The founders of the United Nations must be rolling in their graves. This venerable world institution, now celebrating its 80th birthday, was born of the ideal that conflicts could be settled by dialogue rather than by force. The US was central to the UN’s founding, but on Tuesday its delegates were treated to a speech by an American president that should be cited in a future thesaurus as the opposite of “diplomacy”.
Donald Trump’s rambling monologue was a mixture of outright falsehoods, petty grievances and hectoring. He said he had personally ended seven wars – though it’s far from clear which seven they were. He railed against the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, denying the man-made warming of the planet that threatens the survival of our species. He even criticised the UN for having previously declined his bid to renovate its headquarters back when he was just a property developer.
Trump did not open a dialogue, he basically told world leaders to shut up and listen to him. It was as though he were claiming that everyone should follow his lead because “I’m really good at this stuff” – except those were his exact words. “Your countries are going to hell,” he told European leaders, whom he claimed were failing to adequately check migration.
The pugnacious and improvisational style of Trump’s presentation, which we have come to expect, is truly one of a kind. This is after all the same man who earlier this week at the funeral of Charlie Kirk contradicted a grieving widow to insist that “I hate my opponent.”
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But though his remarks and tone were extraordinary, the content of Trump’s UN remarks reflect the broader Maga movement. Maga has seen the triumph of an “America First” foreign policy with deep roots in the American Right. This current of thought rejects any American responsibility for world peace and order, instead asserting the US power to act unilaterally as it sees fit. It traces back to the America First movement that sought to keep the US out of the second World War, led by aviator and a man often thought of as a Nazi sympathiser, Charles Lindbergh. During the Cold War years, America First took a back seat to the necessity of defeating Communism. But since the Cold War ended, it has once again reared its ugly head.
The United Nations has long been a bugaboo for America Firsters. At its inception, they criticised it as a form of “world government” that would compromise US sovereignty. The voice the UN gave to the decolonised nations of Africa and Asia, and the anti-racist stands it took (for example, against apartheid in South Africa) earned it the scorn of white supremacists. Rightwing Protestants saw it as ungodly. In the bestselling Left Behind novels of evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye, the former head of the UN is the literal Antichrist.
‘Trump’s speech can be seen as a kind of unintentional parody of the contempt with which previous US leaders have treated the UN and world opinion’
Yet it is not just the American right that has undermined the UN. The five nations of the Security Council were given a veto power, designed to restrain the institution’s democratic principles. The US has frequently used its power to veto policies that practically all other nations support – especially in the case of Israel/Palestine. And Trump is hardly the first US president to fail to honour the nation’s financial commitment to the body.
Trump’s speech can be seen as a kind of unintentional parody of the contempt with which previous US leaders have treated the UN and world opinion. Who could forget the notorious 2003 speech that US secretary of state Collin Powell gave to the Security Council on the eve of the Iraq War, seeking support for a destructive, illegal and unnecessary war that the US had already decided to wage? Powell humiliated himself by offering false evidence of Iraqi programmes of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda that failed to convince most world leaders.
But scorn for the UN and its principles has not just come from Republicans. Former US president Joe Biden spoke of defending democracies worldwide and of rebuilding multilateral relationships after the first Trump administration. And in some cases he did so. But he prevented the UN from stopping the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Four times under Biden’s watch, the US vetoed ceasefire resolutions. And Biden ignored a ruling by the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the UN, that Israel was committing a probable genocide against the Palestinian people.
One thing Trump said in his speech was certainly true: the UN is an often ineffective institution offering mere “empty words”. But the principal reason why the UN’s power has been so limited has been because the US wants it that way. What Trump has made clear is that those who hope for a world based on the principles of dialogue, democracy and peace cannot look to the US for hope, if ever they once should have.
Fortunately, there are some in the world who still voice support for those principles. One of them is Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who addressed the UN just before Trump. Lula said: “All around the world, anti-democratic forces are trying to subjugate institutions and suffocate freedoms. They worship violence, glorify ignorance, act as physical and digital militias, and restrict the press.” If the ideals of the UN are to survive this century, then the vision of Lula must triumph over the destructive megalomania of Trump.
Dr Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor of US history at Trinity College Dublin
