NEW YORK — President Trump will address the world’s most powerful multilateral institution on Tuesday with a call for its members to focus first and foremost on their own sovereignty, arguing the U.S. should not shoulder the bulk of the burden when it comes to United Nations funding and global security, the White House said Monday.
Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday will mark the highest-profile foreign policy address of his presidency. Although he has given two other major foreign policy speeches — one in Saudi Arabia on May 21 and one in Poland on July 6 — the UNGA remarks will pull together and build upon the foreign policy themes he has previously laid out, a senior administration official told reporters on a conference call Monday.
“This speech represents the president’s vision and declaration to the country and the world about how America fits into the world, how America operates, what its values are and how it relates to other countries,” the senior administration official said.
Trump spent much of his first day at the General Assembly meeting talking about ways to trim the organization’s bureaucratic excesses. The president has already threatened to slash U.S. funding for the UN , and has previously described the body as “a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.”
As he left the UN headquarters on Monday after hosting a major meeting there on UN reform, Trump told reporters he aimed to “make the United Nations great,” echoing his signature slogan, and clarified that he had intentionally omitted the word “again.”
A senior administration official said Monday that Trump’s speech would make the case for “sovereignty as the basis for mutual cooperation” in a speech that would elevate the original mission of the UN over more idealistic conceptions of the UN as a global government of sorts.
“What the president is doing is explaining how the principle of ‘America First’ is not only consistent with the goal of international cooperation, but a rational basis for every country to engage in cooperation, because all countries that are sovereign put the needs of their own citizens first,” the official said. “The United Nations, as the president will explain, was conceived on the idea of independent nation states cooperating together…It’s only a pretty recent development that some in the world have articulated, this vision of top-down governance. That’s certainly not the president’s vision.”
Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World, said the issue of sovereignty has always factored prominently in Trump’s outlook on international relations.
“One of the few themes that permeates President Trump’s approach to foreign policy…is the preservation of sovereignty and the importance of sovereignty as a basis for international order, which is something that [national security adviser H.R.] McMaster actually stated,” Patrick told the Washington Examiner. “He’ll remind his audience that the UN is not some sort of supernational world government… that it’s a collection of sovereign countries,” Patrick added.
Trump dedicated much of his attention during his two bilateral meetings on Monday to perceived flaws with the Iran nuclear deal, which he has called the “worst deal ever negotiated.” In separate meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump raised his concerns with the Iran nuclear agreement and stressed the need to punish Iran for provocations that fall outside the parameters of the deal.
Brian Hook, director of policy planning at the State Department, said Trump’s skepticism of the Iran deal and the Paris climate agreement, which he discussed with Macron, was based more in how the specific deals were negotiated than the concept of having deals in general
“It’s really not a knock on multilateralism,” Hook told reporters traveling with the president. “At the end of the day, the terms [of the agreements] are what matters.”
A senior administration official said Trump’s speech Tuesday to the General Assembly would include “extremely tough terms” about North Korea.
North Korea’s increasingly aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons capable of striking the U.S. homeland is expected to loom large over the entire UN summit this week.
Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, said Trump should lay out the specifics of his strategy for North Korea to clear up confusion among world leaders about where his administration stands.
“The most important thing President Trump can convey on North Korea during his UN speech is to give the world a sense of clarity on Washington’s position when it comes to the hermit kingdom,” Kazianis told the Washington Examiner.
“So far, there seems to be differences in what I call points of emphasis between Nikki Haley and General McMaster on the one hand, who seem to emphasize the possibility of a ‘military option’ and Rex Tillerson and General [James] Mattis, who seem to want to push forward with ‘peaceful pressure’ and giving more time for diplomacy and sanctions to work,” Kazianis added.
Trump should use his speech to describe what he thinks a solution to the North Korean conflict would look like, Kazianis argued.
“He needs to tell the world what his ‘red lines’ are when it comes to Pyongyang’s provocative behavior. He needs to explain if there is any possibility of talks,” Kazianis said. “Trump needs to explain how he will hold China accountable or not.”
Hook told reporters on Monday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson helped Trump write his General Assembly speech, which U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said had already been completed by Friday.
The senior administration official said Trump’s speech would be “deeply philosophical.”
