All eyes on Trump at UN
US PRESIDENT HAS A CHANCE TO PRESENT HIS VISION AND STRATEGY
United States president has a chance to present his vision and strategy |
Every year, the US President heads to New York to welcome world leaders to the United Nations General Assembly. He gives a speech and meets with an endless string of foreign potentates to discuss a dizzying array of complicated, often intractable issues.
The days are “kind of like speed dating from hell”, as one analyst put it, and the evenings are “the world’s most tedious cocktail party”. In other words, not exactly President Donald Trump’s favoured format.
Unusual leader
But when Trump attends the first UN session of his presidency today, all eyes will be on him as counterparts from around the globe crane their necks and slide through the crowd to snatch a handshake — and, in the process, try to figure out this most unusual of American leaders. “The world is still trying to take the measure of this president,” said Jon B. Alterman, a senior vice-president at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and author of the speeddating analogy. “For a number of leaders, this is going to be their first chance to see him, to judge him, to try to get on his good side.”
In some places, there has been an instinct to dismiss Trump as a bombastic, Twitterobsessed political and diplomatic neophyte.
“But the fact is you can’t write off the American President,” Alterman said.
One of Trump’s primary tasks will be to define how his America-first approach, which has led him to pull out of international agreements on free trade and climate change, fits into the world-first mission of the United Nations.
His challenge is “to describe the Trump Doctrine on US global leadership and engagement,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, ambassador to the UN under President George W. Bush. “The perception in many parts of the world, including the UN, is that President Trump is unilateralist and isolationist. Trump has the opportunity to present and describe his vision and strategy. The world will be all ears.”
Trump arrives in New York at a time of crackling tension over North Korea’s provocative actions and deep uncertainty about what he will do with President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. While foreign leaders once feared that an erratic American presidency was taking shape, they have been reassured, to some extent, that Trump is settling into a somewhat more conventional foreign policy than many had anticipated, analysts said.
The President has not launched an all-out trade war with China, ripped up the Iran deal or the North American Free Trade Agreement, or moved the US Embassy in Israel to Oc-
cupied Jerusalem, at least not yet. He has belatedly reaffirmed support for Nato and agreed to send more troops to Afghanistan. “But America’s friends still see dysfunctionality at the heart of the Trump administration, as key advisers come and go through the revolving door,” said Peter Westmacott, a former British ambassador to Washington. “They remain disheartened by Trump’s announcements on climate change and trade policy.” And “they fear that the fighting talk of this impulsive president could make things worse rather than better on the Korean Peninsula”.