To quote Barack Obama at his most glib, the 1980s are calling to ask for their foreign policy back.
Tensions have hit Cold War levels in Eastern Europe after Poland threatened to shoot down any more encroaching Russian aircraft. Strange drones — possibly Moscow’s — are zipping around over Scandinavia.
Fears are growing of an intifada-style eruption on the West Bank if Israel follows through on hints of annexation to add to its onslaught on Gaza.
And here in the US, inflation is threatening a comeback.
Yet President Donald Trump, who holds the job once reserved for the leader for the free world, had no words of reassurance or poetic invocations of democratic values for America’s alarmed allies in an address to the UN General Assembly in which he, as usual, gave most of the world’s tyrants a pass.
“I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” he told them.
Trump also devoted his speech, which rambled well past time limits and left the red light futilely blinking, powerless against his venting, to what he appears to think are more important priorities.
► He bitterly complained an escalator at UN headquarters stopped while he was on it and revived an old gripe that the world body had refused his offer to fix up its aged Turtle Bay building back in his real estate days. “‘I’m going to give you marble floors; they’re going to give you terrazzo,’” he recalled of his pitch.
► Trump also made nonsensical arguments about climate change that laid bare his rudimentary grasp of science. “We have a border, strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn’t just go straight up; that shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere,” Trump said. “We have very clean air … but the problem is that other countries like China, which has air that’s a little bit rough, it blows.” And he warned of a coming bovine purge. “They want to kill all the cows,” he said, of environmentalists.
► Britain, meanwhile, got an abrupt lesson in what flattery buys you with Trump: not very much. After laying on a fawning royal welcome for the US president last week, the British delegation had to sit and watch him tell a lie — that London wants to go to sharia law. And Trump paid back Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s obsequiousness by slamming his renewable energy policies. “Oh, the North Sea, I know it so well,” Trump said. “Three days in a row, that’s all he heard, North Sea oil, North Sea.” Starmer is already facing pressure from his own Labour MPs to condemn the man he hosted last week.
► And Trump made his latest pitch for a Nobel Peace Prize, even though most of the seven wars he claimed in his speech to have ended were not even raging when he intervened. “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements,” Trump said. But “what I care about is not winning prizes, it’s saving lives.” He turned his frustration into a question of why the UN even exists and why it doesn’t rush to give him credit. “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up, stopped right in the middle. If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would have fallen, but she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape.”
One frequent effect of Trump’s speeches to the UNGA is that the rest of the world gets an unabridged look at the disjointed warbling — the president calls it the “weave” — that Americans now take for granted. It would not be surprising if foreign chancellories started to make reassessments of his temperament and his grasp on key issues following Tuesday’s speech.
But the skill that US allies have had to learn when dealing with Trump is how to separate his invective and babbling and endless self-praise and chest-beating from his true intentions and actions.
For instance, after he offered no new direction for his stalled bid to end the war in Ukraine in his speech, he then said, when asked whether he thinks NATO should shoot down Russian aircraft in its airspace, “Yes, I do.”
But there remain questions about the president’s willingness to honor the Western alliance’s bedrock principle of mutual self-defense, which Putin is sure to test. Trump later offered a caveat to his remark about shooting down Russian aircraft, saying it “depends on the circumstances.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier Tuesday that US jets, at least, would not down Russian planes.
There’s more uncertainty over Trump’s position on the war after what seems to have been a successful meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky. He wrote on Truth Social that he was now convinced Ukraine could win the war, get back all its territory, and even push further, a position that few experts share.
His long post was unusually caustic about Russia, saying it was looking like a failed power and a “paper tiger.” His comment that with “time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO,” Ukraine could prevail does seem like good news for both Zelensky and for Europe, which has been pleading with Trump not to walk away from the war entirely. So does his pledge to supply weapons to NATO that it could pass on to Ukraine.
But Trump’s words are notoriously fickle. If he decides to drop peacemaking, that would please Moscow too, as there seems little immediate threat that Trump is going to impose crippling economic sanctions. It all looks like a shift toward Ukraine, a democracy that was illegally invaded. But Trump’s post could also be a precursor to him washing his hands of the war entirely.
The confusing new developments on Ukraine show why, for all Trump’s contemptuous hostility, foreign powers — especially those in Europe — still try to work with him, to direct him and to avoid the open confrontation some of his threats might merit.
But the first speech to the UN of the president’s second term still offered a sobering picture of the new global reality. The United States, the nation that did more than any other to build the United Nations and to support it for so many decades, is now its most vicious critic, a situation that raises questions about the once vital-world body’s capacity to survive in its current form.
“What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump asked.
That the president doesn’t know suggests the world is in for a tumultuous time.
The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco in 1945, enshrines international law and promotes respect for human rights and international freedoms. But Trump’s actions — both inside the United States, where he’s becoming increasingly authoritarian, and abroad — suggest he’s got little respect for such concepts.
He signaled, for instance, that he plans to continue to flout international law with unilateral strikes on what the administration claims are cartel speedboats off Venezuela. “Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said in his speech. The White House has yet to provide proof of its claims and hasn’t asked Congress for constitutional authorization to wage new acts of war.
American allies must also understand that the most powerful man in the world is a hostile political force who is seeking to undermine not only their leader’s political power bases, with his support for populist insurgents, but also their democratic systems, just as he has in the US.
At times at the UN, he looked less like the leader of the free world than the supremo of the global far-right movement.
“I love Europe, I love the people of Europe, and I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration,” Trump said, before twisting the knife on two issues — climate change and border policies that threaten to destroy liberal governments and usher in extremist leaders in Britain, France and elsewhere. “This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You’re doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct, and you’re destroying your heritage,” he said.
Allied leaders have spent eight months appeasing and flattering Trump. The next three years and four months will be about containing his damage.
It’s going to be an all but impossible task.
“They actually said during the campaign — they had a hat, the best-selling hat, ‘Trump was right about everything,’” the president said. “And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
