On the day when the American President delivered his second speech to the United Nations General Assembly, followed by the Presidents of France, Turkey and Iran, the nightly news only reported the fact that the audience laughed when Trump boasted about his domestic accomplishments. Although Trump issued a detailed indictment of Iran Americans would have had to turn to France 24 to hear the response of its leader, not to mention any analysis.
When I relocated to the US in 2000, the absence of foreign news motivated me to inquire of NBC. The response was: ”Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs.” This was neither a new attitude nor a momentary one. After the end of World War I, reflecting the founding fathers’ opposition to ‘foreign entanglements’, the US Congress refused to join President Wilson’s League of Nations because it did not include a provision that only the US Congress could take the country to war.
This outlier attitude continues to put the United States at odds with the rest of the world. Even France, long addicted to the international spotlight, recognized that the second world war ended European leadership, pegging its claim to influence to its Security Council veto, a privilege it shares with the US, Russia, China, and the UK. At the opening of this year’s General Assembly, marking the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, France and the United States squared off over their two opposite international philosophies.
President Trump loftily defended isolationism, while Emanuel Macron, breaking with the UN’s bureaucratic style, delivered a plea for internationalism. The French President’s domestic speeches that I have caught on France 24 could have come from Jupiter himself, however, when posing his candidacy for president of the world, which he was obviously doing, Macron channeled Mirabeau, the lead orator of the French Revolution, in an impassioned plea to the North to respond to global inequality.
If the UN, born in 1945 as a rebuke to the impotent League of Nations, has proved somewhat more effective at keeping ‘final solutions’ at bay, it’s mainly because technology brought its deliberations into living rooms across the globe and allowed for improved communication among leaders. Still, the UN has for decades cried out for reform, consistently thwarted by a US reluctant to give up its position of primus inter pares. It has taken a second Cold War for the only body in which rivals can meet face to face in the presence of their peers, to begin to take a decisive turn away from US hegemony, toward the multi-polar world whose philosophy its members have observed in action between Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa, the first four of which came together for the first time in 2006.
Announcing that France would chair the G7 in 1919, Macron hinted that he would invite Russia to again become a member. (It was expelled in 2014 by President Obama after holding a referendum on Crimea returning to Russia.) Although President Trump backed this invitation a few months ago, he mouthed the dying liberal order’s claim that Putin and Xi’s multi-polar world would be ‘a return to nineteenth century spheres of influence’ — ending US hegemony.
Although Turkey was a founding member of NATO, President Erdogan still accuses the US of harboring the man whom he believes fomented a 2016 attempted coup, of which he received forewarning from Moscow, mentioning casually a recent meeting with Vladimir Putin in Sochi to discuss Syria. He did not mention the fact that Turkey has been invited to join the BRICS, Russia and China’s formula for cooperation across the racial divide, but the attendees are aware that this will bring the Muslim world into that organization.
Similarly, the world’s turn away from Atlanticism and toward multi-polarism was illustrated by Iran’s President Rohani, who responded to President Trump’s accusations of evil-doing point by point in front of an audience that was clearly on his side. As a member of the P5+1 Agreement on Iran’s nuclear program (France, Great Britain, Germany, China, Russia, the United States), President Macron also proposed that the G7 refuse to do business with countries that do not respect international agreements, targeting US abandonment of that agreement.
It has taken 73 years and many wars for the UN to begin to embody its founding principles, and the best thing to have happened to it thus far is France’s forty-one year old Emanuel Macron, a former Rothschild banker who takes himself very seriously, but who dares to choose La Marseillaise over globalization.
P.S. If anyone thinks I am going out on a limb by signaling Macron’s world level ambitions, the French President took advantage of the presence of international leaders in New York for the UN General Assembly to open on Wednesday a One Planet Summit, courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies, exhorting them to meet their responsibilities for the future of humanity.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exlusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.
