Donald Trump took the stage at the United Nations general assembly hall for the first time in six years to launch a full-on assault on the world body, which he described as a feckless, corrupt and pernicious global force that should follow the example of his own leadership.
Speaking on the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, Trump called for countries to close their borders and expel foreigners, accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda”, and told national leaders that the world body was “funding an assault on your countries.”
“It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” he said in a headline speech to world leaders and visiting delegations in the grand general assembly hall in midtown Manhattan. “You have to end it now… Your countries are going to hell.”
Directly addressing European leaders, he accused them of “destroying your heritage” and of allowing international migration because of misplaced “political correctness”. Trump also attacked green energy initiatives as redistributing manufacturing power from the developed world to “polluting countries that break the rules and are making a fortune”.
“Your countries are being ruined,” he also said, pointing to UN programs that he said provide food, shelter and debit cards to fund migrant journeys to the United States. “The UN is funding an assault on Western countries”.
In many ways, the speech was an appeal to European leaders to embrace a blood-and-soil nationalism in which Trump laid out the recent US assault on immigration as a model for the world to follow.
“If you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “I’m the president of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe, I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration, that double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.”
Repeating a dubious claim that he had solved seven wars during his eight-month administration, Trump said that the United Nations had only offered “empty words” and had not helped him “finalize” the negotiations.
“The UN has such tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” he said. “All they seem to do is write a really strongly-worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action.”
Denouncing the Paris climate agreement that he abandoned during his first term, Trump called climate change a “con job” and ridiculed renewable energy sources like wind farms as a product of a “green energy agenda” that has brought countries to the “brink of destruction”.
“It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion, climate change,” he said. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong.”
“Immigration and the high cost of so called green renewable energy is destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet,” he said. “You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”
Turning to international diplomacy, Trump repeated an offer to levy heavy tariffs on Russia in order to end its invasion of Ukraine, but said that European countries would first have to cease buying Russian energy products.
“Inexcusably, even Nato countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which I found out about two weeks ago, and I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Think of it, they’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
Critics have said that Trump is seeking to shirk US leadership in ending the war in Ukraine by passing the onus for negotiating a ceasefire to Europe. The foreign minister of Hungary, one of the most sympathetic countries to Russia in Europe and Nato, told the Guardian yesterday that his country would not stop buying Russian oil because it had no alternative.
Trump gave only cursory remarks to the recognition of Palestine by the UK, France, and other allies. The response came one day after Emmanuel Macron publicly declared in the UN that “it is time” to recognise a Palestinian state despite public condemnation by Israel and the United States.
British officials have expressed fear that Trump could recognise Israeli control over illegal settlements on the West Bank in retaliation, but he only mentioned the recognition of Palestine in passing.
“Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state,” Trump said. “The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7, even while they refuse to release the hostages or accept a ceasefire.”
During the speech, Trump reaffirmed his decision to raise tariffs on countries around the world, targeting China and other nations that he claimed had broken international trade rules.
“The countries that followed the rules, all their factories have been plundered,” he said. “It’s really sad to watch. They’ve been broken. They’ve been broken by countries that broke the rules.”
He also called for world leaders to combat the spread of nuclear weapons and said the US would launch a new effort to prevent the use of biological weapons, claiming it would be integrated with artificial intelligence.
“We just can’t ever use them. If we ever use them, the world literally might come to an end,” Trump said of nuclear weapons. “There would be no United Nations to be talking about. There would be no nothing.”
Practically the only country he had kind words for during the speech was El Salvador for the “successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country”. The Trump administration has paid El Salvador to receive more than 200 Venezuelan migrants it claimed were members of criminal gangs.
Shortly after his speech, Trump’s tone shifted dramatically during a bilateral meeting with UN secretary general Antonio Guterres. “Our country is behind the United Nations 100%,” Trump told Guterres. “I may disagree with it sometimes but I am so behind it because the potential for peace at this institution is great.”
