President Rorschach

I didn’t listen to or read President Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. I think he’s a boor, dolt, and provocateur and I doubt that he said anything that would change those views. Judging by the reactions I’ve read the speech like the man himself was a Rorschach test—your reaction is more dependent on the views you came in with than what you actually took from the speech.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal express grudging approval for the threats issued to North Korea in the speech:

The President abandoned any nuance, even by his standards, in denouncing the “rogue regimes” in North Korea and Iran. He was especially unabashed in describing North Korea’s offenses, calling it a “depraved regime.” These aren’t words typically heard at Turtle Bay, where others among the depraved sit on the Human Rights Council, as Mr. Trump also had the effrontery to point out.

But he really rattled the seats with his threat to act against North Korea if the U.N. fails to do so. “No nation on Earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arm itself with nuclear weapons and missiles,” Mr. Trump said. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

The threat to destroy the North offended the foreign affairs cognoscenti, who view Mr. Trump as a barbarian. And at first hearing the “Rocket Man” reference to dictator Kim Jong Un does sound like an insult better left to teenagers in the school yard.

Then again, Mr. Trump inherited the North Korean nuclear crisis, and he is trying to get a cynical world’s attention that he intends to do something about it. Traditional diplomacy isn’t getting through to Mr. Kim and his entourage, or to their patrons in Beijing. After years of Barack Obama’s diplomatic niceties that ducked the problem, maybe the world needs to be told some unpleasant truths about an evil regime with a weapon of mass murder and the means to deliver it.

but they didn’t care for his notions of sovereignty:

“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” he said, “but we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties, to respect the interests of their own people and rights of every other sovereign nation.”

How about the rights of their own people? Defined in such narrow terms, “sovereignty” and “interests” don’t include room for how nations govern themselves, which matters to how dangerous they are to their neighbors. In his own speech Mr. Trump rightly spent many sentences deploring how North Korea and Iran treat their people.

I wonder what rights they have in mind? The United States is an outlier. Freedom of expression, the press, and of religion are all much more expansive here than in other countries including countries which are our closest friends and relatives, e.g. the United Kingdom, and, as I noted in an earlier post, they’re under assault here. Many European countries recognize a “right to roam” which is called “trespassing” here.

As I have pointed out before there are more slaves worldwide today than there were in 1860 and the country with the most slaves? India, notionally a free and liberal country.

I think that the editors are responding to the U. S.’s bad habit of forcing their own notions of rights and government on other people. The “spheres of influence” they decry are the way of the world in the absence of American hegemony.

4 comments… add one
  • gray shambler Link

    Ly’in Ted, Little Mario, Crooked Hillary, Rocket man, surprised it wasn’t Rocket boy. Certainly is schoolyard, but seems to work for him.

  • Andy Link

    “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

    I’m sure Trump doesn’t realize how statements like this are interpreted in other cultures. I don’t often agree with the FP establishment, but in this case they are correct. This sort of statemen is, at best, unwise.

  • I’m sure Trump doesn’t realize how statements like this are interpreted in other cultures.

    I’m sure he doesn’t. However, every president of the last 25 years including Barack Obama has made very similar statements at one time or another about North Korea. President Obama did so just last year. He did, however, follow up with a number of disclaimers and qualifications.

  • Guarneri Link

    I think all would agree we could do with less Crooked Hillary, tweeting etc.

    But what a different world we would have if ” We do not expect expect diverse….” had been the posture of numerous administrations. At least we could limit the arguing to the veracity of our institutions See: Iraq or Viet Nam, or what constitutes a latent bone fide threat. See NK.

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