Next week Donald J. Trump returns to the United Nations for the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. While Trump exceeded expectations during his first UN appearance last year, he will face more pushback this time around. The president will encounter a more skeptical global audience, woke to the reality that his administration’s diplomacy is all take and no give.
For the past two years, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, has watched as President Donald Trump upends American foreign policy, engaging in trade wars while simultaneously disengaging from international agreements and alliances. And now Guterres has reached a verdict: The United States, once the guarantor of global stability, is losing its ability to influence world events.
Former foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu will become China’s ambassador to the United Nations headquarters in New York, one of the country’s most prestigious overseas posts, according to diplomatic sources. Ma, 54, returned to Beijing last week after a 20-month stint as the country’s top envoy to the UN in Geneva. As China’s point man at the UN headquarters will be at the forefront of a more ambitious and assertive foreign policy under President Xi Jinping.
In his sovereignty-centric speech Tuesday to the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea”; called Iran “a corrupt dictatorship” whose “chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos”; and said Venezuela’s government “has inflicted terrible pain and suffering on the good people of that country.”
President Donald Trump condemned authoritarian regimes in harsh and Trumpian terms during his first United Nations speech, threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea, lamenting Iran’s “pursuit of death and destruction,” and warning that major portions of the world are “going to hell.”
The United Nations is at an inflection point, with a new Secretary General, growing disbelief in multilateral institutions among members of the international community, and wavering U.S. support for the organization under the new Trump administration.
Photo courtesy: White House
Near the beginning of President Barack Obama’s final speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he pointed out something really important about the world today: We are living through the best time in human history, but it feels to a lot of us like anything but.
Global governance is the mantra of our era’s elite. The surge in cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, and information produced by technological innovation and market liberalization has made the world’s countries too interconnected, their argument goes, for any country to be able to solve its economic problems on its own. We need global rules, global agreements, global institutions.
Washington, which is believed to want a woman in the U.N. role, has been backing Argentina’s foreign minister in the secretive selection process, U.N. sources say. Meanwhile, U.N. sources say Russia is angling for a female Bulgarian diplomat with family ties to the Soviet Union, a nod to its desire to see an Eastern European in the job.
