President Donald Trump’s address to the 80th Session of the UN General Assembly on 23 September can be seen in starkly different lights: for supporters, it was Trumpism in its purest form; for critics, it was Trumpism unplugged. Regardless of perspective, Trump’s speech stood out as one of the clearest, rawest and most unabashed expositions of his worldview and ideology. Angered by a broken escalator and a teleprompter that disrupted his visit and speech, President Trump attacked the United Nations, questioning its effectiveness in resolving conflicts and pointing to the gridlock in the Security Council.
“The UN has such tremendous potential but it is not even coming close to living up to that potential.” Its strongly worded letters represented empty words that do not end wars, he insisted. The UN is supposed to stop invasion, not create them and not finance them, he asserted. His critics, however, hold Trump to be both the cause and the symptom for the UN’s ineffectiveness. This is because Trump clearly believes global crises are best resolved by powerful men and countries sitting together and hammering out deals without any reference to the UN for working out collective solutions.
Clearly, President Trump was not in a good mood at the UN. He took potshots at all his opponents one by one, sparing none, reserving praise exclusively for the United States and himself. The USA is living through a golden age, he announced. Reserving his most savage remarks for Europe, he said: “Europe is in serious trouble. I love Europe, I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration, that double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.” He went on to tell shocked world leaders that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Interestingly, his remarks came as the UN urged countries to present their updated de-carbonisation targets at the UNGA, aiming to revive its momentum in the global battle against climate change.
This position explained Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Agreement. The assembled leaders heard Trump in apprehensive silence. Not that the use of such language around climate change by Trump is new. The world had heard him say this on different occasions, and there should have been no surprise in this reaffirmation of his scepticism about climate change. The interesting point is that the day after he spoke, 121 countries joined the Secretary General’s climate summit, leaving the USA totally isolated. The rebuttal of the Indonesian President, Prabowo Subianto, whose country has the world’s largest Muslim population, speaking immediately after Trump, that “Might cannot be right, right must be right.
No one country can bully the whole of the human family” was strongly applauded. Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also warned, without specifically mentioning the US, about the threat posed by the new authoritarians. Even a close ally of the USA, South Korean President, Lee Jae Myung, insisted that the climate crisis was far from being a hoax and that it represented a threat to global humanity, directly contradicting President Trump. Post Trump’s assertions, the more stark, urgent and unavoidable question was how the world would operate in the absence of a reliable American leadership. This is not only a question for the global south but for Europe as well, because it confronts Russia, Asia, as it wrestles with Chinese power and for the Gulf, as it grapples with Israel’s military dominance.
One response is the alliance recently on display in Tianjin. Another still-forming anti-Trump alliance is led by democratic leaders. This is operating apart from the UN because the reality is that the UN, paralysed by the veto of competing power blocks and abandoned financially by America, has been bypassed. President Lula was clear that “the tyranny of the veto sabotages the very reason for the UN’s existence.” The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, made a pitch for the UN’s continued relevance, insisting that “we must never give up.” Even Trump, after bitterly criticising the UN, assured the leaders, almost as an afterthought, that US remains supportive of the global body.
“I may disagree with it sometimes but I am behind it because the potential for peace at this institution is great.” Nevertheless, Trump’s address unsettled many in attendance because of his blunt style and sweeping agenda. Curiously, though, even when Trump hammered the UN, he did not press the case for reforms as forcefully as expected. Indeed, Trump belied the theme of the session, “Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights.” There is no gainsaying that the USA is the sole super power with mighty nuclear weapons and the largest economy and its President is the most powerful person on the earth. When the ‘Potus’ speaks the whole world listens and all that Trump achieved was to make this unequivocally clear in his ‘America First’ speech maintaining that the USA has the strongest borders, friendship and spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.
Global leaders have embraced the art of flattery with Trump, aware that he responds well to compliments and open display of respect. Just as easily, Trump is known to lash out when he feels disrespected or cheated. No one knows it better than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In the decades since Trump has burst on the global political scene, world leaders have learned to get used to two versions of the US President. There is public bellicosity and the private, in person Trump, which are often conflicting versions of one another.
(The writer is President, the Tagore Institute of Peace Studies and Chairman, Indian Federation of UN Associations, New Delhi)