Eight years ago, when a freshman President Donald Trump rose to the green marble dais of the United Nations General Assembly hall for the first time, he was received in the cathedral of postwar multilateralism with dismissal and suspicion – even mockery.
Few seemed to take seriously an American president who appeared unsure of himself and who offered outlandish claims that might have worked with his political base, but from the U.N. assembly invited derisive laughter.
Yet Tuesday morning, when Mr. Trump takes the same stage in the first year of his second term, things are likely to be very different. He will stand at the golden stage more as the conqueror of the gasping liberal democratic internationalism – the U.N. at its apex – that he seemingly has no use for and has worked to vanquish.
Instead of the outlier in the temple of global governance, he will speak this time to the assembly of the U.N.’s 193 member states as the voice of an emerging world order of America First foreign policy and big-power competition.
To Mr. Trump’s apparent liking, it’s an order that has fading use for either international cooperation or well-intentioned but expensive global development.
“This time, Trump comes to the U.N. as it faces a post-multilateral world that he has had a very important role in delivering. So, I think his audience will perhaps reluctantly pay closer attention to what he says than some of them did in 2017,” says Michael Doyle, a professor of international relations at Columbia University in New York.
“This time,” he adds, “the things he said then that were sort of freelance and outlandish and that suggested a U.S. president with almost no appreciation for the value of multilateral cooperation, are things he can do and indeed has done.”
Gone from the U.S. approach to the U.N. and to multilateralism more broadly, Dr. Doyle says, is the longtime tenet of U.S. foreign policy that the United States derives a good deal of its power from cooperation with international partners.
“Trump has no appreciation for the idea that things can be done with the assistance of allies that can’t be done on your own,” he says.