UNITED NATIONS (CN) — This year’s United Nations General Assembly has brought together in New York hundreds of leaders including the body’s leadership and more than 90 heads of state. President Donald Trump per usual is leaving all of them in suspense.
From global efforts to combat climate change to adequately financing the U.N.’s basic functions, Trump has played coy about his intentions.
Even hours before his New York arrival on Sunday, Trump sent mixed signals about his plan for the Paris agreement, and he still has not announced whether he would follow through on threats earlier this year to ax nearly 44 percent of U.S. funding for international organizations.
In the words of Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ spokesman, such cuts would render U.N. peacekeeping, development and humanitarian missions “impossible.” Trump spent most of his presidential campaign denouncing the United Nations as a "bad deal," and yet his top adviser recently lauded the institution’s “tremendous potential.”
The path that Trump offers the United Nations this year is in some ways starker than that of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who strutted on the world stage wearing an empty holster, saying he offered “an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other.”
Trump also carries a fearsome, metaphorical weapon: control over the purse strings of the organization’s largest funding source.
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University, predicts minimal shakeup.
“The thing about Trump is that he often pulls back on things he said,” Greenberg said in a phone interview.
On the diplomatic arena, this trend recently played out in Cuba, where Trump’s bellicose rhetoric masked a modest policy shift that left most of President Barack Obama’s normalization intact.
U.S. and U.N. officials already have signaled compromise may be coming on the most urgent issues as general debate kicks off at General Assembly’s 72nd session.
One Fewer Opportunity to Be Upstaged
Some of the uncertainty on U.N. reform will be relieved after Trump and Guterres emerge from their meeting on Monday morning.
Recent statements by Trump’s national security adviser suggest that the outcome here is already preordained.
“The president will express support of Secretary-General Guterres’ reform efforts,” Gen. H.R. McMaster told reporters on Friday. “The United Nations holds, of course, tremendous potential to realize its founding ideals, but only if it’s run more efficiently and effectively.”
On the eve of his much-anticipated speech Tuesday, Trump is set to have dinner Monday with the leaders of Latin American nations to discuss violence in Venezuela, whose President Nicolas Maduro opted to tend to civil unrest at home this year.
That snub gave the reality-television-star-turned-head-of-state one fewer opportunity to be upstaged: In 2006, Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez theatrically crossed himself before pronouncing then-President George W. Bush the devil.
"It still smells of sulphur today," Chavez said more than a decade ago.
