Donald Trump took the stage at the United Nations general assembly hall for the first time in six years to launch a full-on assault on the world body, which he described as a feckless, corrupt and pernicious global force that should follow the example of his own leadership.
In an inflammatory speech on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Trump called for countries to close their borders and expel foreigners, accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda”, and told national leaders that the world body was “funding an assault on your countries”.
“It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” he said in a headline speech to world leaders and visiting delegations in the grand general assembly hall in midtown Manhattan. “You have to end it now … Your countries are going to hell.”
Directly addressing European leaders in contentious terms, he accused them of “destroying your heritage” and of allowing international migration because of misplaced “political correctness”.
Trump also attacked green energy initiatives as redistributing manufacturing power from the developed world to “polluting countries that break the rules and are making a fortune”.
“Your countries are being ruined,” he also said, pointing to UN programs that he claimed provide food, shelter and debit cards to fund immigrant journeys to the United States. “The UN is funding an assault on western countries.”
In many ways, the speech was an appeal to European leaders to embrace a blood-and-soil nationalism in which Trump laid out the recent US assault on immigration as a model for the world to follow.
“If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “I’m the president of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe, I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration, that double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.”
Trump also singled out Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital, saying: “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can’t do that.”
Repeating a dubious claim that he had ended seven wars during his eight-month administration, Trump said that the United Nations had only offered “empty words” and had not helped him “finalize” the negotiations.
“The UN has such tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” he said. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action.”
Denouncing the Paris climate agreement that he abandoned during his first term, Trump called climate change a “con job” and ridiculed renewable energy sources like wind farms as a product of a “green energy agenda” that has brought countries to the “brink of destruction”.
“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion, climate change,” he said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”
“Immigration and the high cost of so-called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet,” he said. “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Turning to international diplomacy, Trump repeated an offer to levy heavy tariffs on Russia in order to end its invasion of Ukraine, but said that European countries would first have to cease buying Russian energy products.
“Inexcusably, even Nato countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which I found out about two weeks ago, and I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Think of it – they’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
‘A moment of paradox’
After the speech, French president Emmanuel Macron mounted a defence of the current international order, saying the UN’s “harshest critics are also those that want to change the rule of the game, because they want to exert domination”.
“That is the major risk of our time … a risk of seeing the survival of the fittest. It is the risk of seeing the selfishness of a few prevail,” he said.
(The Guardian)
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