Media Briefing: Unpacking the President’s UNGA Speech

 

CFR experts analyze President Donald Trump’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, September 23, and discuss how it will shape further dialogue on trade, immigration, European security, and U.S. relations with Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

CHANG: All right. Let’s get started. My name is Ben Chang. I’m the vice president for global communications here at the Council on Foreign Relations.

I simply want to say thank you for joining this briefing. It’s a new approach to helping address and analyze the U.N. General Assembly with a wide array of Council experts who will help analyze the president’s remarks to the world body earlier today. As a former Foreign Service officer who served at our U.S. mission to the United Nations twice, I’m particularly grateful for the time all of you are making, both the attendees as well as our fellows and our speakers today. So thank you, again, for helping us launch this new approach to looking at the U.N. General Assembly.

With that, I look forward to handing this over to Lilly Behbehani, my colleague who really masterminded this plan and will help lead us through the next hour. Thank you.

BEHBEHANI: Thank you, Ben. And welcome, everybody, to today’s Council on Foreign Relations media briefing on unpacking the president’s UNGA speech. The contents of this discussion and roundtable, Q&A will be on the record and a recording of this will be posted online at the conclusion of the discussion. This briefing is a part of the Council’s ongoing mission to inform U.S. engagement with the world, work that also includes the analysis and resources posted across our channels, including on CFR.org and ForeignAffairs.com. Please continue to turn to the Council as a resource as we navigate these times and issues going forward.

We have a robust lineup of our Council experts for you today. And we will start with Esther Brimmer, the James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance, and our moderator for today’s briefing. Over to you, Esther.

BRIMMER: Thank you, Lilly. And welcome to all of our guests. We hope this discussion will be helpful for you. And I thank my colleagues for taking time to have this conversation so that we can have a broad-based conversation about the issues that were raised today in the president’s speech at the General Assembly in New York.

One of the interesting opening points, I would say, would be the throughline between domestic policy and what the president raised today at the United Nations. Often a president will focus on foreign policy issues that will seem separate from his domestic agenda. But in this case, the president highlighted two issues, particularly migration and the green economy/climate change issues, in his speech. And there are direct throughlines between his domestic policy and the foreign affairs issues he raised today.

If you were to go back and reread his four speeches from his first term, you would see a lot of lines in there that talk about migration. But in this speech, he greatly expanded the discussion. He since doubled down on a theme in the second term that was raised in the first term, but is a much larger part of his international message. He painted migration as a challenge for states. And, in his conclusion, noted that you need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you want to be great again.

He’s often talked about individual state’s rich heritage, but in this case he also saw migration as, quote, “destroying countries.” He argued that the United Nations, a nebulous grouping of everything related to the U.N., as funding an assault on Western countries. He argued that—he even went on, talking about European allies, to say that Europe has been invaded by illegal aliens, reflected on the mayor of London, and other issues. He also commented on what he saw as children being trafficked in the Americas. It was a much darker, even more sinister picture of the role of migration as eroding cultural norms.

He also criticized particularly the multilateral efforts at developing the green economy. He hailed having pulled the United States out of the Paris accord and argued that states that had been pursuing a green agenda actually were taken advantage of. So he even noted that while China builds wind turbines, from his point of view, he argues that—he was quite critical of, let’s say, wind turbines as part of alternative energy packages. So both the issues of migration and the issues related to the green economy were raised. And, standing in the hall of the General Assembly, he presented himself as the peace dealmaker, and cited seven different conflicts in which he thinks he made an important contribution towards resolving peace.

That’s just a taste of some of the things that were raised in the speech today. I would like to turn to my colleagues to go into these issues in greater depth. May I turn to you—start off with you, Ted? You may want to go ahead and introduce yourself and then talk about some of what you heard when you heard the president’s speech.

ALDEN: Yeah. Thanks very much, Esther.

I’m Ted Alden. I’m part-time these days, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I teach at Western Washington University in the beautiful Pacific Northwest up near the Canadian border, and I’ve worked on immigration and border issues now for a couple of decades.

I think Esther gave a very nice overview of some of the high points of what the president said on migration but I think it’s worth us—and this is a good opportunity to do it—to stand back and try to understand the profound changes in the U.S. approach to immigration policy, which has implications for the entire world.

We have become almost numbed to the profusion of policy announcements in the area of immigration, the most recent being the $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applicants, that it’s sometimes hard to stand back and put it in context.

If you look at Trump in the first term, I think one could have argued that he was only slightly ahead of where Republicans have been on the immigration issue for many years, which is that immigration is a positive thing for the United States. America is, in John F. Kennedy’s famous words, a nation of immigrants.

But there are problems. Illegal migration is a problem. Security is a problem. Terrorism is a problem. We need to fix those problems.

Much of what President Trump did in his first term was not inconsistent with that set of beliefs. What he laid out before the United Nations today is a completely different understanding of immigration and its effects here in the United States and more broadly in the world.

The United States, certainly for the last seventy-five years and off and on again before that, has, largely, been a pro-immigrant nation. Lots of caveats, of course, but what he was saying quite clearly today is no, immigration is bad for the United States. It’s been harmful for us, and as you pointed out, extending that to the rest of the world, saying it’s harmful for other countries and he talked about this on multiple dimensions.

He talked about crime and, you know, European jails filled with foreign citizens, a complicated issue. He talked about the United Nations encouraging people who were trying to move from one country to the next.

I mean, historically, the United States has strongly supported the right of asylum. It goes back to the end of the Second World War and so many countries, including our own, refusing to take in Jews who were fleeing from Nazi Germany and there was very much in the post-war period a never again mentality. We will help people who are fleeing persecution and the threat of death.

He’s saying, no, that’s a terrible thing to do. People should stay in their own countries and if we encourage them to leave, in fact, that’s harmful to them. The United Nations is encouraging people to migrate, to leave in what may be desperate situations in places like Venezuela or Cuba, but by doing that he’s actually harming those people.

There’s danger on those journeys. When they get to the United States their children are in effect being enslaved. The president is reversing that—I’m reuniting families, I’m stopping people from coming to the border. I am more of a humanitarian by shutting the country down to immigration than I would have been by continuing the past policies.

And just overlying all of this, and then I’ll stop there, is very much a broader cultural theme. Again, most of us look at the history of the United States and immigration. We talked about the melting pot. We talked about the different ways in which immigration has strengthened the United States, made our identity, that anyone can come and become an American by embracing our values.

His is a much more—it’s hard even to find the right language but sort of ethno-nationalist version that Americans and Europeans and others are being harmed by immigration because there are people coming who don’t share our values. It’s an invasion that’s undermining our society and culture.

And so I think this speech was a great opportunity just to stand back and recognize what a profound, profound change this is in almost a century of the United States approach to immigration. He has changed our country very profoundly with respect to that issue.

BRIMMER: So it was interesting that he mentioned the ancestors of people in countries now having crossed oceans, which suggests that on one hand he’s celebrating those who have crossed oceans, including his own family, yet while also speaking against migrants. So you wonder about a little bit of the sort of tension in that phrasing.

ALDEN: Oh, I mean, absolutely, right? I mean very much in his view of the world the old European migration in the United States was a great thing, built this nation, but the newer migration coming from Latin America, India, elsewhere in the world is harmful. Again. I think, you know, ethnonationalist is the right phrase for that point of view. But however one labels it, it’s just important to recognize what a change it is. And even, you know, for all of the conflicts between Democrats and Republicans over immigration policy—I was very active in the, you know, 2013 immigration reform efforts—there was a conviction in both parties that immigration was basically a positive for the United States. The debates were over how to control the unwanted consequences, particularly illegal migration. He has moved the Republican Party, and this country because he’s the president, into a completely different position on that issue.

BRIMMER: It was interesting also, in a setting that is, of course, a global setting, that the examples he used on this issue were all about migration into Europe or North America.

ALDEN: Which is an excellent point, right, because the vast majority of the world’s migration these days takes place among other countries, not, you know, what we used to call sort of south-north migration, but people moving to different countries, often at a similar economic level. So yeah, again, it’s a very sort of American-centric, to a lesser extent European-centric, view of the world and how migration dynamics operate with respect to those parts of the world. Not a global view at all.

BRIMMER: Indeed. If I may turn to Alice, that indeed the president also had quite a lot to say about the efforts to create a green economy—one of the hallmarks of multilateral action since the Paris agreement done in 2015. What did you see? What struck you about the discussions of these issues in the speech today?

HILL: Well, this was a tour de force. I mean, he spent about a quarter of an hour talking about climate change. Highly personalized. He called people who work on climate change, the scientists, stupid people. He said that they had evil intentions. Called it a con, a hoax, a scam. Now, remember his audience. Virtually all nations besides Yemen and just a few others, and the United States, are parties to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change. President Trump obviously is trying to leave that. But as part of that convention, all those nations, through their scientific consensus-based reports, based on peer-reviewed science, have agreed that climate change is occurring. It’s warming our temperatures. It’s causing the oceans to rise and bringing much more severe weather.

So Trump is denying that and saying that clean energy efforts, which would reduce the harmful emissions that trap that heat, that cause the harm—he’s trying to say we should pull back on that, and that there is no need to focus on this. That it will destroy the European economy, because Europe has continued to be a leader in focusing on efforts to achieve clean energy for the benefit not only of Europe, which is suffering from very extreme weather, but also for the globe. And President Trump wants to sell more oil and gas to Europe. And Europe has said we want more understanding of what the emissions are that are in that oil and gas that you want to sell us, so that we can be assured that we are not further harming the planet by purchasing this. And there are certainly steps to reduce emissions in the production of oil and gas to reduce those risks.

It was a stunning speech. He attacked cows. And he attacked wind, solar. And he virtually ignored the growth in green energy that has spread across the globe. Many countries in Africa view their energy security as tied with solar. Australia has turned deeply to solar. A coal-based economy is turning to solar. He is just ignoring what’s happening in the rest of the world, and proving that the United States has gone off into a far corner on climate change that really no one else is interested in joining in a significant way—other than perhaps other fossil fuel-producing nations.

So it’s very surprising that he continues to double down that it’s not harmful when we have buckets—overwhelming evidence that it is harmful and, by the way, numerous decisions by courts that climate change is causing harm. So we’ve got the judicial branch, we’ve got the diplomatic corps all saying this is harmful, but President Trump is standing alone among nations in saying the United States should back off on doing anything even though it is the world’s historically largest emitter.

BRIMMER: It’s extraordinary that there are so many activities going on in New York this week and many of them will be related to climate. Would you anticipate the U.S. will just continue to be absent? We didn’t go to the ocean convention this year. If we think about sort of the—just generally the multilateral convenings and discussions of climate change issues, would you anticipate the U.S. would remain either absent or quiet?

HILL: Certainly quiet. I think they’ll have minimal presence. And of course, in November we will have the Conference of the Parties, the thirtieth such meeting under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Brazil. U.S. will be a very minor player there, and we will see how much influence—and that’s the big risk—President Trump’s position has on climate has on the rest of the world, and whether that will simply—his insistence on fossil fuels will derail efforts and ambition from other nations.

One of the interesting things we should all watch is China’s rise on this issue, because certainly it has built a tremendous industrial presence on clean energy and continues to expand that across the globe, leaving the United States in the dust if the United States does not continue to invest in clean energy and innovation just to learn how to do that cheaply, efficiently, and effectively. It’s leaving that to China at the moment.

BRIMMER: Indeed, he also raised the U.S. economy as an example, arguing that it was the strongest ever, and talked about what he thought were accomplishments of this administration related to economic issues. Heidi, if I may turn to you, what did you hear on both the economic and other fronts in this speech?

CREBO-REDIKER: Yeah. So he actually opened the speech today trumpeting sort of a mission-accomplished moment on the U.S. economy, and saying that it was the strongest economy in the world. And I think—you know, I think that that is aspirational. I think it’s premature and it’s too soon to tell.

And why is that? Well, employment is a big question. The Fed just made that clear. They’re cutting—they cut because of labor market concerns. Companies are pulling back on their hiring and younger people are finding it harder to get a job.

Inflation, is it defeated as he said? Well, it’s still an issue. It’s above the 2 percent target, and it’s actually creeping up towards 3 percent, and that big question of tariffs and when the tariff shock is going to hit inflation. They just started kicking in for real in August, and so we really haven’t had that one-off shock. But I think over 2026 we have to factor that in. So it’s really too—you know, it’s too soon to tell on inflation.

The dollar’s weakened by about 20 percent. And with the One Big Beautiful Bill we have—we’re facing huge and rising deficits. So even though tariff revenue might offset some of that, the questions are still—we have legal questions over those—over the legality of the way the president imposed those tariffs. But I think those are also borne by customers, who have seen, basically, a huge consumption tax increase.

And he made a very—you know, a very bold statement about inbound investment, $17 trillion that have—that’s been committed. I would say some of it’s been committed under duress. And I’d like to—you know, would I like to see $17 trillion come into our economy? Yes. But I’m skeptical.

And I think, you know, we have an issue—I’ll tie it back to what Ted was talking about—the H-1B visa issue is big. The ICE raid on the Hyundai-LG facility in Georgia actually sent shockwaves through large foreign investors, because if you want to get advanced manufacturing and facilities that we want to have for the future economy in the United States we’re going to—we’re going to have to have the knowhow in semiconductors, in shipbuilding, in batteries, and a lot of different areas that we want to have investors come in. You know, we’re going to need to have outside expertise come in and train U.S. workers and actually help operate. So the visa thing is actually—the visa thing’s a big deal, so hearkening back to what Ted said.

I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Heidi Crebo-Rediker. I’m a senior fellow for geoeconomics at the Council.

BRIMMER: Thank you, Heidi. And we’ll come back also to have some further questions for you, but I want to make sure we get all the way around the table so our colleagues can comment.

Can I turn to Shannon O’Neil? Latin America has come up at various points, but what did you hear as you listened to the remarks today?

O’NEIL: Sure, thanks, Esther.

And I’m Shannon O’Neil. I’m the senior vice president and the director of studies here at CFR, and a longtime watcher of Latin America. And, you know, picking up on your initial comments, Esther, you know, this was a fairly domestically oriented speech, but there were some foreign policy aspects there. And on the foreign policy aspects, the Western Hemisphere was quite prominent. And so there were callouts to three particular countries. And let me just talk a bit about each of those.

So there was praise for El Salvador. You know, Trump has sent lots of migrants to El Salvador. The president of El Salvador, Bukele, has put them in prisons. He’s quite known for a very hard line towards crime and violence in El Salvador. He’s jailed almost 2 percent of El Salvador’s population in a crackdown on crime. And so many of those migrants ended up next to the people that he had jailed in some of his previous efforts. And that’s something that, you know, Trump has had a working relationship with him. In fact, President Bukele is the first Latin American leader who came to the White House in the second term of the president. So he called out that president, praising him, and sort of showing the strength of that particular relationship.

You know, the second country that he turned to with harsher words than El Salvador was Brazil. And they—you know, the president has felt very strongly that his—you know, the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, and his friend and sort of ideological colleague, has been unfairly treated by the courts in Brazil. The former president was just recently convicted of trying to stop kind of free and fair elections in the last round of elections, and be involved in some efforts to potentially overthrow the democratic process and democratically elected Lula, the current president. He was convicted. And the United States, in response, has both put sanctions on the judges—or some of the judges who were involved in the case, as well as a 50 percent tariff on many Brazilian goods coming into the United States.

So President Trump reiterated that position and the usefulness of the tariffs for that political situation. Though, interestingly, he had somewhat fond words for President Lula. He said he ran into him on the side. They had a hug. And that he’s invited Lula to come to the White House to talk about issues. So that he will be the second Latin American president to go to the White House, if it comes to pass. And interestingly, back to, Esther, you mentioned deals. he said that, you know, he likes to do deals. He only does deals with people that he likes. And he’s decided that he likes Lula, at least from their—from their conversation in passing. So that is to be seen. Harsh words to start, but perhaps an opening up between the two countries in the couple of weeks to come.

And then finally, the other country that was sort of on the radar and in the speech is Venezuela. And here he turned to Venezuela and talked about Venezuela really as a sort of basis for a larger change in the way the United States is thinking about drug cartels and organized crime in the hemisphere, and this real militarization of the taking on of organized crime. And so in this first, you know, number of months, we have seen many criminal groups in Latin America designated as terrorist groups. And moving from sort of transnational criminal groups to terrorist groups which gives some stronger tools and the like to law enforcement to going after money laundering and the like. So that’s been a big part of it.

But really, what I think the most striking change has been the build-up of military presence in the Caribbean. So we’ve seen roughly 4,500 troops, about 2,000 Marines plus some others, move into the Caribbean. We’ve seen a number of warships. We’ve seen a number of jet fighters and others moving into the Caribbean. And we have seen so far over three strikes on boats that were allegedly to be carrying drugs, sort of obliterating the boats, the alleged drugs, and the people who are on them. So a very different approach to a policy that for many years has been led by the Coast Guard and the DEA, now is being led by a much more militarized strike capability way of approaching. And I think his mentioning that and talking about that shows that that is a path—even though there are many in the government as well as outside the government that question the legality of that approach for this particular set of challenges and threats to the United States, it shows that they’re going to continue down that path.

BRIMMER: Yeah. It was just an interesting note when the president of the United States commented on just running into the president of Brazil, because, indeed, they pass—the speakers have to pass as they go in and out of that chamber. And in a sense, it’s almost a microcosm of what happens in New York this week, that not only do you have the formal speeches but you have so many world leaders in one place that a lot of other business gets done on the margins and, indeed, at one point a few years back the State Department also asked itself of, you know, does it make sense for all these officials to go up to New York and actually realized that it saves huge amounts of money because of all the bilateral meetings you can do in New York that you don’t have to go to Capitol to do. So it’s an interesting kind of reminder of the mesh of multilateral diplomacy in that it’s not—it’s not just the speeches, which are the fun things to discuss, but it’s actually also all the other meetings being held at multiple levels by multiple countries that are actually the web of cooperation that is manifest this week, and actually so I would suggest emblematic of the—

O’NEIL: Well, if I can say one more thing about Latin America.

BRIMMER: Please.

O’NEIL: It wasn’t in this speech, but today there’s supposed to be a meeting between President Trump and the Argentine President Milei exactly for that, to see if the United States is going to help bail out the Argentine peso.

BRIMMER: Very interesting. Very, very interesting. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Shannon. See you soon.

Steve, the Middle East is always on the agenda in one way or the other. What did you hear in the remarks today?

COOK: Well, thanks very much, Esther. I’m Steven Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And I think the president basically reiterated U.S. policy. He congratulated himself on securing a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. He congratulated himself five years later for the Abraham Accords and then ran through what is essentially what we know about the Trump administration’s policy, which is the United States will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon and he cited military operations in June—Operation Midnight Hammer—as an example of it, as someone who wasn’t just talking about not allowing Iran to have a nuclear program but in fact that he took the hard decision to demolish the program, in his words.

He also talked about the difficulties of securing a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. He blamed it all on Hamas and he also said at the same time, though, that the conflict in the Gaza Strip has to come to an end and that everybody has to work towards an end.

And then the other big thing that he said, which was just a reiteration of American policy, was that the United States would not recognize a Palestinian state and he criticized obliquely traditional American allies for doing so this week.

All of this comes against the backdrop of the French, the British, the Australians, the Canadians, the Belgians, and others in addition to a few other Western allies who previously recognized a Palestinian state, and there the president said that this was a, quote/unquote, “a reward for Hamas,” and that while everybody wanted the war to come to an end sooner rather than later that this recognition would actually extend the conflict.

So it was all a number of things publicly that he said that I think are very familiar to people. I think the more interesting things that are happening are a meeting that President Trump will have with the Gulf states, a number of other Arab countries, and countries from the Islamic world. I suspect that agenda will be the Gaza Strip, Syria, and Iran.

What to do on all of these major issues are going to be on the table but with particular emphasis on the Gaza Strip, particularly so after the Israeli strike on Doha targeting the leadership of Hamas.

There’s two other things that I think are interesting coming during this big UNGA week or weeks, whatever it is. I can never tell how many days it actually goes on. At the Council on Foreign Relations we do so many meetings it could go—feels like it goes on for months.

President Trump will have a bilateral with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the White House on Thursday. This is a very, very big meeting. There’s going to be a lot of discussion about returning Turkey to the F-35 program, Turkey’s role in Syria, what Turkey can do very quietly to help the situation in the Gaza Strip.

And then, importantly, there’ll be another bilateral—I think this is the fifth at this point—between the president and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed that he will respond to Western countries recognizing Palestine after he returns from the U.N. General Assembly meetings, which leads me to believe that he is going to take President Trump’s temperature on what response the Israelis should pursue.

There’s a lot of pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu from the settler community as well as politicians to his right to declare sovereignty in the West Bank. This is in tremendous tension with the president when he came into office his overall goal in the region, which was to expand the Abraham Accords, his one foreign policy win in the Middle East during his first term.

But the Arab states have said that if there is annexation and Israeli sovereignty of the West Bank they would either suspend, freeze, or reverse the Abraham Accords.

So that is a critical meeting between Netanyahu and President Trump coming on the heels of his UNGA speech.

BRIMMER: (Off mic)—within the UNGA context.

COOK: I’m sorry, Esther. You—

BRIMMER: Oh, yeah, sorry. Just to say that that does remind us that—of all the other diplomacy that occurs and is facilitated by the fact that world leaders are already here on the East Coast. It’s only 200 miles. They could come down to Washington very easily. So, perhaps, that’s a benefit of being a host nation.

So thank you. We’ll come back and explore some of those issues further. I want to make sure we turn to Liana now to make sure we hear about what you heard about transatlantic relations and relations with Europe in the speech today.

FIX: Yeah. Thanks so much, Esther.

My name is Liana Fix. I’m a senior fellow for Europe here at the Council, and what we heard from President Trump about the Ukraine war and about the transatlantic alliance is something that we’ve heard before. He threatened that he will pressure Russia to force Russia to end the war in Ukraine.

But he added an important precondition that he has presented to European leaders which is, first, you have to cut off Russia from energy supplies and you have to sanction or to put tariffs on the most important buyers of Russian energy, China and India.

And so he has a point in one aspect—he does has a point when he says it’s incredible that NATO leaders were actually building up NATO to defend its members against Russia, still sends money over to Russia for fossil fuels. That particularly applies to Hungary and Slovakia, also to Turkey.

But we also have France, Belgium, Spain buying LNG from Russia. Of course, the volumes are much lower than they were at the beginning of the war but it is something that the European Union has just announced in the morning of this day that they will cut off any buying of Russian energy by 2026, not by 2027 as initially announced.

So there is progress being made and Ursula von der Leyen, who’s also in New York, will certainly present this news to the U.S. president as evidence that the Europeans are doing something on that front.

But the big question is will Donald Trump actually follow up if he says that he is going to increase pressure on Russia because after the Alaska meeting between the two presidents we do see that the Russians currently perceive they have an opening. They have an opening to negotiate with the United States about New START, the arms control treaty, which will expire in February 2026, and they have also increased pressure on NATO members with the attacks and violations of NATO airspace.

So one glaring omission in Donald Trump’s speech was to call out Russia for the interference in NATO’s airspace that has repeatedly taken place. There are good grounds to believe that an incident in Denmark over the airport of Copenhagen could also be linked to Russian drones. This is what NATO members actually want to hear from Donald Trump.

They want to hear that he is committed to NATO’s defense and they want to hear him say that Russia should back off from these unprecedented provocations, which are really beyond anything that we have seen in hybrid tactics or gray zone warfare before.

This is a straight path towards NATO-Russia escalation what Moscow is doing these days and this is what Europeans have dearly missed in Donald Trump’s speech.

BRIMMER: Indeed, it is extraordinary to see, as you say, these incursions into NATO airspace in multiple countries in such a short period of time.

I wonder as I listened to the speech that there was almost an—if you would say wistful or wise or other, a moment of reflection when the president said he thought working with Russia would be the easiest because of his relationship with Putin. But he went from there. What did you think of just a little bit of just sort of the tone that he used in his remarks?

FIX: Yeah, so we’ve heard that before. He has very often said that he thought it’s going to be the easiest because of his good relationship with Vladimir Putin and that he’s disappointed that he’s not making the progress he would like to see.

But Ukraine by now is rather disillusioned that this kind of rhetoric will be followed up by pressure on Russia because it’s something that has been repeated again and again throughout multiple deadlines. Donald Trump has not picked up the bill on the Hill which would be available to increase pressure on Russia, or at least some variation of that bill. So at the moment, he and his administration are still trying to bring Russia to the negotiation table through incentives, rather than through sticks. And that’s a policy that unfortunately in the last couple of months, basically since Donald Trump has come into power, has not worked with Russia. We have not seen any concessions from the Russian side. To the contrary, Russia feels pretty comfortable with the outcome of the Alaska summit that it doesn’t need—they don’t have to agree to an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. They see this as a victory. And so the announcement of Donald Trump today is not something that will make Moscow nervous.

BRIMMER: Indeed. We almost expected more commentary on Ukraine as well.

CREBO-REDIKER: Let me just—I would just add to Liana’s point. Yes, the Europeans need to stop buying Russian energy. And she mentioned the oil imports are largely down to Hungary and Slovakia. But the Europeans did actually announce a fresh package of sanctions on Friday. And they actually did include some provisions to pressure companies in China and India to stop purchasing Russian energy. And also—so they imposed secondary sanctions, not secondary tariffs. And they also for the first time will hit cryptocurrency platforms that enable transactions with Russia.

And I think really importantly in the energy space, the EU has continued to ramp up its sanctions on Russian vessels, the so-called shadow fleet. And they’re up to about 560 vessels at this point. That’s something the U.S. has not kept pace with, even though we were leading the charge previous—prior to Trump coming into office. And those sanctions have been effective. They also lowered the oil price cap. It used to be $60 a barrel and now it’s down to around $47. So it’s hard to police that, but I think, you know, the Europeans have actually been keeping up with the increasing pressure through sanctions. And that’s something that the president, President Trump, has said is on his agenda. And he keeps threatening to do it. But, to Liana’s point, we really just haven’t seen him act.

BRIMMER: Just picking up on energy issues as well, the president at one point talked about wanting to encourage, obviously, sales from the United States to other countries of oil, gas, and other and other materials. Just a comment—would anyone like to comment further just on some of the energy policy issues that were raised in the speech, just in general? OK.

HILL: Well, I’ll just add—and I should have said earlier, Alice Hill, senior fellow for energy and the environment. I’ll just add, there is some ironic timing here, since we’re having New York’s climate week occurring as well. So we have investors, tech CEOs. We have people from a wide variety of NGOs, government, elsewhere, all meeting—racing across New York City at a time when they’re listening to the president say that clean energy is a scam and that it shouldn’t go forward. So it will be fascinating to understand how those remarks were received by those who are deeply invested, both probably personally and financially, in making sure that the harmful pollution is reduced so that heating is reduced.

FIX: Perhaps just one add on, because Donald Trump has singled out specifically Europe but also Germany as a country that has realized that renewable energy is not the path forward and wants to return to nuclear policy. That is factually not true. Germany has shut down its last reactors in 2023—in the end of 2023. What Germany is doing under new conservative governments, they’re looking into newer technologies. And they have also dropped their resistance within the EU to accept nuclear policy as equivalent to renewable policy when it comes to the emission footprint. So that’s sort of a little bit of a shift from previous governments. But it’s not that Germany is doing a U-turn on its exit from nuclear policy. That is not true.

CREBO-REDIKER: Just one more note. China did not come up as a main topic for this speech, but I think that the president showed a bit of an outdated view of China on energy policy because the Chinese have been making generational investments in their own energy security and are ramping up quickly. They’ve diversified and are installing enormous amounts of solar capacity and wind capacity. I think if President Trump goes to visit Xi Jinping next year, perhaps they can do a side tour and see all the windmills all over the various parts of the Chinese countryside. But I think that that is—that’s something that perhaps was not the case during Trump 1.0, but is certainly the case during Trump 2.0.

BRIMMER: Thank you.

Other comments on energy? I want to make sure anyone who wants to jump in has a chance to do so.

I also, then, would just want to take a moment just on arms control issues. I’m just wondering just generally what the reactions were. I thought it was interesting that he called for an end of the use of biological weapons. I did not expect this to come in this speech.

And he talked about, again, as you mentioned, that the—that with only one remaining arms control treaty, which expires next year—the New START treaty—that there might be an opening for, you know, further discussion on these. One wonders what that will look like.

And then—and then he talked about the importance of effective ways to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention.

So just intrigued that some arms control issues came up briefly in this speech. Just further thoughts on some of these types of mechanisms or treaties. Or are these, you know, relevant and important to countries in your region?

FIX: I could perhaps add as to—that it’s important to note that Russia just yesterday has suggested that it could keep the New START treaty and its provisions in place for another year in return for the United States doing the same. What we’ve, however, seen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Russia has linked any concessions or any goodwill gestures in arms control usually to other demands in Ukraine. So the United States has consistently tried to delink these two issues and to start a dialogue with Russia on New START and strategic stability that has nothing to do with Ukraine and to see the issue as separate and important in itself. That’s not the Russian strategy. And so we can see this in the context of a broader Russian approach towards the United States that tries to achieve some kind of U.S.-Russia normalization in return for concessions on Ukraine. So there might be no coincidence that the nuclear issue is on Trump’s mind. This has been the smart move from the Russian side in the current—in the current climate.

COOK: Let me just add very quickly if we were having this conversation a year ago there would have been a lot of discussion about the United States and Iran and nuclear negotiations. This would be something that would be taking up a lot of time of Middle Eastern leaders, as well as European leaders. And although there is discussion of snapback sanctions, the urgency of a nuclear negotiation between Iran and the United States and the issues around it have diminished significantly since Israel’s operations in June and the United States’ bombing of Iran’s nuclear program. I think the Gulf states don’t really believe that Iran can reconstitute its nuclear program any time in the near future, therefore this isn’t an issue. What remains an issue for them, however, is any kind of sanctions relief that they would in turn use to rebuild Hezbollah, Hamas, and continue to arm the Houthis.

BRIMMER: Steve, he did, of course, talk about the hostages as well and return. I just wonder what you thought of his comments and where you think that sort of the return of the hostages fits into his overall vision of the issues related to Gaza.

COOK: Yeah. I thought it was an interesting remark that he said, you know, we shouldn’t forget what happened on October 7. I think, you know, the Israelis are quite isolated in the U.N., more so than ever. That was, you know, I think a statement that was directed to them, as well as everybody else, indeed to remind people that October 7—that there were still hostages.

The president has said over and over again he wants the war in Gaza to come to an end. He hasn’t, though, prioritized whether he wants that come to an end either through negotiations or through military action. He has kind of ping-ponged between the two. There was—for months there was an emphasis on, you know, the Witkoff plan, that plan, and an effort to secure partial agreements. And of course, Hamas sent him a letter asking for a sixty-day ceasefire in return for a number of hostages. But the president now seems back in the mode where he believes, at least for the moment, that Israel’s military operations in Gaza City are the best way to bring the conflict to an end. But that could change. Like I said, he doesn’t have a clear view of how the war should end, he just believes it should end.

BRIMMER: As we pick up on some of the other themes that he raised during the—during the speech, I want make sure we touch on as well, just to go back on some of his comments on fighting drugs and narcotics in the hemisphere. And, Shannon, as you noted that he had talked about MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. What did—were there any other sort of implications of what he said related to dealing with narcotics and similar issues? Other things that you would have liked to have heard or some of the implications of where what he raised that might talk about his thinking these days, after the types of actions that he’s been taking against Venezuela and others in the region?

O’NEIL: Well, there’s a bit of a disconnect with the way he lays out the problem and then how he sees the solution. And so he laid out the problem very dramatically. In fact, he said, if I remember correctly, that 300,000 people had died last year from an overdose. That’s actually a misstatement. It’s closer to 100,000. But most of those people who did die of drug overdoses died of drug overdoses from synthetic drugs—so things like fentanyl, and other—meth, and other things. Those types of drugs are coming from—when they’re coming from abroad—some are made here in the United States. When they’re coming from abroad, they’re coming from places like Mexico. And often the precursors are coming from China and elsewhere.

So it’s a bit of a different creation cycle, let us say, than, you know, biological drugs—things like cocaine, that are made from plants and the like. And those are more the ones that are coming across the Caribbean. So I think here, you know, one of the—if the problem is Americans dying of drug overdoses, what is happening in the Caribbean is probably not going to solve that problem because of those drugs that are coming out of Venezuela, many of them are going to Europe—which has become an increasingly large buyer of cocaine and other drugs coming out of South America. And some of those are unlikely to come up to the United States.

But what I do think, and I sort of mentioned this but I think is worth stressing, is we have seen a fundamental shift under this administration. And, you know, as Ted was saying, on migration we’ve seen just a fundamental change. We’re seeing a fundamental shift in the way you think about, you know, drugs moving into the United States, or contraband moving into the United States, and organized crime in the hemisphere. For many years, it was dealt with as a law enforcement problem. So the DEA was leading. It was working for tracing the money patterns that were going. It was interdicting the various, you know, drugs that were coming in by the Coast Guard or by others.

And this is a much more militarized approach, right? It’s a strike first ask questions, perhaps, later. It’s a very different approach. And it’s not working with—it’s much more unilateral approach, right? It’s not working with local police forces, or even militaries, in the countries to try to break down that, you know, illegal supply chain. It’s a very go-it-alone type of approach. And so it’s quite, you know, dramatic. And we have seen, you know, these, you know, drone attacks and bombings. But there’s a question there on, you know, these are—as much as we talk about, you know, changes to the rules in the global economy. And Heidi brought this up in terms of the ways they’re changing. This is a real, you know, attempt to change the sort of illegal economies that are out there.

And, you know, many of those that—you know, in a drone strike these are sort of the lowest people in the totem pole in terms of a pretty sophisticated business model that that you’re going after. And when we have had success in the past it is on the financial side, going after the financial flows and where they lead, particularly if you want to take out, kind of, those higher kingpins.

ALDEN: If I could just add, Esther, I mean, we’ve seen the same dynamic on the migration side. I mean, it never went as far as some of us would have liked to see, but during the Biden administration and in other administrations previously there was an effort to build hemispheric cooperation on managing migration. And to try to use some combination of carrots and sticks to increase possibilities for legal migration into the United States, while trying to shut down on the channels for entering illegally. All of that is out the window now. It’s largely a unilateral U.S. policy.

And where we’re looking for cooperation, it’s a coercive approach. You know, if Mexico doesn’t cooperate in different ways in stopping people at its borders, we will hit Mexico with tariffs or other sanctions. So I think it’s going to take us some time to see how all this plays out. I think the president is right that we have seen a very sharp slowdown of people arriving at the southern border, people crossing the border illegally, because I think migrants are scared in different ways. That may continue. I don’t know. I think we’ll see going forward whether a go-it-alone approach can be more successful in managing the flows—putting aside all of the dire humanitarian consequences—but can be more successful in managing the flows than more cooperative approaches were previously.

You’re still muted, Esther. Yeah.

BRIMMER: Sorry. Thank you both for those comments.

Alice, I want to turn to you with my next question. I do want to mention to our listeners that if you’d like to ask a question, please use the raised hand function and we will recognize you. But Alice, turning to you, what else do you see Trump doing on climate issues?

HILL: Well, certainly what he said today is consistent with what he’s doing here in the United States with domestic policy. He has put a hand on the scale in favor of fossil fuel production, and really hampered solar and wind. But beyond that, he has taken steps to reduce the collection of data that is fundamental to our understanding of what is happening in the atmosphere. And that is data that is used worldwide. For example, in Hawaii is the Mauna Loa Observatory. It’s 13,000 feet above sea level rise. It happens to be a spectacular place to measure what is happening in the atmosphere. And since the late 1950s, scientists, and most recently under NOAA, have been collecting data on the dramatic increase of carbon in the atmosphere, which, of course, is trapping heat and causing more—trapping heat and causing temperatures to rise.

So in his budget, he’s proposed cutting the Mauna Loa Laboratory. That is viewed as the single best continuous measurement of carbon emissions in the world. He’s proposed shutting down two satellites that collect carbon. And he’s made dramatic cuts to our meteorological services. Our meteorological services were viewed among the very best in the United States, but now he has shrunk that. There is some rehiring going on. There is concern though that the forecasts are being degraded in the United States, which, of course, puts people at risk. Because the more warning you have about a disaster that’s impending, the more steps you can take to protect yourself.

So we also then see simultaneously reductions in emergency management investments, disaster recovery, disaster preparation. The United States is moving into unfamiliar territory, for recent years, of not having a significant role by the federal government in disaster recovery. It appears that it’s going to shrink and shift to the states. That is really an assessment whether that’s a good thing. But the challenge right now is it’s happening so quickly that the states are not able to prepare themselves sufficiently for the worsening weather that we’re experiencing. And we’re seeing cracks in the system with property insurance, the municipal bond market, all expressing concern about what they’re seeing in terms of the rate of disasters and the intensity of disasters in the United States.

BRIMMER: Alice, may I just follow up on this point? Because it also is part of the United States’ global role. Which is, you know, symbolized by standing in the General Assembly, but really happens 365 days a year in many different parts of the planet. And I just wanted to pick up on your point about the role the United States plays in providing vital accurate information on environmental issues. Now, you know, I spent time worrying about things like the Arctic and the Antarctic and outer space, and these areas beyond national jurisdiction where, again, that it’s often the United States’s, let’s say measurements in Antarctica or others, that are crucial for our understanding about what’s going on the globe. Could you share a little bit more with the audience about kind of the United States plays in this global knowledge production because of the expertise in our country?

HILL: Yes. The United States has been very important in the effort to collect data. So NOAA had satellites, sensors, buoys all over the globe—not just for the United States—to inform them about what’s happening in the atmosphere, but also just weather, and to be able to understand what the threats are. Of course, knowing what the weather is is key. Military wants to know what the weather is ahead. And famously, during World War II, weather played a significant role in the choice of when the invasions occurred. So that is being diminished. Scientists are leaving from the United States. I think it’s fair to say it’s a generational loss of science knowledge and expertise. And that will degrade, again, our ability to understand.

What many may not appreciate is that the data that—and analysis that NASA and NOAA generate about atmospheric environmental conditions, as well as the EPA, are then used by private-sector companies to create detailed information for companies and others to understand the threats that they face. And we have seen an explosion of climate modeling, but more specifically modeling of catastrophes, which was born in the United States out of a hurricane in 1992 in Florida that surprised insurers, wiped out about eleven insurance companies. And out of that came catastrophic modeling, and the United States has some of the most sophisticated. But that modeling rests on data collected by the United States, so it’s very difficult to imagine how this will continue. AI will be of assistance, but we will probably see other nations being interested in stepping up their own efforts to improve their understanding in the absence of the United States playing a role.

It happens to come at a particularly critical time because we’re seeing that the temperatures are rising quickly. We are reaching thresholds almost every year. Last year, I believe, was the hottest year ever. And we’re seeing unprecedented damage. So you can know that the risk is growing. We’re being more confident in the analysis because reinsurers—the Lloyds of London and others who have been looking at risks across the globe for centuries—have been raising the alarm about climate change damage for decades, and every year their reports become more dire about the global loss in economic strength as a result of disasters that we have not mitigated in preparing for them and also because we are not cutting our emissions. So we’re going to see a growth—continued growth in damage, and the choices made by the Trump administration make us more vulnerable to that.

OPERATOR: We’ll take our first virtual question from Philip Martin (sp).

Q: First of all, thank you. I appreciate this discussion and I appreciate the gravitas of this discussion.

I’m wondering how you’re dealing with what—the takeaway from today’s speech by the president given that other people have been very blunt in describing it as lunacy, as bonkers. A senior diplomat apparently texted to a reporter at the Washington Post that—described it as lunacy. How do you frame what we’re hearing? I understand the takeaway that you’ve given us, which has been extraordinary. But I’m wondering, given the bluntness of the assessment, how do you—what do we take away from this in foreign relations terms, something that the American people can actually use? And what can we salvage from today’s speech, if there’s anything positive that can be—that resulted? I hope that’s clear.

BRIMMER: OK. Ted, would you like to jump in on that?

ALDEN: Let me—let me give it a shot here. I mean, obviously, there are elements of what the president talks about—not just on this set of issues, but on many others—that seem weak in terms of their factual basis and counter a lot of what we know in terms of scientific evidence, but I do think we have to acknowledge he has a very clear worldview. It’s a nation-centric worldview. It’s a belief, as he talked about, in strong borders, state sovereignty. I think on economics he has essentially an eighteenth-century mercantilist view of the world that policy should be aimed at maximizing revenue to the treasury. I mean, a $100,000 fee on H-1Bs, a lot of that is an attempt to raise money for the treasury. There is a coherence to his worldview that I think we have to take seriously.

To me, the really interesting thing in the context of the United Nations is, are other nations going to buy any of this? I mean, they have to deal with the United States, have to negotiate with the United States. We’re important and powerful. But are they willing to embrace a view of the world that is so radically different from the way global affairs have been organized for the last seventy-five years under a very different sort of U.S. leadership? And to me that’s the very interesting thing about having this in front of the United Nations: How is the rest of the world hearing this? And if they see it as lunacy—and I’m sure many of them do—what does that mean? Does that mean that they try in different ways to minimize their dependence on the United States, move in other directions, find new alliances, try to create new structures of order that don’t involve the United States? To me, those are the really interesting questions going forward here.

BRIMMER: And Shannon.

O’NEIL: Just to add onto Ted’s point. I know we’re reaching toward the end of our time. But, you know, what struck me? I mean, I think, you know, your point is, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the substance. And this is sort of the style, right? And his style is much more, you know, at times bombastic or sort of, you know, populist, you might say, if you compare it to others around the world. But what struck me and, you know, has been a recurring theme, which we saw in this speech, is he’s very unilateral, right? He doesn’t have a lot of time for these multilateral institutions, like the U.N., where he was giving this speech. And, you know, I just want to link this back to, you know, we sort of mentioned sort of the dog that didn’t bark in the speech, in many ways, was China, and Asia more broadly.

But China has taken—and, you know, potentially our greatest sort of geopolitical adversary today. But China has taken a very consistent approach to build multilateral ties, to be involved in all of these kinds of institutions, from the U.N. to, you know, standard-setting bodies, very technical setting bodies. And they think that the way that they will build power and influence around the world is sort of that, you know, step-by-step involvement in these institutions, while the Trump administration is seeing it as being very unilateral or bilateral an approach, and that that is the way to build and project power. And I think it’s a very different approach we saw today presented in this speech. And we will see what the results are, and who’s actually right.

COOK: Esther, if you just give me one second. I just want to point out that when it came to the Middle East, the president’s statement—there was really only one that I picked up on, the total demolishing of the Iran nuclear program, that seemed way out. Although I would suggest that the—after the initial assessments of the damage, the now consensus is that the Iranian nuclear program has been damaged far more than people suspected in the early days afterwards. But on the larger point that Ted and Shannon are making, I think what’s important is to understand that we’re at the end of one order—one global order. And we don’t know what the new one is going to look like. And I think that as a result of these kinds of speeches, and the president really doesn’t have a commitment to multilateral fora or institutions, what’s going to happen is exactly what Ted is talking about, is that countries are going to seek other alliances, other partnerships. And that is going to increasingly, over a period of time in a dialectical way, shape the new global order. And that in ways, the way in which the United States under President Trump, and if he sets us on a particular path, we’ll have less and less to do with actually shaping it than it responding to this new global order that emerges in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years or so.

CREBO-REDIKER: Just to ricochet off of what Ted and Steve just said, it’s nowhere more present than in the trade space. Because you already are seeing the rejigging of the jigsaw puzzle of who is partnering with whom on new trade arrangements. So, you know, watch that space because it’s the first step that the Trump administration and Trump himself actually took, as tariff man. But it may be where you actually see the most significant first move in that U.S.-plus one. Where do we—where do we start building and rebuilding after the U.S. has pulled back from this architecture?

BRIMMER: Indeed. It is so interesting to see how other countries are building their diplomatic relationships. It’ll be interesting for the United States because next year, in addition to hosting the World Cup we are also hosting the G-20. Which is one of those institutions where many leading middle powers have turned in order to act internationally. So a lot more to come from the issues raised today.

And I’d like to thank my colleagues for their participation here, thank all of our guests. I’m sorry that we weren’t able to answer all the questions, but appreciate your joining us for this conversation. And good afternoon to all.

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