{"id":23616,"date":"2025-09-25T02:02:26","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T02:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=23616"},"modified":"2025-09-25T02:02:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T02:02:26","slug":"is-this-america-first-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=23616","title":{"rendered":"Is This \u2018America First\u2019? – The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n

Standing on the United Nations General Assembly dais yesterday, President Donald Trump had a message for the global leaders and representatives in attendance: \u201cYour countries are going to hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

What for? The \u201cfailed experiment of open borders,\u201d according to the president. Never mind the fact that some countries represented in the room\u2014such as, say, the Solomon Islands\u2014don\u2019t receive very many immigrants at all, and that leaders have profoundly diverging views about the long-term effects of mass immigration. The irony was lost on Trump; his address demonstrated what happens when an \u201cAmerica First\u201d president engages with the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

Trump spoke for almost an hour (well past his 15-minute limit) in a speech that oscillated between bombast and blithe nihilism. He grumbled about the building\u2019s terrazzo floors, complained that the teleprompter had broken down before his speech, and repeatedly mentioned that an escalator he\u2019d been on had stopped short. (\u201cThese are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.\u201d) He also falsely claimed sole credit for ending seven wars, and at one point suggested that radical environmentalists \u201cwant to kill all the cows.\u201d Rather than laughing at him, as the assembly did back in 2018, his audience was polite this time, chuckling at some of the ad libs and sitting through the digs.<\/p>\n

The address featured many such unrelated and fabricated elements, including the supposed \u201ccon job\u201d of climate change (it\u2019s real) and the claim that London and its mayor want to institute Sharia law (they don\u2019t). The through line was the contrast between America\u2019s current \u201cgolden age\u201d and the \u201cdeath\u201d and destruction that Trump argues other nations are facing\u2014support for his general thesis that he\u2019s handling the world\u2019s most intractable crises better than anyone else is.<\/p>\n

So, is the \u201cAmerica First\u201d mentality about investment at home, or is it just about the abandonment of long-held foreign-policy goals? The answer depends on Trump\u2019s disposition at any given moment. Take his unpredictable stances on the Ukraine war: When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky petitioned the White House in February for support in the country\u2019s ongoing war against Russia, Trump publicly scolded him, saying that Zelensky didn\u2019t \u201chave the cards\u201d to be asking for any more money. But in yesterday\u2019s speech, Trump placed the blame for the drawn-out war squarely on Russia. In a follow-up post on Truth Social, he wrote that Ukraine can \u201cWIN\u201d back the territory illegally occupied by Russia since the start of the war, and even said during a post-address press conference that NATO member countries should shoot down Russian planes that enter their airspace.<\/p>\n

This apparent 180 is more an abdication than a switching of sides\u2014\u201cone of his tantrums,\u201d as my colleague Tom Nichols put it last night. Trump once appeared content to let Russian President Vladimir Putin steamroll Ukraine. \u201cNow,\u201d Tom writes, \u201cthe president seems to be implying that he\u2019ll walk away and let Europe do whatever the hell\u201d it wants.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s disregard for diplomatic norms extended to the UN itself. \u201cWhat is the purpose of the United Nations?\u201d he asked during his speech, not as an inspiring prelude but as a swipe. The vision of the world the president espoused was one of profound dysfunction, a globe-enveloping chaos that is eating away at the very fabric of society\u2014except, of course, in America, per his telling. Faced with a world on the brink, Trump seems to be throwing up his hands; countries can either follow his cue or fend for themselves.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s News<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. One ICE detainee was killed and two were seriously injured in a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, according to Department of Homeland Security officials; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Officials are investigating the incident and found ammunition engraved with the message ANTI-ICE<\/span>, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.<\/li>\n
  2. Russia dismissed President Donald Trump\u2019s statement at the United Nations that, with NATO\u2019s help, Ukraine could retake all of its territory occupied by Russia. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on a radio interview that Ukraine refusing to negotiate would only worsen its position.<\/li>\n
  3. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently dropped a civil-enforcement case against Devon Archer, a former client of current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, who had testified on Archer\u2019s behalf before joining the commission. An SEC spokesperson told The New York Times that Atkins had recused himself from the decision to drop the case.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Illustration by Akshita Chandra \/ The Atlantic. Source: NASA \/ Getty.<\/p>\n

    The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology<\/p>\n

    By Ross Andersen<\/p>\n

    To study the origins of our universe is to struggle with profound chicken-or-egg questions. We know the Big Bang happened. Cosmologists can see its afterglow in the sky. But no one knows whether the laws of physics or even time itself existed before that moment. Nor can we say exactly what happened next. The order in which certain celestial objects formed during the very early universe is hotly contested.<\/p>\n

    For a long time after the Big Bang, not much of anything could form. All of space was permeated by a roiling plasma. It was too hot and chaotic for any structure to cohere. Hundreds of thousands of years passed before a tiny hydrogen atom could even hold itself together. Another 100 million years or so after that, great clouds of hydrogen condensed and stars flared into being. Most cosmologists believe that these stars were the first large, free-floating structures to illuminate our universe, and that black holes appeared later. But some have proposed that it went the other way around.<\/p>\n

    Read the full article.<\/p>\n

    More From The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n

    Culture Break<\/p>\n

    David Wall \/ Getty<\/p>\n

    Read. Addie E. Citchens\u2019s novel, Dominion, creates a vibrant Mississippi town and a dire morality tale about the suppression of desire, Omari Weekes writes.<\/p>\n

    Explore. In the world of sorority rush, expensive fashion trends merge with old southern ideals. Caitlin Flanagan asks, \u201cWhat kind of future (or past) are these young women preparing themselves to enter?\u201d<\/p>\n

    Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n

    Explore all of our newsletters here.<\/em><\/p>\n

    Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n

    When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Standing on the United Nations General Assembly dais yesterday, President Donald Trump had a message for the global leaders<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[574,1671],"class_list":{"0":"post-23616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-atlantic"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}