Trump Tells the U.N. What It Needs to Hear

By
Richard C. Young
-
“The entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves, and radically disrupt their entire societies, must be rejected completely and totally.” – President Donald J. Trump, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2025. Photo courtesy of the White House via X.com.

Matthew Kroenig explains in Foreign Policy that President Donald Trump has told the United Nations what it needs to hear: that it has failed.

I am in New York this week for the U.N. General Assembly. At various events over the last few days, I’ve already had the opportunity to chat with former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak; Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares; and Trump’s designee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, Jacob Helberg, among many others.

Of course, a main topic of discussion was U.S. President Donald Trump’s nearly hourlong U.N. speech on Tuesday morning. Some media outlets have tried to fact-check the speech, but this misses the point. Whether or not climate activists want to “kill all the cows,” for example, was not central to Trump’s message.

The serious argument that resonated most with me was Trump’s claim that the United Nations is not living up to its founding purpose to resolve global conflicts. It may have been impolitic to deliver that message directly to the UNGA, but that does not make it untrue.

After all, if world leaders were creating global institutions from scratch today, they would never land on the U.N. as currently structured. The U.N. Security Council (UNSC), the primary body responsible for global peace and security, is an artifact of the 1940s. Then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned the four wartime allies—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China—serving as the world’s four police officers. France was later added to make up the five veto-wielding members of the UNSC.

After all, these countries had just worked together to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan; maybe they could work together to solve other threats to global peace.

But it was not to be. The Cold War pitted Washington and Moscow on opposite sides of a half-century ideological struggle, meaning that Moscow vetoed nearly everything Washington wanted to do.

As a result, the UNSC has arguably executed on its founding mission only two times in its history, at the dawn and dusk of the Cold War.