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Not the most agile gymnast.
Photo: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images
Trump has a difficult balance to break through this week – both in his speech to the UN General Assembly and at the Security Council meeting he will chair – balancing his vision of US nationalism against the need to cooperate with the allies goals. Even before his appointment to the Supreme Court became a national nightmare, President Trump's overarching goal in New York was to strengthen his position with his main supporters. It will do so by playing with a well-fed fear in the right – that the UN will come to replace its cherished local lifestyle with a multicultural global socialist dictatorship, supplemented by black helicopters and brainwashing.
That's why the White House told everyone who would listen that the theme of the President's speech on Tuesday would be the sovereignty of America – not just everything that's going on not only within its borders, but also for its citizens and its economic interests. The history of the United Nations, which has been going on for more than 70 years, is of course based on the idea that nations could use their sovereignty to accept common standards, ranging from mailing rules to nuclear bans, child labor and rape. The size of the US economy and the size of its military around the world are simply unimaginable – for better or for worse – without a series of agreements that have allowed Washington to exert tremendous pressure on other countries.
Although the United States' adoption of the common rules has been at best inconsistent over the decades, Americans and others have made great strides in rights and living conditions around the world. talk about what shared experiences offer.
On the other hand, Trump's bet – and it has been consistent since the 1970s – is that the commitment to a common set of rules can be replaced by a series of one-off transactions, in which the United States renounces less. and gets more. His vision last year at the UN, Warsaw and South-East Asia, replaces rule-based international institutions with cooperating countries to secure their own sovereignty. It also replaces the slow progress of the international community towards standards that treat people equally, no matter who and where they are, with the right of a dominant culture to decide for itself who may belong and what are the rights of minorities. It is here that national racism, nativism and sexism, unleashed in recent years in the United States, respond to a strong international strategy.
But the UN is not just about a speech-making forum, and we'll see several examples of how Trump's worldview is coming to fruition.
Unlike last year, President Trump now has national security assistants who are familiar with the UN and pursue their own ambitions. Its national security adviser, John Bolton, the famous ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, seems to regard the United Nations as a threat to the United States, along with Russia, China or Al Qaeda. When he does not deliver a teenager speech announcing that the International Criminal Court of the United Nations is "dead for us" – a grotesque commentary on an organ charged with prosecuting mass murders and most serious war crimes – out of the US budget ..
Unfortunately, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is trying to advance policies on North Korea and Iran that require the cooperation of other major United Nations nations. The Administration attempted to maintain decades of international pressure on Pyongyang while opening its dialogue with the North at the Trump Singapore Summit earlier this year. However, Pompeo's continued calls for the North to take the first steps towards denuclearization are now out of sync, not only with China, which has returned to allow trade and essential fuel to cross the border, but also with our southern allies -coréens. which last week called for a declaration ending the Korean War in exchange for North Korea's promise to shut down a nuclear facility in the presence of international experts. US administration experts have long preferred any declaration, let alone a peace treaty, as a price to be given after the North has taken concrete steps to disarm not just the facilities but the existing weapons.
Some, this columnist among them, thought that UN meetings this year could serve as a backdrop to a second Trump-Kim summit – and Trump told reporters this morning that the announcement of another summit would be coming soon. take place. However, what is being exposed this week is the growing rapprochement between North and South, and Kim's efforts to divide Trump from Pompeo and other US officials demanding real progress on disarmament. It is Kim's bad luck that Kavanagh's embarrassment probably means that few people in the United States will notice. But many Asians will notice that being an ally of the United States does not count for what it once did, and that Washington's much touted political apparatus can not follow the thirty-year-old leader of a country of the size of Mississippi.
Iran is closely monitoring the situation in North Korea. Secretary of State Pompeo and his allies have attempted to devise a repressive Iranian policy for a republican administration: to return the agreement negotiated by a Democratic predecessor to freeze and roll back the Iranian nuclear program and restore sanctions crippling international relations imposed on Iran. oil exports and demand a "better" deal that would counter not only Iran's nuclear ambitions, but also its support for extremist groups and its regional ambitions.
This policy is unlikely to work if major oil importers, such as India and China, do not agree to cut their purchases from Iran. Sanctions that make it difficult to use the US currency to buy or sell Iranian products will come into effect in November. Plans originally announced by the President to chair a Security Council session on Iran on Wednesday made sense. If you thought that the President would make a positive and persuasive case that would convince not only the leaders, but also their audiences, to sacrifice not only cheaper oil but a little national sovereignty to the demands of the United States.
The main demand of US policy on Iran is that key allies and partners sacrifice some of their own sovereignty … while insisting that US sovereignty is inviolable. How and if Trump can reconcile this circle is the game of the week.
