Donald Trump’s bullying UN speech shows he is not the leader the world needs

Advisers to US President Donald Trump promised he would take a “philosophical” approach in his speech to the United Nations. If it was philosophy, it was that of an adolescent schoolyard bully threatening to beat up any challenger.

Of course, it is worse because Trump has an arsenal of several thousand nuclear weapons at his fingertips. Even so, it was stunning to hear Trump threaten “to totally destroy” North Korea if Kim Jong-un refused to cease his nuclear ambitions.

It is past time for other world leaders to come together and show global leadership to challenge Trump on issues including climate change and environmental degradation, growing gaps between rich and poor across the world, persecution of minorities for their race or religion and the dangerous rise of nationalism – none of which Trump mentioned – as well as the threats of nuclear North Korea, mass migration and terrorism.

French President Emmanuel Macron, the only leader at the top table free of an immediate domestic challenge, pointed to the lessons that France and Europe learned 80 years ago from nationalism. “Nationalism is all about war,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour from the same United Nations building where Trump spoke.

Macron was echoing Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, who had told the general assembly a year earlier that: “At this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion.”