Consistency and Dissonance: UNGA 2025 and President Trump’s View of America’s Role in the World

The friction that President Donald Trump encountered at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), including a malfunctioning escalator and teleprompter reminded me of the hectic days of the 2017 UNGA. More important than the string of meetings and events was the preparation work and, in particular, the work on the President’s speech as part of what is called the General Debate during which each member state is afforded the opportunity to make a short statement. This year, asked to speak for fifteen minutes, President Trump spoke for almost an hour, mentioning immigration and “green renewable energy” multiple times and stating that both are “destroying a large part of the free world and a large part of our planet.” Commentary in The Guardian described the speech as “a long and humiliating rant, filled with personal grievances and attacks on the UN, European leaders, migration policies and clean energy.” Although his delivery was typically indelicate, boastful, and offensive to many, Trump is correct that many countries, including the United States under the Biden Administration, failed to secure their borders and respond effectively to migration crises. Although “getting rid of renewables” would be self-defeating, Trump is correct that the European Union’s effort to displace fossil fuels almost exclusively with solar and wind power led to energy scarcity, high energy prices, and dependence on an authoritarian, hostile regime (i.e. Russia).

What most reporting did not cover was how the speech clarified issues on which Trump has been consistent since his first term as President (e.g. border security, energy security, burden sharing in defense, nuclear arms control and counter-proliferation) as well as potential shifts in his foreign policy such as a biosecurity initiative and maybe, finally, the abandonment of a conciliatory approach to Moscow and the associated prospect for more economic and financial pressure on the Kremlin. The speech and Trump’s subsequent Truth Social posting on Russia’s war on Ukraine also revealed the enduring dissonance Trump carries with him in foreign policy and national security: the tension between his belief in “pursuing peace through strength” and his inclination to retrench because the United States shoulders an unfair share of the burden for international security.

The following excerpt from At War with Ourselves (pp. 230-233) provides a window into the experience of preparing for and executing UNGA as well as how I tried to help an unconventional and iconoclastic President reconcile his dissonance, clarify his foreign policy agenda, and communicate that agenda to an international audience.

But in autumn 2017, I still believed that Trump’s unconventional nature held promise for deterring adversaries and improving America’s ability to advance our security and economic interests. It was my intention to help him do that during part of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City from Monday, September 18, through Thursday, September 21.

Metaphors for the three-week long UNGA meeting include diplomatic circus, political speed-dating, a cocktail party where everyone talks but no one listens, and the world’s most expensive open mic night. But the UNGA presents an opportunity for the American president to advance foreign policy objectives. And Trump could do so from the comfort of his penthouse in Trump Tower without the travel anxiety he experiences on long trips.

The main event at the UNGA is a general debate, but the most important work occurs on the sidelines of the assembly, in bilateral and multilateral meetings with counterparts. Our overall goal for this General Assembly was to foster unity of effort behind weakening the rogue authoritarian regimes of North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela and to increase pressure on their key sponsors, China and Russia.

On September 17, the fast-paced four days began with an early morning phone call with Xi Jinping, who was skipping the UNGA, from the president’s penthouse apartment on the sixty-sixth floor of Trump Tower.

It was my first visit to Trump’s New York home, whose Louis XIV–style décor makes Mar-a- Lago look understated. I reminded Trump that the main purpose of the call was to give advance notice of sanctions on any foreign financial institutions facilitating “any significant transaction in connection with trade with North Korea.”

Xi would no doubt object. Moreover, he was eager to appear strong going into the Communist Party Congress scheduled for October, so the time to push was right. Trump assured Xi that he would not take any actions that might spoil the vibe prior to the Congress. And Xi urged Trump to finalize the date for what he promised would be a very special state visit in Beijing.

The call went long, and the window for our coordinated motorcade was closing. The UNGA snarls Manhattan traffic, and if we missed the motorcade window, there could be riots in Midtown. We got to UN Headquarters just in time to join UN secretary-general António Guterres and Ambassador Haley for a session that Haley had organized.

Guterres, like Stoltenberg at NATO, used Trump’s criticisms to galvanize reforms. Trump stated that the United Nations was in “an unhealthy state” while urging Guterres and the delegates to “start the healing process.”

I returned to my makeshift office at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, on Fiftieth and Madison, to review with Stephen Miller the speech the president would give the following day. The hook would be the seventieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan to highlight America’s role in helping Europe and the world rebuild after the most destructive war in history. The speech would call for reform of international organizations while galvanizing pressure on rogue authoritarian regimes and their sponsors.

The speech was solid. Trump’s speeches were sometimes too long, too strident, and overburdened with patriotic clichés and flowery language. But the main themes were straightforward, such as the call to confront and deter aggression from “Ukraine to the South China Sea.”

Miller and I had labored to reconcile contradictions in Trump’s worldview. Some of these were confounding:

Trump believed in American exceptionalism and that the United States was a force for good in the world, but he often manifested moral equivalence.

He was viscerally opposed to communist and socialist dictatorships but was ambivalent at best about the dictators of Russia and China.

He was skeptical about long-term military commitments overseas, but he believed in peace through strength and recognized the need to defeat jihadist terrorists who threatened the homeland or U.S. citizens abroad.

He abhorred democracy promotion abroad but understood that autocrats that bandwagon with Russia and China diminished American power and influence.

He wanted alliances and international organizations to share security and development burdens but viewed multilateral organizations as threats to U.S. sovereignty and their member nations as free riders on American largesse.

He found it difficult even to utter the phrase “human rights” but became impassioned when he witnessed cruelty, such as the serial episodes of mass murder in Syria.

He wanted fair and reciprocal trade and economic relationships but was biased against trade agreements that might advance those objectives.

The UNGA speech was an effort to resolve Trump’s paradoxes and lay a conceptual foundation for his foreign policy. One overall mechanism to do so, previewed in the July 6, 2017, speech in Warsaw, was the need to safeguard the sovereignty of nations in which citizens enjoyed liberty and had a say in how they were governed. In New York, Trump would receive applause for the line “We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” though he went on to state that “we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.”

To clarify Trump’s view of America’s role in the world, and counter those who accused the United States of imperialist designs, the speech cited the Marshall Plan as evidence that “The United States of America has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world, and the greatest defenders of sovereignty, security, and prosperity for all.”

Much of the speech was about human rights without using the phrase directly. He singled out the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, noting that “wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”

In retrospect, we had crafted a coherent statement of policy while remaining true to Trump’s agendas on sharing burdens, reforming international organizations, and demanding fair and reciprocal trade. There was a warning that America “can no longer be taken advantage of or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return” and an expectation that member nations bear more of the United Nations’ costs and “take a greater role in promoting secure and prosperous societies in their own regions.”

Most important for the audience to hear was that the United States was not disengaging, but would pursue policies “rooted in shared goals, interests, and values.” Trump closed with the observation that “making a better life for our people also requires us to work together in close harmony and unity to create a more safe [sic] and peaceful future for all people.”

I put the speech aside and thanked Miller for his and his team’s collaborative work. We had agreed to a label for our effort to make sense of Trump’s paradoxes: “principled realism.”

Other language in the 2017 speech was meant to resolve Trump’s dissonance over America’s role in the world and reassure those who feared U.S. disengagement. Trump closed with the observation that “making a better life for our people also requires us to work together in close harmony and unity to create a more safe and peaceful future for all people.” Similarly, Trump ended this week’s speech with a call to “work together to build a bright, beautiful planet, a planet that we all share, a planet of peace and a world that is richer, better and more beautiful than ever before.” It is easy to dismiss those words as meaningless rhetoric at minute 57 of a 57-minute-long speech. But much of the other fifty-six minutes of the speech touted his Administration’s wide-ranging diplomatic initiatives and military operations abroad. Those concerned that the Trump 47 administration would retrench and thereby embolden adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran, might look beyond the strident, boastful, and embellished language in this year’s UNGA speech to find continuities with what he said at the same podium eight years ago.

For more on international organizations see: Battlegrounds w/ H.R. McMaster: UN & Int’l Organizations: Collective Action & Prospects For Peace