Meet world leaders, in hypocrisy

Leaders from around the world have descended on New York for United Nations meetings, fancy parties, ringing speeches about helping the poor — and a big dose of hypocrisy. And — finally! — this is one area where President Donald Trump has shown global leadership.

If there were an award for United Nations chutzpah, the competition would be tough, but the medal might go to Mr Trump for warning that if necessary, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea”. There were gasps in the hall: A forum for peace was used to threaten to annihilate a nation of 25 million people.

There also was Mr Trump’s praise for American humanitarian aid to Yemen. Patting oneself on the back is often oafish, but in this case it was also offensive. Yemen needs aid because the US is helping Saudi Arabia starve and bomb Yemeni civilians, creating what the UN says is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. In other words, we are helping to create the very disaster that we’re boasting about alleviating.

It was also sad to see Mr Trump repeatedly plug “sovereignty”, which tends to be the favoured word of governments like Russia (even as it invades Ukraine and interferes in the US election) and China (as it supports corrupt autocrats from Zimbabwe to Myanmar).

Speaking of Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi skipped the UN meeting, after being feted last year, because it’s awkward to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner who defends a brutal campaign of murder, rape and pillage. Many Muslim leaders in attendance, like Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did highlight the plight of the Rohingya suffering an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. If only they were as interested in their own political prisoners!

Meanwhile, world leaders usually ignore places that don’t fit their narratives. Everybody pretty much shrugged at South Sudan and Burundi, both teetering on the edge of genocide; at Congo, where we’re headed for civil strife as the president attempts to cling to power; and at the “four famines”: in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan. To Mr Trump’s credit, he expressed concern on Wednesday about South Sudan and Congo and said he would dispatch UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to the region to see what can be done.

In fairness, there are broader reasons for hope, including astonishing progress against global poverty — more than 100 million children’s lives saved since 1990. For the first time in human history, less than 10% of the world’s population is living in extreme poverty, and we probably could virtually eliminate it over the next 15 years if it were a top global priority.

The progress on stopping human trafficking is also inspiring. I moderated a UN session on the topic, and it was heartening to see an overflow crowd engaging in a historically obscure subject, even as a new report calculated that there are 40 million people who may be called modern slaves. Prime Minister Theresa May convened perhaps the largest meeting of foreign ministers ever on human trafficking.

We now have the tools to achieve enormous progress against these common enemies of humanity — poverty, disease, slavery — but it’s not clear we have the will. What’s striking about this moment is that we have perhaps the worst refugee crisis in 70 years, overlapping with the worst food crisis in 70 years, overlapping with risks of genocide in several countries — and anaemic global leadership.

“There is a vacuum of leadership — moral and political — when it comes to the world’s trouble spots, from Syria to Yemen to Myanmar and beyond,” notes David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee. Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s foreign minister, agrees: “There’s a leadership vacuum.”

There are exceptions: Ms Wallstrom, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and more.

But many countries are divided at home, distracted by political combat and looking increasingly inward, and in any case, the US remains the indispensable superpower, and it is Awol.

The number that I always find most daunting is this: About one child in four on this planet is physically stunted from malnutrition. And while it is the physical stunting that we can measure, a side effect is a stunting of brain development, holding these children back, holding nations back, holding humanity back.

It’s maddening to see world leaders posturing in the spotlight and patting themselves on the back while doing so little to tackle humanitarian crises that they themselves have helped create. @

Nicholas D Kristof is a columnist with The New York Times.