“America is governed by Americans,” he declared on the opening day of the Assembly’s annual general debate. “We reject the ideology of globalism and adhere to the doctrine of patriotism. Responsible nations everywhere must defend themselves against threats to their sovereignty not only from global governance, but also from other new forms of coercion and domination.”
At the same time, he reiterated the United States’ commitment to making the UN more effective and accountable. “I have said many times that the United Nations has unlimited potential,” he said.
United States-UN relations
But Mr. Trump reiterated his past criticism of the world body, lashing out at UN-backed organizations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the recently proposed Global Compact on Migration while emphasizing that the United States will pay no more than 25 percent of the UN peacekeeping budget to encourage other countries to step up their efforts and share the burden.
“And we are working to shift more of our funding from mandatory contributions to voluntary contributions so that we can target American resources to programs with the best results,” he said. “Only when each of us does our part and contributes can we achieve the highest aspirations of the United Nations.”
He added that despite his warning to the Assembly last year that “the United Nations Human Rights Council had become a grave embarrassment to this institution, protecting the perpetrators of gross human rights violations while denigrating America and its many friends… no action was taken.
“The United States therefore chose the only responsible course: we withdrew from the Human Rights Council and we will not return until real reform is passed.”
The International Criminal Court has “no legitimacy”
“As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority,” he said. “The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating every principle of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected and unaccountable global bureaucracy.”
Likewise, he declared that the United States would not participate in the new Global Compact on Migration, which is expected to be adopted in Morocco next December.
“Migration should not be governed by an international body that is not accountable to our own citizens,” he stressed.
On trade issues, in which Mr. Trump recently imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports on $200 billion of imports from China, Mr. Trump said the United States has opened its economy with few strings attached, allowing foreign goods from around the world to flow freely across our borders, while other countries have not provided fair and reciprocal access.
“The United States will no longer be exploited,” he added. “Some countries have abused their openness to undercut their products, subsidize their goods, target our industries, and manipulate their currencies to gain an unfair advantage over our country. As a result, our trade deficit has ballooned to nearly $800 billion a year. Because of this, we are systematically renegotiating broken and bad trade deals.”
As for Iran, Mr. Trump called Iran’s nuclear power “a godsend” for the country’s leaders, and in the years since the deal was struck, Iran’s military budget has increased by nearly 40 percent. “The dictatorship used these funds to build nuclear-capable missiles, increase internal repression, finance terrorism and finance devastation and massacres in Syria and Yemen.”
The agreement, officially known as Joint Comprehensive Action Plan (JCPOA), was concluded in 2015 by Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. It establishes rigorous mechanisms to monitor restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, while paving the way for the lifting of UN sanctions against the country.
“We cannot allow the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism to possess the most dangerous weapons on the planet. We cannot allow a regime that chants ‘Death to America’ and threatens Israel with annihilation to possess the means to deliver a nuclear warhead to any city on Earth,” Trump said.
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