In a fiery speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump attacked some of the key principles of the world body, and urged Western countries to adopt MAGA-style policies on migration and climate change.
Trump used the stage of the UN General Assembly to deliver a nearly hour-long address that was short on substance about ending the world’s two biggest ongoing wars — in Ukraine and Gaza — but long on critique of two of his favourite targets: immigration and green energy.
The U.S. president slammed what he called the “globalist migration agenda” and criticized efforts to tackle what he called “the global warming hoax.” Near the end of his speech, he called the global push against climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” — a remark that drew gasps from some in the audience.
European leaders “must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it’s too late,” he said.
“You’re destroying your heritage,” Trump added in arguably the most strongly worded part of his speech. “Your countries are going to hell.”
Given UN-backed treaties on climate change and the rights of refugees, it would mean a profound shift in the global order if other nations heeded Trump’s calls.
U.S. President Donald Trump accused the United Nations of funding and supporting ‘an assault on Western countries’ as he slammed the immigration policies of member countries and urged them to ‘take their own stand’ and defend their borders.
The White House had promised a UN speech that would take aim at global institutions. But some observers believe his words struck at the heart of what the UN is supposed to do — namely, make life better for people of all nations.
Dave Harden, founder of Georgetown Strategy Group and a senior adviser on Middle East peace in the Obama administration, told CBC News the speech “signals the closing of the era of the United States as being a beacon of hope” to the international community.
‘A torrent of falsehood on migration’
While some observers expected Trump to slam UN bureaucracy and spending in his speech, his sharpest critique of the international body focused on immigration.
“The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them,” Trump said, blaming the UN for fuelling what he called “the No. 1 political issue of our time: the crisis of uncontrolled migration.”
The president claimed the UN “provided food, shelter, transportation and debit cards to illegal aliens” to gain access to the U.S. via its southern border.
“In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime and deplete our social safety net,” said Trump.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, an advocacy group that doesn’t rely on UN or U.S. government funding, called Trump’s speech “a torrent of falsehood on migration” in a comment posted to X.
Prime Minister Mark Carney was one of 18 national leaders to speak at the United Nations on Monday about why they’ve chosen to formally recognize a Palestinian state as the war between Israel and Hamas continues.
Hugh Dugan, who served on the National Security Council in Trump’s first term, doesn’t think the speech called for “tearing apart the multilateral order.”
“In fact, he did reiterate that the UN has potential,” Dugan told CBC. “I think he went mild on the UN by just sticking with the use of U.S. funds to bring immigrants across our border illegally … he could have been even harsher about how our dues are being used.”
U.S. withdrawal from UN agencies
While Trump pulled some financial support from the UN and its agencies over the course of his first term as president, he has done so far more quickly in his second.
On the day of his inauguration in January, for example, Trump announced plans to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and pull out of the UN-backed Paris Agreement on climate change.
Two weeks later, Trump signed a sweeping executive order to end U.S. involvement in the UN Human Rights Council and launch a full-fledged review of U.S. funding and participation in all UN bodies and other international organizations. Meanwhile, his administration moved quickly to obliterate the U.S. Agency for International Development, wiping billions of dollars in funding from aid projects worldwide, jeopardizing such programs as HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa.
At Trump’s urging, Congress proposed in August to withhold more than $1.4 billion US in funding for UN dues and peacekeeping operations.
The UN is now planning a 15 per cent cut to its core budget, its biggest in decades, including eliminating more than 2,600 posts, roughly one out of every five UN jobs worldwide, as part of a broader reform called UN80.
Tom Weiss, a retired professor emeritus at the City University of New York who has written extensively about the UN, says Trump’s funding cuts have already made it harder for the UN to deliver humanitarian assistance
“This administration is very good at destroying things. It’s not very good at building anything, so I suspect the downward slide of the [UN] is only going to be accelerated,” Weiss told CBC News.
‘Almost no progress’ on Gaza, Ukraine
Trump’s decision to focus on migration and green energy while only giving the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine conflicts passing mention drew plenty of attention from political observers.
During the speech, the U.S. president reiterated his claim that he has ended several wars — including a diplomatic conflict over water resources that isn’t actually a war (Egypt-Ethiopia); a long-running dispute between Kosovo and Serbia in which no peace deal has been signed; and a Rwanda-backed rebel uprising in eastern Congo that hasn’t actually stopped.
“I ended seven wars and in all cases they were raging with countless thousands of people being killed,” said Trump. “No president or prime minister, and for that matter, no other country, has ever done anything close to that.”
Notably, he said the UN “did not even try to help” end the conflicts.
“I was a little bit surprised that he would brag quite so overtly about ending seven wars when the two main wars that he vowed to end — obviously in Gaza and in Ukraine — he’s made almost no progress,” Frank Lowenstein, a former U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, told CBC News Network.
Lowenstein said Trump must realize the “sheer force of his personality” will not bring about an end to those conflicts.
