Trump's trashing of the UN is tragic and hypocritical

The world body is a useful scapegoat for the US President who mocks its failure to maintain world peace.

- Andreas Kluth

"Better together." That’s the optimistic theme that Ms Annalena Baerbock, the new president of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), chose for 2025's global gathering, the 80th. US President Donald Trump instead confirmed in his speech what I keep hearing from the cognoscenti here at UNGA: The likelier trajectory points towards “worse apart”.

As is his wont, Mr Trump heaped contempt on the UN as on other countries and people he disdains. “The two things I got from the United Nations”, he sneered, are “a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter”. (Apparently, neither device worked to his satisfaction.) And while he, the peacemaker-in-chief, was allegedly out ending seven wars, “sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help”.

This is today the sound of America — the co-founder, host and eight-decade underwriter of the UN system - eating its children like Cronus. And the stony faces and occasionally audible gasps are those of the assembled world dreading the fate of what diplomats call the “international community minus one”.

The US may or may not exit the UN as it once orphaned the League of Nations. But it’s bad enough that America has morphed from the system’s main benefactor into its spoiler.

Part of the tragedy is that this hostile US turn towards its own creation rests on a profound misunderstanding. Many American conservatives, and especially Maga types, view the UN largely as Mr Michael Waltz, Mr Trump’s new ambassador, described it in his confirmation hearings: At best, as a feckless and bloated bureaucracy that burns through American tax dollars to churn out woke verbiage instead of keeping world peace. At worst, as an anti-Semitic and anti-American cesspool.