Patrick Wintour critiques Trump’s UN speech, suggesting that the world can no longer look to the US for strong leadership. Discover the anal...
Patrick Wintour critiques Trump’s UN speech, suggesting that the world can no longer look to the US for strong leadership. Discover the analysis of his speech The US president's speech made fun of UN values and showed how important it is to build strong coalitions against Trump.
Donald Trump and the US economy have such a strong pull that the politics of the other 192 countries in the United Nations are quickly becoming one big discussion about how to deal with and fight this president, which is getting stranger and darker by the day.
Before Trump's amazing 58-minute speech on how open borders, sharia law, the UN's problems, and the "climate hoax" were all threats, people who supported the UN's values realized they had a problem. Now they realize how far the world's superpower seems to be willing to go to destroy everything they believe in.
After the astonished and even humiliated UN delegates got over Trump's speech, the presidents of two big Muslim countries, Indonesia's president Prabowo Subianto and Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spoke to the general assembly. When Subianto said, "Might cannot be right; right must be right," the audience gave him a lot of applause. No one country can bully all of the people in the world. We may be powerless on our own, but the feeling of being oppressed and wronged will bring us together as a tremendous force that will fight against this wrong. Erdoğan said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was utterly out of control and that anyone who didn't speak up against his violence was just as bad.And right before Trump's speech, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave a smart warning about the threat presented by the new authoritarians without mentioning the US. "The ideas that drove the UN's founders in San Francisco are more at risk today than they have ever been. Multilateralism is reaching a new turning point. This organization doesn't have too much power. We are seeing the formation of a global order that is defined by recurring compromises to power play. Attacks on sovereignty, random punishments, and one-sided interventions are becoming the norm.
"There is a clear link between the crisis of multilateralism and the decline of democracy." When the international community fails to protect peace and sovereignty, we make authoritarianism stronger by not doing anything about random atrocities. Anti-democratic groups are striving to take over institutions and limit people's freedoms. They love money. "They praise ignorance, act as physical and digital militias, and limit the press," Lula stated.
Lee Jae Myung, the president of South Korea, and others said that the climate problem was not a hoax and that it posed a threat to all of humanity.
But the Trump address made the question of how the world will work without dependable American leadership even more clear and urgent.
Not only the global south, but also Europe as it deals with Russia, Asia as it deals with China's influence, and the Gulf as it deals with Israel's military power. One answer is the group of dictators that came together in Beijing at the start of the month, led by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
But there is also the anti-Trump alliance that is still coming together, driven by Democratic leaders. This is happening outside of the UN because, in actuality, the UN is being ignored since the veto of opposing power blocks has made it impossible for the UN to work, and the US has stopped funding it.
The US president's assertion that he ended seven "unendable wars" without any aid from the UN is ridiculous. However, it is true that the UN security council can no longer end hostilities. Lula said, "The tyranny of the veto goes against the very reason for the UN's existence."
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, spoke about how important the UN is and how it needs to stay that way. He did, however, say that the pillars of peace and prosperity were cracking and that multilateralism was suffering. He remarked, "Multipolarity without effective multilateral institutions leads to chaos, as Europe learned the hard way in World War I."
He kept saying "we must never give up" to soothe himself by the end of his speech.
But the work to build a strong anti-Trump alliance between the global south and Europe has been hurt by the idea of double standards: the idea that Europe is angry about Russia's invasion of Ukraine but not about Israel's destruction of Gaza.
On Monday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez spoke to 500 Columbia University students and told his fellow Europeans again and over how damaging the double standards claim had been to their reputation.
In fact, Sánchez is quickly becoming the European leader who is most willing to stand up to Trump. He got a lot of applause at Columbia when he talked about the good things about migration and added, "Open societies are the best antidote to fanaticism." These words were especially relevant because Trump was trying to stop the protests on the Columbia campus.
He went on to say, "When a society's voice is silenced, it dies." Words are what make open societies work. The right to speak your mind, believe what you choose, and take part in public life gives people power. "Opening the door to tyranny means losing the right to disagree."Sánchez is also one of the top politicians trying to build alliances to stand up to Trump. On Wednesday, he met with Lula and Chile's Gabriel Boric to form an alliance called In Defense of Democracy. This group focuses on issues like strengthening multilateralism, the rule of law, and working together to fight extremism and the algorithms that weaken social cohesion.
But these worldwide alliances are still new and not very well organized.
The bigger risk is that each country will decide how to fight or give in to American influence based on their own politics and how strong their economy is.
Each country will know how strong Trump's shakedown diplomacy is when they make that choice. Trump gets the most out of his negotiations by combining trade, security, and immigration into one deal. No matter how much people hate him, it takes a brave country to stand up to him.