UN must find a way to reinvent its relevance as the US isolates itself still further from its allies

Such is the gravitational pull cast by Donald Trump and the US economy that the politics of the other 192 countries that make up the United Nations are rapidly being reduced to one long discussion about how to relate to, and challenge this ever darker and weirder presidency.

- Patrick Wintour

Before Trump's extraordinary 58-minute speech on the supposed threats posed by open borders, sharia law, the UN's failings and the “climate hoax”, the supporters of the UN's values already knew they faced a challenge. Now they realise the degree to which the world's superpower seems bent on the destruction of everything they believe.

Immediately after the shocked, and even embarrassed, UN delegates had recovered from Trump's performance, the general assembly was addressed by leaders of two large Muslim states, the Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Subianto was strongly applauded when he asserted: “Might cannot be right; right must be right. No one country can bully the whole of the human family. We may be weak individually, but the sense of oppression and injustice will unite us into a strong force that will overcome this injustice.” Erdoğan insisted that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was completely out of control, and those that were silent in the face of his barbarity were complicit.