Trump’s “wild-eyed” speech to the United Nations

United Nations delegates were aghast: never before has Twitter carried so many murmurings of “holy shit!” in so many different languages. Donald Trump’s maiden speech to the UN General Assembly last week was, safe to say, unlike any other given before in that venue by a US president, said Rich Lowry in National Review. Trump pulled no punches. He referred to Kim Jong Un mockingly as “Rocket Man” and warned that if North Korea threatened America or its allies, the US might have no choice but to “totally destroy” the country. He all but announced the abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal, denouncing it as an “embarrassment”. And he launched “excoriating” attacks on the political and economic systems of Cuba, Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

It used to be international “pariahs” such as the Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who spouted “hateful nonsense” at the UN, said Ryu Spaeth in the New Republic. Now it’s the US president. If Americans ever wondered what it’s like “to be represented by a wild-eyed megalomaniac”, now we know. Trump’s tone was certainly “bombastic”, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post, but look past the “rhetorical overkill” and this was a fairly “conventional” speech. Trump essentially spoke up for human rights and democracy, criticised rogue regimes, and restated the existing US policy of nuclear deterrence. At its core, this was a speech that any recent US president could have delivered.

Well, I can’t imagine Harry Truman delivering it, said Max Boot in USA Today. When he addressed the conference that founded the UN in 1945, his message was “pretty much the opposite” of Trump’s. Truman warned UN members not to use their power “selfishly” but for the greater good. Trump, by contrast, sang the praises of “national sovereignty”, while threatening war and warning that “major portions of the world… are going to hell”. The president may think that his crude threats and “swaggering” won respect for the US, but they had the opposite effect (North Korea’s foreign minister dismissed Trump’s speech as “the sound of a dog barking”). Truman, who dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, was “clearly not afraid to stand up to America’s enemies. But he did not believe in empty threats, and he knew the importance of alliances.” Trump’s speech must have left Truman turning in his grave.