Donald Trump Returns to a World That Speaks His Language

When President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, he does so on home turf, in New York City. But it might as well be a foreign country.

The U.N. is alien to Trump’s worldview, a multilateral institution supposedly about dialogue and compromise, built on 20th-century idealism after two devastating wars.

Though Trump, who is around the same age as the U.N. itself, is a transactional leader, his sense of deal making is that it sits downstream from hard power.

That is a more traditional understanding of how power works, one that had governed international relations for centuries before. In truth, as Trump understands, it still does.

As he takes the podium to address fellow leaders from across the globe, Trump does so as a politician who sees the world for what it is, not what it ought to be.

He did not build this world—Russian President Vladimir Putin has been playing this game for more than two decades, for example—but his instincts fit this moment with precision.

For all his faults and flaws, his missteps and mistruths, Trump will speak to a world that is increasingly speaking the same language back to him.

In the past week alone, Trump has reached an agreement with Denmark, a fellow NATO ally, over the fate of Greenland, seen as vital to U.S. national security.

The three sides are expected to sign a security agreement that emerged after an American president threatened to take an ally’s territory—by force if it came to that.

It was a threat that appalled NATO allies. But it ultimately worked.

Trump, through the aggressive assertion of the hard power at his disposal, has forced a new settlement on Greenland, one that he says maximizes American security interests.

There is a cost to that, of course. It has damaged trust among allies in American leadership and raised concerns that they could be next.

But the same hard power logic applies. Ultimately, NATO allies are inextricably dependent on the U.S. for European security.

This brings us to NATO defense spending. Trump has again used a dramatic, almost-unthinkable threat—a U.S. withdrawal from NATO—to secure what he wants from the alliance.

He is not the first U.S. president to want European allies to share a greater portion of the burden of their own security.

But he is the first to actually trigger them to do it, and it took the drastic leveraging of American hard power to get there.

Now, NATO allies have committed to—and most actually are—increasing their defense spending as the U.S. reviews its posture in Europe.

The alliance is taking more seriously than ever how European allies can defend themselves, rather than leaning disproportionately on the U.S.

Of course, the U.S. needs NATO too, to counter the Russian nuclear threat to itself and to keep stable the European market in which so much of American trade takes place.

But a new NATO is emerging from Trump’s disruption and the escalating threat Russia poses to Europe amid its faltering war against Ukraine.

Back in the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela is going from strength to strength after Trump’s stunning operation to seize Nicolas Maduro from Caracas.

The socialist regime in Venezuela was a close ally of American enemies, and its economic mismanagement squandered the country’s vast oil resources.

Moreover, the corrupt impoverishment of its own people created issues for U.S. national security through drug cartels and illegal immigration.

These problems are on their way to being resolved after the Maduro ouster, only made possible through Trump’s old-school, gun-toting realpolitik.

The communist island of Cuba, blockaded by the U.S. and now cut off from Venezuelan help, appears to be next, though action there looks stalled by the Iranian mire.

Speaking of which, there is no clean strategic victory for Trump there, and he may well have overplayed his hand, a symptom of the hubris that often infects American power.

A war that was supposed to be over in weeks, on Trump’s timeline, is still ongoing, wearing down critical stocks of American munitions.

The Iranian threat persists in the throttled Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for a fifth of global oil and gas flows in normal times.

And now the Houthis, and Iranian-backed militia in Yemen, have opened up a new war against Saudi Arabia, strangling oil and gas shipping through the alternative Red Sea route.

But let’s not give the Iranian regime too much credit. Its economy is utterly crippled under U.S. military action and the Treasury’s latest sweeping sanctions.

The Iranian military is severely depleted. Its friends, namely Russia and China, seem to have given Tehran little more than targeting intelligence. It was deadly to American troops, but not game-changing.

In fact, China, the largest purchaser of Iranian oil, is reportedly quietly pressuring Tehran to pull the Houthis back from their attacks on Saudi Arabia.

Strategic partnerships are clearly not alliances.

And any Iranian nuclear ambitions lie in ruins thanks in large part to U.S.-Israeli airstrikes.

So Trump cannot yet claim a victory in Iran, and Americans are suffering an inflationary blowback through higher energy prices.

But he has extracted a vast price from Tehran for its intransigence over the nuclear issue and its use of proxy militias to sow havoc across the region.

Trump did that by eschewing the type of diplomacy that produced the 2015 Iran deal in favor of what he knows best—exercising hard power to create more leverage.

And so it was with China, America’s great power rival with who Trump had opened up a trade war to force a negotiation on a range of issues, including supplies of critical minerals.

There is a detente right now, and Chinese President Xi Jinping is due in the U.S. for a state visit this week.

He and Trump met in Beijing in May and produced new trade and investment mechanisms alongside Chinese purchasing commitments.

The U.S.-China competition is intact, and the two sides are bargaining bilaterally, as Xi and Trump will do in Washington, D.C., this week—a few hundred miles from the hall built to embody multilateral diplomacy.

But it is America’s closest neighbor, geographically and culturally, that will perhaps offer the best test of the limits of Trump-style power politics.

Canada, locked in a bitter trade feud with the U.S., and angered by Trump’s repeated mocking that they should become the 51st state, is looking elsewhere.

Ottawa is seeking deeper trade ties with China and the European Union, perhaps even becoming an associate member of the latter, if such a thing can be invented by Brussels.

This is a big strategic pivot away from the U.S., with whom Canada is deeply intertwined economically. It is not clear that Ottawa can pull it off, but Prime Minister Mark Carney is certainly trying.

So, today at the U.N., Trump comes to an institution designed to tame power at a moment when hard power is again openly changing the world we live in.

Maybe that’s regression, maybe it’s just the realism we’ve always lived under. Either way, for better or worse, it’s Trump’s world right now.