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.
As he takes the podium to address fellow leaders from across the globe, Trump does so as a politician who sees the world for what it is, not what it ought to be. He did not build this world—Russian President Vladimir Putin has been playing this game for more than two decades, for example—but his instincts fit this moment with precision. For all his faults and flaws, his missteps and mistruths, Trump will speak to a world that is increasingly speaking the same language back to him.
In the past week alone, Trump has reached an agreement with Denmark, a fellow NATO ally, over the fate of Greenland, seen as vital to U.S. national security. The three sides are expected to sign a security agreement that emerged after an American president threatened to take an ally’s territory—by force if it came to that. It was a threat that appalled NATO allies.
But it ultimately worked. Trump, through the aggressive assertion of the hard power at his disposal, has forced a new settlement on Greenland, one that he says maximizes American security interests. There is a cost to that, of course.
It has damaged trust among allies in American leadership and raised concerns that they could be next. But the same hard power logic applies. Ultimately, NATO allies are inextricably dependent on the U.S. for European security.
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