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New York: In just a few chaotic hours, Donald Trump gave the international community the one-finger salute, and then embraced it with a dramatic shift on the war in Ukraine and a commitment to backing Europe against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
It is another reminder that Trump’s exotic and outrageous statements always have to be measured against his actual decisions, and those of his vast administration.
The day began with a full-throated rejection of globalism as the world’s most powerful leader railed against immigration, climate change and multilateral co-operation, instead emphasising the value of sovereignty and self-determination.
‘I look at London where you have a terrible mayor’
Indeed, Trump’s address to the United Nations was heavily sceptical of multiculturalism. What made the world beautiful, he said, was “that each country is unique”. Explicit in his message: don’t dilute your population with immigrants who have “different customs, religions – different everything”.
It was no surprise the city he chose to make an example of was London, with its highly visible Muslim population and Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan.
“It’s been so changed,” he said. “Now they want to go to Sharia law. But you’re in a different country, you can’t do that.”
As Ed Kilgore put it in The Intelligencer, the speech was “blood-and-soil nationalism”. Though it will appeal to some Australians, it is the antithesis of what the Australian project has tried to realise: a home for the world’s cultures, united by shared values.
‘It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’
Then, Trump tried to shatter the global consensus on climate change. It was a “con job”, he said, and a “hoax”. Not only were the people in the room wrong, Trump said, they were “stupid”. In the same sentence, he said he did not mean to brag, but he was “right about everything”.
‘Your countries are going to hell’
More than anything else, Trump condescended to the world’s leaders, telling them he alone knows the truth and the secrets to success – and if they did not follow in his footsteps, they were doomed to failure.
“I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell,” Trump bragged, before touting what he described as his administration’s “bold action” on uncontrolled migration.
“Once we started detaining and deporting everyone who crossed the border and removing illegal aliens from the United States, they simply stopped coming. They’re not coming any more. We’re getting a lot of credit, but they’re not coming any more. This was a humanitarian act for all involved because on the trips up, thousands of people a week were dying.”
This was a president emboldened: more righteous than ever and happy to do his friends a favour by telling them where they were going wrong. “I’m the president of the United States, but I worry about Europe,” he said.
Yet, hours later, Trump re-entered the international community – or at least, the European one – in spectacular and frankly bizarre fashion.
Zelensky and Trump meet on the sidelines of the UN on Tuesday.Credit: AP
Having met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN, Trump posted to Truth Social that “after getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine-Russia military and economic situation”, as well as Russia’s economic woes, he believed Ukraine was in a position to fight and win back all its land from Putin.
It was not completely clear whether he included Crimea, taken without a fight in 2014, in this calculation. But he did say “all of Ukraine, back in its original form … and who knows, maybe even go further than that!”
“We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them,” Trump added, just as the European bloc faces drone incursions from an increasingly aggressive Russia.
This is an astounding change of tune from a US president who has for the past eight months insisted Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards”, was weak on the battlefield and would have to cede territory to Putin and his bigger, more powerful army.
On one hand, it’s more evidence that Trump is especially susceptible to the whims of whoever was last in his ear. And it’s not clear why he suddenly thinks Ukraine has an advantage when, if anything, Russia has been on the advance after a long stalemate.
Indeed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio undercut Trump’s sudden bullishness at a UN ministerial meeting about Ukraine, saying it was a war “that cannot end militarily – it will end at a negotiating table”.
No one can possibly know how seriously to take Trump’s latest pronouncement. Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, posted on X: “When Trump imposes a new sanction on Russia and asks Congress for new funds for military assistance to Ukraine (and not just selling US weapons to European countries), then we will know that he’s ready to back up his words with actions.”
But it also shows that Trump, for all his anti-globalist rhetoric, is not cleaving himself and the US from the community of nations. He went from castigating Europe as a collection of failing states in the morning to promising to aid them in the fight for Ukraine in the afternoon.
Of course, those things are not mutually exclusive. But it goes to show his administration is not withdrawing from the world, whatever disdain he might have for it.
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