The man next to me could not stop laughing and shaking his head. On stage, Donald Trump was telling the world’s leaders they were all idiots. We were at the UN General Assembly, a spaceship-like room under a domed ceiling bordering the East River, New York. Trump was high up behind the lectern looking down on the world’s political elite. His face was framed by a green marble dais and he looked like a Strangelovian villain. “I can tell you, I’m really good at this stuff,” he was saying, “your countries are going to hell”. The Russian delegation filmed him on their phones, amused.
Trump’s message was that the twin evils of globalism were the expensive and futile pursuit of net zero and the suicidal opening of Western borders to mass immigration. London was coming under the influence of Sharia law, he said, while the UN was funnelling money to the illegal migrants trying to cross the United State’s southern border. Wind turbines received a characteristic lashing in his latest order to Keir Starmer to start drilling for gas and oil in the North Sea. It was a litany of attacks on the system the UN has spent decades constructing, all delivered in a disturbingly buoyant tone.
This was Trump’s victory parade in the battle between nationalism and globalism. His plan was to prove that the UN was useless and that, in fact, he was the only one who could solve the world’s problems. His attack lines seemed pointedly chosen to wound the UN at its core.
Take climate change: Trump described it as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”. What about international law, which underpins the entire international system? “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence.” OK then. And conflict resolution, the founding mission of the UN? “I ended seven wars… and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help”.
Speeches were supposed to last 15 minutes. Trump rattled on for close to an hour. At one point, I thought his competitive spirit might push him to surpass Colonel Gaddafi’s notorious hour and a half sermon in 2009. It felt surreal when he started speaking about something as familiar as cooperation on biological weapon proliferation. But who could be surprised? Trump is no longer the diplomatic whippersnapper leaders patronised when he first addressed the UN in 2017. He has since remade the world in which they live.
“What is the purpose of the UN?” Trump asked at one point. It was a good question. In 1996 Claude Inis wrote that there were two United Nations. The First UN was made up of the secretariat and agencies based in New York and Geneva, led by the Secretary-General. The Second UN comprised the member states themselves, led by the most powerful nations.
Trump is tearing the First UN apart. It subsists on norms and conventions which underpin its reputation as an impartial and moral arbiter. Trump’s disregard for international law and personal antipathy towards the secretariat denudes the UN of the gravitas it needs to be a major player.
He has taken the United States – the UN’s unofficial leader and most generous donor – out of the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Unesco. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, was denied a visa to attend the Assembly – a mockery of the idea that the UN is neutral ground. Trump has taken back $1bn in US funding and plans to cut the same amount again. At the same time, gutting Usaid has had knock-on effects across the entire humanitarian industry. Charities have lost big contracts and started laying off staff.
Remember in the eyes of the administration this is all part of the same globalist infrastructure: where international organisations, not nation states, are responsible for solving the world’s problems. This is the ideology Trump wants to blow apart. In its place, spheres of influence will arise where power decides. Politico has reported that the forthcoming National Defense Strategy will prioritise the defence of America and the Western Hemisphere over neutralising the threat from China and Russia.
What does this mean for the UN? That the liberal internationalism which underpins its bias towards free trade, human rights, and free and fair elections has lost its chief backer. Other countries are jumping at the opportunity to fill the vacuum. Qatar wants to host some offices of the UN’s workers’ rights agency. The Chinese Communist Party sits pompously on the Human Rights Council as the rights of Uyghurs and Hong Kongers are rendered in the past tense. China is poised to begin dictating terms at the WHO. At the same time, the UN faces competition as a forum for diplomacy from regional groups such as the EU, Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the African Union.
The UN has fallen far since George Bush felt so optimistic after Saddam Hussein was evicted from Kuwait in 1991 with Security Council approval that he proclaimed a “New World Order”. Now, the UN is cash-strapped, laying off staff and halting investigations into human rights abuses. And more importantly, its voice is ignored in the great power politics defining diplomacy.
The biggest news of the day did not come from the General Assembly Hall. That honour went to a social media post from Trump declaring that Ukraine had the ability to push Russia back to the pre-war borders and “who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Donald Trump is an orchestra of one.
Inis quipped that you could say the secretary-general is the general in command of the First UN and a secretary of the Second UN. Now, António Guterres is a general without an army and a secretary left outside the meeting room.
[Further reading: Why Kamala Harris lost]
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