The Two UN Speeches

You might not have realized it from reading the news coverage but there were actually two valedictory speeches given at the UN yesterday and they could hardly have been more different. President Obama’s address praised the “liberal international order” and appeared to be directed primarily at a domestic audience:

He painted a dark picture of the future awaiting Americans, and the world, if the forces of “aggressive nationalism” or “crude populism” win out. And he specifically inveighed against building a wall — a centerpiece of Trump’s proposal on border security.

“A nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself,” Obama declared to the assembled representatives of the UN’s member states.

Gone were Obama’s idealistic appeals to bring about a world free of nuclear weapons and an agenda focused on peace, as were his previous UN addresses. The “hope and change” of his argument as a presidential candidate himself was also replaced by exhortations against a future filled with chaos.

“Time and again human beings have believed they finally arrived at a period of enlightenment, only to repeat cycles of conflict and suffering. Perhaps that’s our fate,” Obama suggested.

“We have to remember the choices of individual human beings led to repeated world war,” Obama said. “Each of us as leaders, each nation can choose to reject those who appeal to our worst impulses and embrace those who appeal to our best. For we have shown that we can choose a better history.”

He pointed to growing divisions and discontent at home that challenge those decisions, and noted that the shortcomings of globalization had created “an uncertainty and unease and strife” that required acknowledgement, but not turning inward.

“I believe that at this moment we all face a choice,” Obama said. “We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration or we can retreat into a world sharply divided and ultimately in conflict along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion. I want to suggest to you today that we must go forward and not back.”

To my ear President Obama’s remarks were only tangentially related to reality. The United States is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state, astonishing in its diversity. At present roughly 14% of its population consists of immigrants. We already have among the most liberal trade policies in the world. The evidence that the problems of the world can be solved by the U. S. accepting more “refugees” or further liberalizing its trade is weak.

By comparison China is not multi-ethnic and is barely multi-confessional with religious minorities routinely persecuted. It is an illiberal oligarchy. It has highly restrictive trade policies. Unlike the U. S. for every incremental dollar of GDP it produces proportionally more greenhouse gases.

India remains for practical purposes a one-way autarky. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has a large population of foreign workers with almost no rights. Trade is controlled rigidly. The same may be said of many of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

In other words, not only is President Obama preaching to the choir, he’s damning the choir for its misdeeds when by far the graver misdeeds are those of others.

By comparison UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon’s farewell address was more generally addressed and even less optimistic:

Ban stated that recent achievements in economic development and public health are vulnerable to “grave security threats.”

Armed conflicts have grown more protracted and complex. Governance failures have pushed societies past the brink. Radicalization has threatened social cohesion—precisely the response that violent extremists seek and welcome.

This is not where he then pivoted with a but! to things more hopeful. Instead, Ban went on to detail the consequences of these trends in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sahel region, Ukraine, South Sudan, and North Korea. Still, he saved most of his frustration for Syria, pointing to this week’s bombing of a U.N. aid convoy and saying “just when we think it cannot get any worse, the bar of depravity sinks lower.”

He noted:

Present in this hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all sides of the Syria conflict against Syrian civilians.

He also shouted out both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, calling the current state of affairs “madness” and arguing that abandoning the two-state solution “would spell doom” for both peoples.

He doesn’t like Donald Trump, either.