The United Nations General Assembly is meant to showcase international consensus. This week it became a stage for its fiercest critic as Donald Trump returned to New York not to flatter the global order, but to flay it. He accused the UN of bankrolling migration, derided climate policy as hoax, and warned that if Russia refused to end its war, America would impose ‘powerful tariffs’ and force Europe to do the same.
The rest of Donald Trump’s UN speech made the pattern impossible to miss
Later the same day, after meeting Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump struck a different but complementary note: Ukraine, he declared, could recover all of its lost territory, dismissing Russia as a ‘paper tiger’. Headlines quickly hailed a volte-face – only months ago, Trump had implied Kyiv might have to surrender land for peace.
Yet to see this as an embrace of the rules-based order is to miss the point. Trump’s support for Ukraine was presented not as multilateral solidarity but as an extension of the sovereignty-first doctrine he set out from the UN podium. And this has important consequences for the domestic political debate in the UK and Europe.
Trump’s message on Ukraine was striking less for any promise of American firepower than for how seamlessly it slotted into his broader creed. He threatened Moscow with ‘powerful tariffs’ and told Zelensky that Ukraine could ‘fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.’ The meaning was unmistakable: sovereignty should be defended, but with national tools like tariffs, economic pressure, and demands on Europe. By contrast, international institutions or indefinite US commitments are not the answer.
The logic fits neatly with how he sees alliances. For Trump, they are transactional, conditional, and designed to protect America’s primacy rather than sustain any abstract ‘order’. He accused Europeans of hypocrisy, condemning Russia’s invasion while bankrolling it with energy purchases. He admitted he had once thought the war would be ‘the easiest’ to resolve, but instead it has dragged on, killing ‘5,000 to 7,000 young people a week.’ In Trump’s telling, Ukraine is less a rallying cry for liberal multilateralism than a demonstration of its bankruptcy. Only hard sovereign power can fix it, whether through tariffs, energy independence, or border controls.
The rest of his UN speech made the pattern impossible to miss. He claimed the UN had set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to bankroll migrants heading for the United States. He denounced open borders as a civilisation-destroying folly, telling his audience that ‘Your countries are going to hell.’ He dismissed climate policy as a tool to hurt the US and the West, and renewable energy as ‘pathetic’. His refrain was blunt: ‘The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not promote them.’
This was not just another Trump tirade. It was a doctrine, delivered in broad brushstrokes but internally consistent. Sovereignty was cast as the only safeguard against threats, whether from migrants, hostile states or the green lobby. Multilateral institutions, once the proud architecture of the US-built order, were painted as part of the problem. For the president, they are complicit in disorder, not guarantors of it.
The fact that the UN, along with the IMF and World Bank, were built by Washington in the 1940s to embed America’s post-Second World War leadership is not important to the current Administration. What matters is that they are not supporting America as they used to. As the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared in January this year: ‘The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us.’
The timing of Trump’s New York speech matters. Just ten days earlier, China’s UN envoy Fu Cong had told a forum that the world must ‘strengthen global governance centred on the UN’ and warned that ‘unilateralism driven by some countries’ narrow self-interests’ was undermining cooperation. Beijing has cast itself as the new champion of globalisation, trade and multilateral institutions. The contrast could hardly be sharper. Trump mocked the UN as a failed club; China offering to lead it.
A new ideological contest is taking shape. The Cold War was framed as democracy versus communism. The divide today may be sovereignty versus globalism: Beijing defending interdependence, Trump exalting national borders. In that sense, New York provided not just theatre but a preview of the lines along which world politics is now splitting.
If Trump’s doctrine seems parochial, it is anything but. In Britain, his words will be music to the ears of Reform and other sovereigntist politicians who argue that immigration and EU regulation have hollowed out national control. Across Europe, from Italy to Germany, right-wing parties are already riding the backlash against migration. Brexit was the first rupture. Trump’s return to the world stage has given the argument new energy.
Where globalists hear in his rhetoric a retreat from leadership, sovereigntists hear vindication. The defence of Ukraine is not about shoring up a liberal order; it is about affirming the right of a nation to defend its borders. Trump’s framing makes their case for them. When he sneers at the UN and insists that sovereignty is the only principle that matters, he offers not just an American doctrine but an ideological template that sovereigntists in Europe are already copying.
The result is a split that now runs straight through the Western alliance. On one side are the globalists, who see Ukraine as a linchpin of the rules-based order, proof that institutions and collective defence still matter. On the other are the sovereigntists, who see Ukraine as a matter of borders and national survival but reject any reliance on international bodies.
Trump’s two interventions in New York showed clearly which side he is on. In his UN speech, he offered tariffs and rhetoric of sovereignty. In his remarks afterwards, he gave Ukraine encouragement but no promise of multilateral solidarity. The support is real, but it comes in sovereignty-first terms like coercion, tariffs, and national burden-sharing, not collective defence.
Trump’s UN speech may be remembered for its bravado on Ukraine, but the deeper story is his sovereignty doctrine. For Washington, it signals a rejection of the multilateralism that has structured the West since 1945. For Westminster and beyond, it offers encouragement to sovereigntist parties who are already on the march. Trump’s pivot is not just about Ukraine. It is about re-drawing the battle lines of Western politics – globalists versus sovereigntists – and declaring that sovereignty, not globalism, is the banner under which he intends to fight.
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