Commentary
President Trump’s address to the United Nations last week was a historic speech and a tour de force. He made the point that the United Nations is a useless talking shop, incapable even of making its escalator and teleprompter work. He identified the twin threats to the survival of Western civilization to be the uncontrolled flood of immigration from desperate and often chronically criminal people with no interest in becoming functioning citizens of a new jurisdiction, and the drive to reduce carbon dioxide on the mistaken theory that climate change is a threat to life itself.
These waves of illegal immigration are not immigration at all but only desperate masses fleeing adversity, while sheltering substantial numbers of very violent and dangerous criminals. It is an invasion, and resembles nothing so much as the barbarians pouring into the Western Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., ahead of the more destructive and ferocious barbarians who followed them in the fifth century and completely overthrew the Western Roman Empire.
The president even revealed that the U.N. had made substantial financial contributions to subsidize illegal immigrants into the United States, who are now, at great expense and social stress, being systematically deported.
Trump unmistakably made the point that the U.N. is effectively a force for the destruction of its principal member states that pay its bills.
He accurately described anthropogenic climate change as the greatest hoax in history, and pointed out the immense cost to people in Western Europe due to increased home heating and gasoline expenses. Europe had reduced its carbon footprint by over 30 percent, but this was completely useless to the declared objective of reducing global emissions, as the total world carbon footprint at the same time increased by nearly 60 percent.
Trump also pointed out how hideously expensive wind and solar power are, and that they can only be extracted and used for electrical generation at all when the sun is out and the wind is blowing. He made a telling point that the Chinese manufacture most of the windmills for energy generation in the world, but don’t use any of them themselves. His illustrations of the fatuity of the policy of the United Nations and many of its member states in these matters were very graphic and unanswerable.
Having rubbed the nose of the 192 other member states in the mistakes and pretensions and hypocrisy of the organization, he directly addressed the two principal wars now in progress in the world. He assaulted the hypocrisy of forgetting the origins of the present Gaza war: an invasion of Israel by Hamas, the massacre of 1,200 people, and the taking of 250 hostages, many of whom have been murdered in captivity, which violated an existing ceasefire. The only excuse for it has been the conviction of the anti-Israel terrorists that Israel does not have the right to survive as a Jewish state, and that the survival of a Palestinian state, which has been on offer for 25 years, would be invalid and meaningless if it existed alongside Israel.
Few things could be more obvious than that it will be impossible to have any lasting peace, where Israel’s neighbors believe that they cannot coexist with the Jewish state, and therefore will continue to harass and terrorize it indefinitely. Any peace based on the continued ability of the Arab terrorist regime to return indefinitely to this activity is no recipe for peace, but merely for continued terror and war. The fact that many of the U.N.’s member states have taken complete leave of these facts is merely indicative of the ineffectuality, hypocrisy, and irrelevance of the United Nations.
Trump’s comments on the Ukraine war are even more germane. He had gone to some lengths to conciliate Russia because he recognized that defeating Russia in a manner that was gratuitously humiliating could have the effect of driving that country more thoroughly and deeply into the arms of China. This could have the effect of producing an arrangement in which China moves 30 or 40 million of its surplus population into Siberia and exploits the resources of that area—as Russia has never been able to do (except for oil and gas)—in exchange for a royalty. This would reduce Russia to the status of a vassal of China and endow China with strategic resources that it has never had before. Obviously, this is an outcome that would be extremely unfortunate for the West, as it would effectively install China as the dominant force in the Eurasian land mass.
President Trump made it clear that he has now lost patience with President Putin’s bad faith as well as with the hypocrisy of America’s European allies. The Western European members of NATO have consistently besieged the United States to do the necessary to defeat the Russians, while themselves providing arms and munitions reasonably generously to Ukraine. But they have also been buying gas from Russia on a scale that effectively finances Russia’s conduct of the war. It was not so long ago that Europe was led by political figures of the stature of Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Charles de Gaulle, and François Mitterrand, and it is inconceivable that those leaders would have been party to such contemptible double-dealing and humbug.
Trump noted that he would soon be attempting to reach an agreement with the Western European powers for alternative sources of energy other than Russia, at which point the United States would be prepared to impose severe sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Russia.
The Kremlin appears to be sleepwalking toward a serious reversal. Trump has got the isolationists in his own party off his back by persuading the European NATO members and Canada to raise their defense contribution to 5 percent of GDP, and using some of these funds to buy sophisticated military hardware from the United States and hand it on to Ukraine with revised rules of use and engagement. This will enable the Russian public to participate more fully in the war experience, and endure the attacks on civilian areas that the Russians have never ceased to rain down upon the Ukrainians.
The president’s description of Russia as a “paper tiger” was correct when it is not just facing the much smaller country of Ukraine, but rather all of NATO. Russia has a smaller GDP than Canada and only about 40 percent of the population of the United States, and has already taken more than a million casualties and suffered over 50,000 desertions and hundreds of thousands of conscription evasions in Ukraine.
It has been Trump’s policy to try to get a peace deal that avoided such a humiliation of Russia that it was driven permanently into the arms of China. But Putin’s conduct has been so dishonest and provoking that he has pushed himself into a corner. Unless he comes to his senses and begins negotiating in good faith on the basis of existing conditions on the ground and not wild fantasies about restoring Stalin’s USSR, he will bring down upon his country by far its greatest reversal since the disintegration of the Soviet Union 35 years ago.
President Trump’s address to the United Nations made it clear that the continuation of a terrorist entity on Israel’s border would not be tolerated, that Russian demands for the complete emasculation of Ukraine would not be accepted, and that the U.N. itself is in drastic need both of institutional reform and drastic revision of the authoritarian, anti-Western, socialistic dogma that guides the majority of its members.
The organization founded with great hopefulness by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 has become a primal scream therapy center for the most failed and corrupt governments in the world. The serious and successful countries should sponsor profound reforms, and it may be that President Trump’s Sept. 23 address will be seen as the beginning of this long-overdue step.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
