convoluted themes—in an increasingly interconnected and globalizing world—was the need for greater sovereignty. “The nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition,” he said. The subtext was that walls, along every nation’s borders, were the keys to prosperity and international security.
The line baffled veteran American diplomats. “The President kept talking about sovereignty as if it were imperilled,” Richard Haass, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations and the head of the State Department’s policy-planning staff under the George H. W. Bush Administration, told me. “The last I checked, we still have a veto at the U.N. We set our own limits in the Paris climate pact. No one is forcing us to adhere to trade agreements. It seemed to me it was something of a red herring. U.S. sovereignty is not imperilled. It’s an odd emphasis at the U.N., where our goal is to generate collective effort against common problems. It seemed to me inherently contradictory.”
The tenor throughout Trump’s forty-minute speech was contrary to many of the trends of the twenty-first century. He advocated ideas that other nations either find suspect or shun outright. Trump ignored the fact that he needs the world right now more than the world needs (or wants) him. Saying that the United States is gaining military muscle no longer means that Washington gains more leverage. Power has been redefined and defused, as have the threats of the era.
“The defining challenges of the twenty-first century are global in nature,” Haass said. “That is what was missing—whether proliferation or terror or climate change or hacking or democratic disruption. A pinched approach to sovereignty is inadequate.”
Ian Bremmer, the president of the Eurasia Group, a risk-consulting firm, told me that the long-term fallout from Trump’s speech may be to accelerate the identity politics and anti-globalization sentiments that fuel so many of today’s conflicts. The world, he said, has been headed toward a “geopolitical recession,” a period of instability featuring setbacks to globalization and international coöperation. Weakened global institutions that can’t respond quickly or effectively to challenges increase the prospects for more wars. Trump’s unilateralist rhetoric is “facilitating a faster unwind, and that’s a dangerous thing,” Bremmer said.
Trump’s patronizing language at the U.N. was a stark departure from the policies of America’s two other twenty-first-century Presidents. George W. Bush’s strategy emphasized the promotion of democracy and nation-building, while Barack Obama was big on human rights, global outreach, and resolving old tensions.
“Our success depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty to promote security, prosperity, and peace for themselves and for the world,” Trump said. “We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government.”
The question is whether Trump, in his speech, went too far—and scared too many—to generate the kind of collaboration that he needs to achieve the very foreign-policy goals he outlined.
The President’s threat “won’t make Kim Jong Un quiver in his boots and give up his nukes,” Mark Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in Washington, told me. “To the contrary, it will reinforce his determination to have nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles that can deter the U.S.” America’s allies also now have to worry, he added, that Trump’s belligerent words will make Pyongyang even more dangerous.
The same is true of his condemnation of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the clunkily named Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the most significant nonproliferation agreement in more than a quarter century. “Nobody in the room, save Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, will have been pleased by Trump’s denunciation of the J.C.P.O.A.,” Fitzpatrick said. The consequences of abandoning the Iran deal, he noted, could also backfire in relation to North Korea. “Denouncing a deal that all other parties are upholding will certainly not make North Korea any more disposed toward striking a deal with the United States over its nuclear program.”
Trump’s speech infuriated the Iranians. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted, “Trump’s ignorant hate speech belongs in medieval times-not the 21st Century UN -unworthy of a reply. Fake empathy for Iranians fools no one.”
Key players didn’t even show up for Trump’s début. President Xi Jinping, of China, didn’t come to New York to build on the relationship started over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, in April. Trump is dependent on China to deal with North Korea—and Xi is unlikely to make the grand gestures required to force the “Rocket Man” to surrender his deadliest weapons. For all that is at stake between Washington and Moscow, President Vladimir Putin didn’t bother to attend, either. Trump needs Russian help to tighten the squeeze on Pyongyang through U.N. sanctions.
Angela Merkel, now the de-facto champion of the West, also stayed home, occupied by the run-up to a crucial election. The Germans are outspoken about their commitment to the Iran nuclear deal—and have said so, bluntly, to the Trump Administration. Despite closer ties with Saudi Arabia forged during Trump’s first foreign trip, neither the King nor the Crown Prince came to New York. As at Trump’s Inauguration, the crowd at this opening of the United Nations may not have been as large as the President had hoped.
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