Trump’s Unilateralism and our Future
President Donald Trump’s recent speech to the United Nations doesn’t understand our country’s past or the problems we face in the future.
In his speech to the U.N., Trump said he would never surrender our country’s sovereignty to an “unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy.” He also said “sovereign, independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has every survived, democracy has ever endured, or peace has ever prospered.” In writer Charles A. Kupchan’s story “Trump’s Nineteenth-Century Grand Strategy,” he accuses the President of “dumping cold war water on multilateralism and global governance.”
Certain foreign policy tenants have been practiced by our country since the end of World War II, a war that killed millions and ended in the use of an atomic weapon. Our country took a step in the direction of multilateralism when the United States joined the U.N., an organization where various countries work together to try and set international norms. The establishment of the U.N. in 1945 came out of the memory of the second world war, trying to prevent something similar from happening again.
In his speech, Trump also attacked international institutions like the International Criminal Court, the Global Compact for Migration, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. The President’s actions are congruent with his speech, as he has pulled our country out of the Paris Climate Accords and the Iran Nuclear Deal. His current National Security Advisor, John Bolton, is known for being hostile to international pacts. In addition to opposing the international organizations that our country belongs to, Trump supported the United Kingdom’s withdraw from the European Union as well as the anti-internationalist right-wing populist parties across Europe. Trump’s trade policy has sparked off trade wars with more than one country, including many that have been our allies.
Even more disturbing, Trump seems to be more comfortable with autocratic leaders, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, than with democratic leaders like Germany’s Andrea Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. We do not have a leader that sees the promoting of democratic norms and ways around the world as important.
Kupchan said in his story that the actions of the Trump Administration have sparked a debate about the United States’ role in the world. Trump’s strategy is dangerous because of the lethality of the weapons modern day nation-states possess – chemical, biological, and nuclear. Of course, nuclear weapons are the deadliest.
In a way, these weapons bring the world together because using them would be more catastrophic than war in the time of swords and spears or even the type of weaponry that existed in the two world wars. On the issue of climate change, a similar conclusion can be reached. The greenhouse effect has an impact on the whole world and cannot be solved without a global solution.
The issues that confront individual nation-states are too big to be solved by Trumpian unilateralism because technology has made the world more interconnected. While the political form of the nation-state is likely to continue along with some city-states (Singapore, Vatican City and Monaco), there is an obvious reason why nations need to pull together to solve their problems. Realist international theorists from George Kennan, to Hedley Bull, to Han Morgenthau all believed that states pursue their own self-interest on the international stage. It’s in no nation-state’s self-interest to endure the worst of the greenhouse effect, nuclear war, or anything else that might impact our future.
Can we realize the things that are in our best interest? Or will the populist nationalism, or authoritarian democracy, that’s creeping into various countries on both side of the Atlantic keep our eyes covered?
