Trump’s UN speech sends shivers down listeners’ spines
The maiden speech of the weird White House occupant in the United Nations General Assembly left many among his shaken listeners wishing he had rather held his peace. By chillingly and nonchalantly threatening to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea, no doubt with its 25 million people, and risking retaliatory strikes that might vacuum-clean millions more, the president came across as a Dr Strangelove, the former Nazi scientist in the 1964 (prophetic?) political satire, ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, a Cold War fantasy of an impetuous hand on the US nuclear trigger. The aptly named Air Force General Jack D. Ripper wants obliteration of the USSR to avert a communist conspiracy that seeks to pollute the ‘precious bodily fluids’ of the American people!
President Trump’s reasons behind his fire-spitting UN rhetoric against the equally brash North Korean leader are indeed based on more credible grounds. ‘The Rocket Man on a Suicide Mission’ seems hell-bent on his aggressive nuclear programme, alarming South Korea and Japan, as also the US, which has thousands of troops stationed in the region. He stands in reckless defiance of UNSC resolutions against atomic weapons and missile tests, and crippling sanctions have augmented the misery of his famine-stricken but strictly regimented people. Trump also threatened to unravel the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran calling it ‘a rogue nation’ and ‘corrupt dictatorship’, which brought smiles to the faces of Israeli delegates, and railed against socialist Venezuela’s ‘corrupt’ regime and tiny Cuba’s ‘corrupt and destabilising’ one.
Such amateurish gunslinger talk was unsuited to a platform dedicated to world peace and avoidance of future wars. Being couched in an undiplomatic crusading spirit, with its harping on the ‘righteous many’ and the ’wicked few’ gave it a bigoted slant, reminiscent of George Bush’s 2002 ‘axis of evil’ speech, but on steroids. ‘America first’ and national sovereignty hold little meaning against such blunt language and arbitrary tendencies. Pakistan needs to tread cautiously with this powerful but unpredictable man who doesn’t always ‘means what he says or says what he means’.