Donald Trump Challenges Global Norms at the U.N. Assembly

When President Donald Trump addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, he does so on home turf, in New York City. But it might as well be a foreign country.

The U.N. is alien to Trump’s worldview, a multilateral institution supposedly about dialogue and compromise, built on 20th-century idealism after two devastating wars.

Though Trump, who is around the same age as the U.N. itself, is a transactional leader, his sense of deal making is that it sits downstream from hard power.

That is a more traditional understanding of how power works, one that had governed international relations for centuries before. In truth, as Trump understands, it still does.

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