RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his speech to the United Nations, President Trump very successfully met the political and intellectual challenge he faced. He reminded the delegates that the United Nations was never meant to be a gigantic bureaucracy that would steadily become a world government. Rather, he said, it is an association of sovereign states whose strength depends “on the independent strength of its members.” Its success, he argued, depends on their success at governing well as “strong, sovereign, and independent nations.”

Trump cleverly turned patriotism — love of one’s own country, and what he called the necessary basis for sacrifice and “all that is best in the human spirit” — into the basis for international cooperation to solve problems that nations must face together. “The true question,” he said, is “are we still patriots?” If we are, we can work together for “a future of dignity and peace for the people of this wonderful Earth.” This was a useful, principled, and accurate reminder that the nation-state (a term he used) remains the key to world politics, and that successful nation-states will be the key to addressing the world’s challenges.

The speech added to this line of thinking several Trumpian touches that must be applauded — and others that served at least to wake up his audience. He said, for example, that “the problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented.” That has to count as one of the nicest lines ever delivered in that General Assembly chamber. He noted that “major portions of the world are in conflict, and some in fact are going to hell.” One assumes he added the latter phrase to the written text — and it was pure Trump. He carefully distinguished between the vicious and corrupt regime in Iran, “whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos,” and “the good people of Iran,” adding that “Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most” after only “the vast military power of the United States.” On North Korea, he delivered the line that may be the most quoted: He said of Kim Jong-un that “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” and told the delegates that if Kim attacks the United States, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

What did Trump not talk about? The Israeli–Palestinian conflict. At times that problem was the central item in President Obama’s speeches to the U.N., so its absence in Trump’s first address to the General Assembly was very striking. He wants to get a deal done, as he reiterated when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, but he realizes that the conflict is not central to world politics or even to stability and peace in the Middle East. So it had no place in this text.

Trump’s criticism of the United Nations was clear, hitting everything from the hypocrisy of allowing tyrannical regimes to serve as members of the Human Rights Council to its bloated bureaucracy, but every criticism was combined with a call for improvement and a pledge of cooperation. He held out the picture of a better U.N. able to confront and solve many of the world’s problems.

Donald Trump on Tuesday confirmed yet again why he is the most robust president since Ronald Reagan. Following up on his brilliant speeches before a joint session of Congress in February, his speech about combating Islamic terrorism before Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, and his splendid defense of Western civilizational values in Warsaw a few months ago, Trump addressed the United Nations and articulated for the 150 delegates at that ostentatiously corrupt institution the signal lesson of successful international relations: that freedom within nations, and comity among them, is best served not by the effacement or attenuation of national sovereignty but its frank and manly embrace.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/19/trumps-un-speech-triumph/

“Sovereignty,” indeed, was the master word of Trump’s address. The word and its cognates occur 21 times in the 4,300-word talk, centrally in conjunction with the core Trumpian ideal of “principled realism.”

“We are guided,” Trump explained, “by outcomes, not ideology. We have a policy of principled realism, rooted in shared goals, interests, and values.”

The United Nations has in recent decades become a poster child for bureaucratic despond: corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient. It has also evolved into a megaphone for anti-American, left-wing sentiment, often hiding behind utopian world-government rhetoric.

This development, Trump reminded his listeners, is a blunt betrayal of the noble aspirations that formed the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II. Trump quoted Harry Truman, who stressed that the success of the United Nations depended on the “independent strength of its members.” The United Nations was not created to subvert national sovereignty but to help guarantee it.

One of the most refreshing things about Trump’s address—it is characteristic of his speeches—was his frankness. At the U.N., this had a positive as well as a critical side. On the positive side, I found it a breath of fresh air to hear an American president celebrate the achievements of America.

“The United States of America,” Trump said, “has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.” This is the simple truth, but I do not recall hearing such sentiments from the White House in recent years.

On the critical side, Trump was equally forthright. He affirmed his intention to battle threats to sovereignty from “the Ukraine to the South China Sea.” He roundly castigated the handful of “depraved” rogue regimes that not only terrorize their own people but threaten world peace. They violate, he noted, every principle upon which the U.N. was founded. In one the speech’s two most memorable moments, he called out the deplorable regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea. The patience of the United States, Trump noted, is great, but it is not infinite.

If North Korea persists in its policy of nuclear blackmail, Trump explained, the United States “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” He continued: “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.” I could almost hear tongues clucking at the New York Times and the Washington Post, as much for the contemptuous nickname as for the threat of military force. But I liked it, just as I liked his robust calling-a-spade-a-spade moment with respect to the criminal regime of Iran, one of the world’s most ostentatious enablers of terrorism.

But Trump’s comments about North Korea and Iran were not only a declaration of resolve. They were also a challenge to the United Nations, the forum in which rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea ought to be brought to heel. The United States would step up to the plate by itself if necessary. But, Trump said, it would be better if the United Nations address the outliers. “If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few,” Trump said in another memorable line, “then evil will triumph.”

President Donald Trump came to the United Nations this week as the “representative of the American people,” not as the “global citizen” that Barack Obama had portrayed himself to be. To paraphrase William Shakespeare, when Obama asked his global audiences to lend him their ears, he came to bury America under a heap of apologies for its alleged past misdeeds, not to praise his home country. President Trump could not have presented a starker contrast. He praised the U.S. Constitution, called out the miserable failures of socialism and confronted the totalitarian enemies of the United States, singling out radical Islamic terrorists and the rogue authoritarian regimes of North Korea, Iran and socialist Venezuela with a moral clarity reminiscent of former President Ronald Reagan.

During his inaugural visit to UN headquarters in New York for the annual convocation of world leaders, Trump delivered two speeches and held a series of high level bilateral meetings. His first speech, delivered at an event Monday on UN reform hosted by the United States, focused on the need for significant management reform at the UN. Trump criticized the UN for its bloated bureaucracy and mismanagement, while not producing results in line with the sharp increase in the UN budget, which is disproportionately funded by the United States. However, he included in his remarks some praise for the UN’s disaster relief efforts, its feeding of the hungry and UN Secretary General António Guterres’ own UN reform initiatives.

Trump’s second speech on Tuesday, delivered on the opening day of the General Assembly’s world leaders’ debate, was much tougher in tone. It focused on his notion of “principled realism” in international relations, balancing effective multilateralism to combat problems of global concern with the primacy of national sovereignty. The U.S. president explained his “American First” principles in some detail and put the rogue nations of North Korea, Iran and Venezuela on notice that their misdeeds would have serious consequences.

A globalist appeaser is clearly no longer in the White House.

“Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens — to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. I will always put America first — just like you — as the leaders of your countries will always — and should — always put your countries first,” the president declared. The success of the UN, he said, depends on the “independent strength” of its member states, built on each nation’s respect for the interests of its own people and for the rights of every other sovereign nation. “All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition,” he added.

America would do its fair share, continuing to “lead the world in humanitarian assistance,” the president assured the assembled dignitaries, and to shoulder the burden to protect freedom and security around the world without territorial ambitions. However, under his watch, President Trump would no longer allow the United States to be taken advantage of or enter into “a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return.” This was not music to the ears of the self-important foreign leaders in attendance who have gotten used to exploiting UN globalist institutions on the US’s dime, while using forums provided by the UN to slander the United States and Israel.

Obama certainly won the popularity contest when he strutted onto the world stage year after year during his presidency to deliver his encomiums to global governance and to place the United States at the same level as all the other 192 member states of the United Nations, no matter how authoritarian they were or how little they contributed to the budget of the UN. Obama was treated like a celebrity, his speeches punctuated by frequent outbursts of rapturous applause. President Trump, on the other hand, came across during his General Assembly speech as the serious teacher, seeking to bring some sense and discipline to what he once referred to as “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.” The president reminded his audience of America’s unparalleled economic and military strength, rather than apologize for it as Obama so often did in front of foreign audiences.

Of particular note, Obama used his global platform at the UN General Assembly in 2012 to shamelessly declare that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Obama had more concern for the Islamists offended by an obscure anti-Muslim video than he did for the victims of terrorism. He refused to acknowledge the ideology that inspires and sanctions Jihad. President Trump, in contrast, used his global platform at the UN General Assembly to categorically declare that the United States “will stop radical Islamic terrorism because we cannot allow it to tear up our nation, and indeed to tear up the entire world.” The world must rally against “Islamist extremism,” he said, not wish it away or make excuses for it. In other words, the president named and labeled the ideology and movement now waging war on the Western world.