James Gibney, Columnist

What Trump Got Wrong (and Right) at the UN

Of course sovereignty matters. But it isn’t a one-way street.

September 26, 2018 at 5:30 PM UTC

James Gibney is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously an editor at the Atlantic, the New York Times, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy and the New Republic, he was also in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1989 to 1997 in India, Japan and Washington.

Rules are good.
Photographer: John Moore/Getty Images

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Before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in New York to deliver this year’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, his top national-security officials promised that he would affirm the importance of sovereignty in U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. As National Security Adviser John Bolton put it, Trump planned to “talk a lot about American sovereignty.”

He did, and that was precisely the problem. The president fails to recognize that sovereignty isn’t a one-way street — and that institutions like the UN, far from threatening sovereignty, in fact establish the conditions in which it can flourish.