The United Nations Without Purpose

What a corker of a speech President Trump delivered today to the United Nations. His hour of remarks at the world body’s annual debate were part angry tirade and part dressing down. The 47th president laced into the UN for its obsession with the “double-tailed monster” of migration and green energy. He aired his disappointment at the UN’s truculence in the quest for peace, asking, “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”The question was not lost on the delegates, who paid rapt attention. There was little of the mockery that greeted Mr. Trump’s first presidential address to the world body, in 2017. That was when he warned the “little rocket man,” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean party boss. This time delegates seemed to grasp that Mr. Trump’s speech marked a new moment for the UN itself and the American administration that provides the largest share of UN funding. That funding, we’d like to think, can no longer be taken for granted. On the first day that Mr. Trump was inaugurated for his second term, the Associated Press pointed out, he began curbing outlays for the UN. He withdrew America from the World Health Organization. He ended our participation in the Human Rights Council. He ordered up a review of American membership in what the AP called “hundreds of intergovernmental organizations.”Mr. Trump’s question about the purpose of the world body was not entirely dismissive. No sooner did he pose the question than he declared — regretfully — that the UN “has such tremendous potential.” He maintained that he’s always held that view. “It has such tremendous, tremendous potential,” the president declared, “But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” laying particular emphasis on peacemaking. Secretary-General António Guterres may have blathered in his opening speech about how the world “must choose peace rooted in international law.” Mr. Trump, in contrast, claimed to have ended seven wars in his second term as president. He referenced his diplomatic efforts in Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. “And sadly,” Mr. Trump rumbled, “the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them.” Mr. Guterres has little to offer, our Benny Avni reported from Turtle Bay, the New York waterfront where the UN is headquartered. Mr. Guterres spoke of the death toll in Gaza. “The scale of death and destruction are beyond any other conflict in my years as secretary general,” Mr. Guterres said. Yet the secretary-general was disconnected from reality.Since the secretary-general’s tenure started in 2017, Mr. Avni notes, the UN Development Program “has clocked 377,000 deaths in Yemen. The war in Sudan, which Mr. Guterres mentioned in passing in his speech, has exacted an estimated 150,000 deaths since 2023. During the same time frame, according to Hamas’s inflated figures, 70,000 Gazans were killed.” The way Mr. Trump summed it up is that “empty words don’t solve wars.”In the wake of the latest conference to promote a Palestinian state, our Mr. Avni reports, Mr. Guterres and many other speakers mentioned that goal as a “fait accompli.” Not Mr. Trump, who, Mr. Avni notes, “stressed the need to release all the hostages, rather than a small number at a time,” and blamed Hamas as having, as Mr. Trump put it, “repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace.” He warned against rewarding Hamas “for their atrocities.”Mr. Trump was due after his speech to begin meeting with leaders of several Arab states. Next week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due at the White House. Mr. Guterres, in Mr. Avni’s report, is now irrelevant to the peace process or anything else. What we’d like to see emerge from the UN is a strategic withdrawal by the United States in favor of bilateral diplomacy until, if ever, the UN can find a purpose worthy of American support.

The United Nations Without Purpose

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