Photo Source Patrick Gruban | CC BY 2.0
Daniel Falcone: What are your general thoughts on Trump’s recent UN talk and how world opinion received it? What do you regard as the central theme? Trump seems determined to be one of the more militaristic statesmen in recent history while claiming to be an anti-establishment politician. What are your thoughts on what Trump said and were you surprised that certain diplomatic issues were left unsaid by the president?
Richard Falk: The Trump speech at the UN this year was a virtual mirror image of Trump’s overall political profile, slightly embellished by some idealistic sentiments of an abstract and vague character, and if the content analyzed, revealing glaring tensions between its abstractions and the concrete lines of policy being advocated.
At the same time, if compared with Trump’s first speech to the General Assembly a year earlier, it was somewhat less belligerent except with respect to Iran, a bit more ingratiating to other members and to the UN as an organization, yet essentially unchanged so far as its essential features of policy and prescription are concerned.
A central theme articulated by Trump throughout the speech and strongly stressed at the beginning and end was the primacy of a sovereignty-centered world order based on territorial nation-states. This amounts to a strong affirmation of Westphalian ideas of world order as these have evolved in Europe since the middle of the 17thcentury. The essential tone…