The right way to read Trump’s UN speech

President Trump’s September 23rd address to the UN General Assembly offered a fascinating glimpse into the fundamental contradictions that continue to plague American foreign policy, even as it purports to embrace a more nationalist approach.

While Trump’s critics focus on his bombastic style and diplomatic faux pas, the more substantive question is whether his performance reflects a genuine strategic realignment or merely theatrical posturing that masks policy incoherence.

Trump’s castigation of the United Nations as an ineffective institution that produces nothing but “empty words” and “strongly worded letters” reflects a broader American frustration with multilateral constraints. Yet this critique reveals a profound contradiction at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy approach.

If the UN is indeed as useless as Trump suggests, why waste precious diplomatic capital addressing it at all? The very act of delivering a lengthy rebuke to the General Assembly suggests that America still craves the legitimacy that only international institutions can provide.

The president’s complaint that the UN failed to acknowledge his supposed success in “ending seven wars” is particularly telling. It reveals an administration that simultaneously disdains international opinion while desperately seeking validation from the very institutions it claims to reject.

This is not the behavior of a truly confident superpower operating from a position of strength.

Migration: projection of domestic anxieties

Trump’s extended lecture on European migration policies—telling world leaders that “your countries are going to hell”—represents the projection of America’s own demographic anxieties onto the global stage.

This approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of migration as a complex response to economic, political, and climate pressures that cannot be resolved through border controls alone.

More significantly, Trump’s migration rhetoric undermines America’s soft power precisely when the country needs to maintain influence in a multipolar world. By positioning the United States as hostile to the movement of people, Trump alienates potential partners and reinforces perceptions of American insularity and decline.

Climate change: the costs of denial

The president’s dismissal of climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” may play well to his domestic base, but it represents a strategic error of enormous proportions.

Climate change is not merely an environmental issue—it is fundamentally a national security challenge that will reshape geopolitical alignments, create new forms of interstate conflict, and determine which nations prosper in the coming decades.

By ceding leadership on climate policy to China and the European Union, Trump is effectively surrendering American influence over one of the defining issues of the 21st century. This is not America First; it is America Last.

The Ukraine-Gaza paradox

Perhaps most revealing was Trump’s treatment of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.

His admission that ending these wars has proved more difficult than expected inadvertently highlights the limitations of his transactional approach to international relations. Complex geopolitical conflicts cannot be resolved through personal relationships or deal-making prowess alone.

Trump’s criticism of European energy purchases from Russia while simultaneously demanding they take greater responsibility for their own security creates an impossible bind for American allies. This approach risks pushing European partners toward greater strategic autonomy—an outcome that would ultimately weaken American influence in the region.

Decline of American leadership

What emerged most clearly from Trump’s UN address was not American strength, but American confusion about its role in the world.

The speech careened between isolationist rhetoric and interventionist impulses, between demands for allied burden-sharing and criticism of allied independence, between dismissal of international institutions and desperate appeals for recognition.

This incoherence reflects a deeper challenge facing American foreign policy: the country has not yet developed a sustainable grand strategy for the post-unipolar world. Trump’s nationalism offers a critique of the liberal internationalist consensus but fails to provide a coherent alternative framework for American engagement with the world.

A Pyrrhic victory

In the short term, Trump’s UN performance may satisfy his domestic political base and create the appearance of strong leadership. But in strategic terms, it represents a missed opportunity to define a new framework for American international engagement that could command both domestic support and international respect.

The silence that greeted Trump’s remarks—in contrast to the laughter that accompanied his first UN address—suggests that the world has moved beyond either shock or amusement at American diplomatic dysfunction.

Instead, other powers are quietly constructing alternative institutions and partnerships that will gradually erode American centrality in global affairs.

Trump’s UN speech thus serves as a metaphor for America’s broader foreign policy challenge: the country continues to act as if it operates from a position of unquestioned dominance, even as that dominance steadily erodes.

Until American leaders develop a more realistic assessment of the country’s capabilities and constraints, such performative displays will continue to substitute for genuine strategic thinking.

The broken escalator and malfunctioning teleprompter that Trump complained about may have been more symbolically apt than he realized—metaphors for an American foreign policy apparatus that struggles to function effectively in a rapidly changing world.

This article first appeared on Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist Substack and is republished with permission. Read the original here.