How Trump became laughing stock at UN

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

TEHRAN - U.S. President Donald Trump took the podium of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday and delivered a bombastic speech that drew mocking laugher from the world leaders. In his characteristic foolhardy manner, Trump rejected the ideology of globalism and denounced multilateralism, forgetting that he was speaking from the stage of the global body that endorses both globalism and multilateralism. But, we can expect that from the man with foot-in-mouth syndrome.

Trump began his speech with unabashed self-praise, talking about the “extraordinary progress” his administration has made in less than two years, “more than almost any administration in the history of our country”. With these words, the jam-packed assembly broke out in spontaneous derisive laughter. “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” he reacted, drawing more laughter. The world’s greatest summit briefly appeared like a comedy show.  

Lot of the participants could be seen suppressing their laughter while Trump was quite pompously hailing his government’s ‘accomplishments’, citing fictitious data like $10 trillion wealth added in his tenure, jobless claims at 50-year low, 4 million new jobs, half a million manufacturing jobs. Perhaps he thought he was speaking at a kindergarten to a bunch of nursery students, who would accept his figments of imagination as gospel truth.

He went on to say that his administration was “standing up for America” and “standing up for the world”, adding that America would always choose “independence and cooperation over global governance, control, and domination”. He needs to be reminded of what his country’s founding father Abraham Lincoln famously said. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

The history of U.S. imperialism is replete with stories of violent invasions, unilateral military strikes, gory massacres and socio-cultural aggression. Trump is only following on the footsteps of his predecessors by trying to impose the writ of U.S. on other countries, aiding and abetting global terrorism, imposing draconian economic sanctions, announcing trade and tariff wars, and issuing vile threats to countries that refuse to pledge allegiance to the ‘Big Satan’.

He further talked about his “highly productive conversations” with Chairman Kim of North Korea to pursue the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and said the nuclear testing has stopped and military facilities are being dismantled there. It is very naïve of Trump and his speech-writers to even think that North Korea would pursue denuclearization under the U.S. pressure. But, it certainly goes to show how desperately the Trump administration wants the world to be its colony.

Then he referred to the Middle East, and his visit to Saudi Arabia last year, where he famously did that sword dance with King Salman. He said the Gulf countries (UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) are working with the U.S. to “fight terrorism and extremism in their own region”, and are “pursuing multiple avenues” to end Yemen war. What he really meant was that these Gulf countries are collaborating with the U.S. government to fuel global terrorism and carry out more massacres in Yemen.

Then he came to his favorite topic: Iran. While he thinks Iran has “fueled and financed” the crisis in Syria, he quite brazenly maintains that Saudi Arabia is pursuing avenues to end the Yemen war. His love affair with the King and Crowne Prince has truly turned him blind.

He accused Iranian leaders of “sowing chaos, death, and destruction” and said they do not respect their neighbors or borders, or the sovereign rights of nations. Either he needs to change his advisors and speech writers or he should revisit history to know that Iran has never attacked any foreign country while the U.S. has a history of unprovoked attacks and invasions, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the U.S. government has launched a “campaign of economic pressure” to deny Iran the funds it needs to advance its agenda. Clearly he is taken aback by the unflinching and indomitable resistance put up by Iran against the American policy of global hegemony. For Bush, it was ‘with us or against us’. For Trump, it seems to be ‘my way or the highway’.

By imposing the crippling economic sanctions, he thinks Iran is North Korea that will be forced to bend and work out a compromise formula. He is wrong. As Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said recently, Iranians have been around for millennia and seen fall of empires, including their own, which lasted more than the life of some countries. The bluster clearly doesn’t work here.

Labeling Iran as the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” is not only hilarious but preposterous. It is educative to recollect what George Orwell said in his classic 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

To cut the long story short, the “agenda of aggression and expansion” belongs to Washington, not Tehran, and it’s illustrated by the way America’s allies are slowly turning away from it, including some European countries.  The unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal was a gamble that backfired and exposed the duplicity and hypocrisy of Trump and his cohorts.

One of the main goals of pulling out from the deal was to please the powerful, influence-peddling, pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Interestingly, in his UN speech, Trump mentioned three countries before signing off: India, Saudi Arabia and Israel. He said India was “a free society with over a billion people”, in Saudi King Salman and MBS were “pursuing bold new reforms” and Israel was “proudly celebrating its 70th anniversary as a thriving democracy”.
India is a free story? Saudi will have bold reforms? Israel is a thriving country? This speech deserves award for the best fiction of the year.