US President Donald Trump’s speech at the UN has been widely condemned as a belligerent perversion of an institution established in 1945 to promote global peace.
Breathing fire and brimstone, Trump spoke in biblical terms, warning that "if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph". He noted that Washington would have "no choice but to destroy North Korea" if it added to its recent nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches.
He threatened to annihilate not just a regime but an entire country. As he crudely put it, referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un: "Rocket man is on a suicide mission."
Trump described North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as "rogue regimes", before hypocritically criticising threats to Ukraine and the South China Sea by Russia and China. He conveniently forgot his own launch in April of 59 Tomahawk missiles — without any investigation or a UN mandate — against the Syrian regime for allegedly using chemical weapons.
As abhorrent and condemnable as Trump’s UN speech was, such actions are actually not unusual for US presidents, who routinely engage in this type of martial posturing and religious self-righteousness.
George W Bush’s "axis of evil" speech in 2002 included two of Trump’s "rogue regimes" — North Korea and Iran — as well as Iraq, which Bush invaded a year later without UN authorisation. Drawing on a sanctimonious, born-again Christianity, Bush’s arrogant insistence following terrorist attacks on the US on September 11 2001 that the whole world decide whether it was "with America or with the terrorists", came right out of an atavistic Old Testament world in which doctrines such as "an eye for an eye" reigned supreme.
In this absolutist "new world order" there was no room for nuance. One could not at the same time condemn terrorism and caution the US not to kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq in a vainglorious attempt to "impose" democracy around the world through the barrel of a gun.
The depiction by Bush of the US as a "liberator" was also repugnant in its hypocrisy and historical inaccuracy, at least as viewed by Africans, Asians, Caribbeans, Latin Americans and Middle Easterners who have suffered, and, in some cases, continue to suffer, from the brutality of US-backed tyrants.
Barack Obama is often erroneously depicted as one of the most peaceful contemporary US presidents, despite sending drones that killed an estimated 3,500 civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and participating in the "regime change" mission in Libya in 2011 that assassinated Muammar Gaddafi, left Libya anarchic and destabilised the region.
Obama’s Nobel peace prize speech in 2009 demonstrated the same "American exceptionalism" that Bush and now Trump has expressed. Delivered in the shadow of two US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he explained why force had to be used to bring about peace. A celebration of peace thus turned into a justification for war.
Obama perversely used the Christian-derived doctrine of "just wars" to explain why he could not be guided by apostles of nonviolence such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jnr.
In stark contrast to his condemnation of the historical imperial acts of the US in Latin America and the Caribbean, he glorified his country for having "helped underwrite global security for more than six decades and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans".
Inappropriately in the context of a Nobel speech, he criticised Iran and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, while reserving his country’s right to act unilaterally, in an echo of Bush’s "pre-emptive" use of force doctrine.
These martial musings are deeply ingrained in the DNA of a US that has historically been in a perpetual search for enemies, wishing to slay foreign dragons as if in a recurring Hollywood nightmare of sequels.
This time, the imperial country is actually led by a reality TV star who has turned the presidency into an endless version of The Apprentice, with Trump himself in the starring role: a bumbling, brutish, buffoonish rookie always one episode away from pressing the nuclear button in a fit of violent rage.
• Adebajo is director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg.
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