When President Donald Trump brought his trademark braggadocio to the United Nations’ rostrum in his first term, he was met with an unfamiliar-for-him response from the delegates: mocking laughter.
Seven years later, few could imagine the scene repeating itself. Once the object of skepticism and open derision by his foreign counterparts, Trump arrives at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday as an avatar of a changing world order that has little use for global institutions like the one he’s speaking at.
Instead of laughing in his face, world leaders are now devising ever-more-lavish displays of flattery to enter Trump’s good graces. And rather than a novice in a shrine to multilateralism, Trump is now the president who has rocked global arrangements on trade and security, all while hollowing out the post-World War II international system that his predecessors built and worked to uphold.
The successes and failures of his strategy are still being written. Two conflicts he once promised to end quickly — in Gaza and Ukraine — continue to rage; his plan of abandoning a collective approach in favor of leveraging close personal relationships with the leaders of Israel and Russia has so far yielded virtually no progress. (After his speech Tuesday, Trump plans to meet a host of foreign counterparts on the margins of the UNGA meetings, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump said last week should agree to a peace deal with Russia.)
Trump often touts his efforts to broker peace elsewhere, including a once-intractable conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan for which he’s received widespread credit. His role in other negotiations, including between India and Pakistan, is a matter of dispute. Either way, Trump has made plain he believes his efforts deserve a Nobel Peace Prize — in no small part because he thinks he’s found success where prior attempts, including through the UN, have failed.
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