President Trump at a UN General Assembly luncheon, September 2019. The essayist writes that the approach of Trump to the UN in his second term is that he “appears ready to divvy the entire globe into three spheres of influence: Asia for China; Eurasia for Russia; the Northern and Southern Hemispheres for the US.” LI MUZI/XINHUA POOL PHOTO
President Donald Trump’s blustering approach to the world in his first three months in office has set off growing apprehensions in Turtle Bay on how he will deal with the United Nations. From his on-again-off-again tariffs to his public chastising of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to his imperial threats against neighboring states to his praise of President Vladimir Putin and his open disdain for Europe and NATO, what can the organization itself expect from Trump?
In his first term, it should be noted, Trump maintained a fairly stable, if still sometimes turbulent, relationship with the UN, ostensibly, it seems, because he could both impose sanctions on countries he did not like, especially Iran, Venezuela and North Korea, while he could also denounce globalism and accords like the Iranian nuclear deal. But, since those days, he seems to have hardened his principles about world affairs. Four Trump tenets stand out today:
First, power politics in the world are the sole attributes that count in his mind. Trump regards Russia and China as the strongest states on the planet, so they are the only nations that he takes seriously. Indeed, he appears ready to divvy the entire globe into three spheres of influence: Asia for China; Eurasia for Russia; the Northern and Southern Hemispheres for the US. For him, that’s the real-world order. That approach, of course, willfully discounts the role of multilateralism and collective security in international affairs. But, for Trump, only unilateralism and transactional deal-making truly hold any cachet. So, for him, the UN is essentially a sideline organization, except for its ability to institute sanctions.
Second, Trump’s well-publicized “America First” doctrine seems to be primarily based on his unimpeded exercise of executive authority. Such dominance allows him, in open defiance of the UN Charter, to talk publicly about seizing Greenland, sending US troops back to the Panama Canal, making Canada the 51st state, taking over Gaza for America’s tourism industry and installing multiple tariffs on foreign nations. Trump’s champion in this regard turns out to be the 19th-century American president, William McKinley, who was well known for expanding the territorial size of the US via the occupations of the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, Guam and Puerto Rico and, at the same time, using tariffs to supposedly grow prosperity — a goal that produced only mixed results.
Third, anything President Joe Biden may have done or approved of regarding overseas programs, in Trump’s view, must be repudiated. Trump has never forgiven Biden for the latter’s victory over him in the 2020 presidential race. Consequently, he has spent an inordinate amount of his time seeking to prove that his loss was due to electoral “rigging.” That grievance has led Trump to spitefully reverse, on grounds of waste and corruption, Biden’s support of the World Health Organization, the UN’s Human Rights Council, UNRWA, the Paris Climate Agreement and USAID, whose funding cuts alone, among other things, have precipitated mass layoffs of workers in the critical UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office, almost 40 percent of whose budget is covered by the US agency. Trump is also considering re-evaluating every international treaty that the US has ever signed through a litmus test that will determine whether the accords are, in his opinion, anti-American, socialist or totalitarian.
The UN, beware!!
Fourth, foreign policy for Trump also has its strategic uses. It allows him, at times, to follow the tried-and-true practices of demagogues to initiate global crises to deflect attention from his domestic woes. Just last week, Washington bombed the Houthis in Yemen despite that they had stopped attacking shipping in the Red Sea during the Gaza cease-fire. This gave Trump a temporary reprieve from difficult economic times at home, where he has so far done little or nothing to lower grocery prices, which he promised to do on his first day in office.
These four guideposts will undoubtedly inform the work of Trump’s ambassador to the UN, whomever that eventually might be. His original nominee, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), notable for her extreme fealty to Trump, would have followed his dictates faithfully. However, she had to withdraw because the Republicans desperately needed her vote to pass bills in the House of Representatives due to the party’s slim margin there. A reliable Trumpist ally will surely follow.
For all of Trump’s dismissiveness toward the UN, what remains puzzling, though, are his own public remarks about the organization. In comments he made to reporters on Feb. 4, he asserted the UN has “great potential” and “we’ll continue to go along with it, but they got to get their act together” — whatever that may mean. He added that it’s “not being well run . . . and they’re not doing the job.” Trump may have been referring to the fact that, despite America’s enormous role in the body, he can’t count on it.
So far, though, Trump has not taken the path that some members of his own party are considering, namely threatening to withhold funding to the UN or insisting on outright withdrawal from the institution. My guess is that he wants to maintain a presence in the body, if only to counterbalance Russia and China. Still, as a man infamous for changing his mind, he remains hard to read on the UN’s future.
Stephen Schlesinger
Stephen Schlesinger is the author of three books, including “Act of Creation: The Founding of The United Nations,” which won the 2004 Harry S. Truman Book Award. He is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York City and the former director of the World Policy Institute at the New School (1997-2006) and former publisher of the quarterly magazine, The World Policy Journal. In the 1970s, he edited and published The New Democrat Magazine; was a speechwriter for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern; and later was the weekly columnist for The Boston Globe’s “The L’t’ry Life.” He wrote, with Stephen Kinzer, “Bitter Fruit,” a book about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala.
Thereafter, he spent four years as a staff writer at Time Magazine. For 12 years, he served as New York State Governor Mario Cuomo’s speechwriter and foreign policy adviser. In the mid 1990s, Schlesinger worked at the United Nations at Habitat, the agency dealing with cities.
Schlesinger received his B.A. from Harvard University, a certificate of study from Cambridge University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He lives in New York City.