About this time last year, the normally wooden United Nations was treated to a spectacle the likes of which the organization hadn’t seen since former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez likened former President George W. Bush to Satan. The man who captured all of the attention was none other than President Trump, who used his time at the lectern to promote American nationalism, threaten North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with total annihilation, and insult Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro for taking an otherwise prosperous nation in the Western Hemisphere and turning it into a garbage heap of poverty, starvation, corruption, and incompetence.
Trump’s first address at the U.N. General Assembly was quintessential Donald Trump: designed to dominate the news cycle and shock people out of complacency. Military historian and Slate columnist Fred Kaplan called it the “most hostile, dangerous and intellectually confused” speech an American president ever delivered to an international audience. As Trump was speaking, John Kelly – then only a month into his new job as White House chief of staff – was watching from the bleachers, head-in-hand, looking like he was undergoing an out-of-body experience.
This week, Trump will be performing an encore at U.N. headquarters, stressing yet again the prevalence of American sovereignty over an architecture of international institutions which has been besieged by a wave of populism from Western Europe to the Philippines. Like most of Trump’s speeches, it’s almost a guarantee that he will play to his political base, hit America’s adversaries over the head with rhetorical bluster, and list what he considers as his administration’s numerous foreign policy achievements. He will tell the assembled diplomats in the grand General Assembly chamber that the Islamic State’s caliphate is no more, that America’s military is stronger than ever, and that his talent as a master dealmaker has brought the international community on the cusp of solving a three-decade old North Korea nuclear problem. Much of his address will be sprinkled with exaggeration.
The General Assembly speech, however, is largely theater; it may grab most of the television ratings (at times, it seems ratings are all Trump cares about), but the speeches are a side-show to the real diplomatic work that occurs during the annual U.N. meetings. Trump has a lot on his plate, from at least six formal bilaterals to the chairing of a U.N. Security Council session on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Plenty can go right during these meetings, but plenty can go wrong too – particularly if the president is unprepared.
Trump will need to be many things to many people. Japan’s Shinzo Abe will attempt to explain to the president that, notwithstanding his bromance with Kim Jong Un, North Korea is still North Korea: a country that has mastered the art of deception and whose regime violates Security Council sanctions with an uncanny skill. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will beat the Iran drum over and over again while reassuring Trump that his decision to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal was the right one (the rest of the world takes the exact opposite view). European leaders will try to the best of their ability to trumpet multilateralism to a president who regards institutions like the European Union as an enemy of America on trade and NATO as a collection of deadbeats and freeloaders. There will likely be choice words used behind the scenes – and given this administration’s propensity to leak, some of those words will make their way into the pages of the New York Times.
Above all, however, one would hope Trump’s second trip to the U.N. will be about the business of statecraft. Trump needs to understand that his time in New York is not just an opportunity to get ratings, but also a chance to work the diplomatic magic he so often brags about. The rest of the world will hold their breath and pray the provocateur-in-chief doesn’t fly back to Washington having done lasting damage to a multilateral system already under assault.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
