UNsteady on the stage
At the United Nations Tuesday, Donald Trump was right to call out two rogue regimes that threaten the world. Beyond that, his speech devolved into a dangerously contradictory muddle, punctuated by one egregiously offensive idea. Ignore the hue and cry over Trump’s admittedly impolitic use of “Rocket Man” to describe North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. And his statement that, if Kim attacks America or its allies, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
A threat of overwhelming retaliation in answer to Kim’s use of nuclear weapons is legitimate.
And kudos to the President for calling on Pyongyang’s trade partners to sever ties and deepen its isolation. There’s a chance, albeit remote, that the economic walls closing in will accomplish what decades of sporadic engagement could not.
Trump also deserves credit for bluntly blasting an Iranian regime that is destabilizing its neighbors and arming Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists who kill innocents in Israel.
But these two rhetorical strikes were tied down by a speech that utterly failed to outline a coherent Trumpian vision for international relations.
Trump sought to enshrine sovereignty and respect for borders as among his, and the UN’s, highest values, and signaled a new realism rooted in respect for undemocratic forms of government.
“We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example,” he said.
Perhaps that was a signal that he will leave alone, say, the human-rights-abusing dictatorship of Saudi Arabia; or the repressive Chinese regime, which stifles basic rights; or the government of Vladimir Putin in Russia, which kills journalists.
But it clanged loudly against Trump’s condemnation, in the very same speech, of a Venezuelan government that, according to the President, might be subject to aggressive intervention for showing overzealous commitment to socialism.
And it contradicted his pledge to keep in place economic sanctions against Cuba on human rights and ideological grounds.
Nor did a President who held up the sanctity of national sovereignty as a core tenet of an emerging global order bother, in even a sentence, to criticize Russia’s persistent attempts to meddle in other nations’ elections, including our own.
It was in urging nations to handle their own refugee crises that Trump verged into morally indefensible territory.
“We have learned that over the long term, uncontrolled migration is deeply unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries,” he said. “For the sending countries, it reduces domestic pressure to pursue needed political and economic reform and drains them of the human capital necessary to motivate and implement those reforms.”
Which is to assert that the estimated 5 million men, women and children who left Syria as Bashar Assad ripped cities apart in a bloody civil war were doing a disservice to the nation they fled by not staying and, presumably, joining town councils.
One shudders to apply this standard to the Jews who fled Europe en masse in the 20th century.
Such are the moral contortions Trump is prepared to engage in to justify closing America’s doors to those in deepest need.