by Jay Rogers
A conservative's case for results over rhetoric at the United Nations.
Last week at the United Nations, President Donald Trump stood before the same institution that laughed at him in 2018. That year, he warned the General Assembly that Germany was making itself dangerously dependent on Russian energy through Nord Stream 2. German officials smirked on camera. European diplomats rolled their eyes. Then, in February 2022, Russia’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, and Germany scrambled for alternatives while energy prices strained European households. I watched last week’s speech after a long day of client meetings with one of my sons. The message was the same as 2018: while others talked, America acted. The difference is, now we have the receipts.
I’m not a foreign policy academic. After more than 30 years of running hedge funds, private equity strategies, and family office mandates, I know the difference between people who identify problems and people who solve them. Trump is good at identifying problems with a verified track record. That combination makes the foreign policy establishment deeply uncomfortable. It also happens to be exactly what a sclerotic international bureaucracy needs to hear.
The Prophecy Problem
Trump’s 2018 energy warning was not an outlier. He has spent years telling European leaders that their immigration policies were a slow-motion civilizational disaster, and they spent years dismissing him for it. Speaking at the UN General Assembly in September 2025, he described open-border approaches as destroying European cultures and warned that governments admitting people “with little in common” without proper vetting would see their nations fail. He said political correctness was making Europe “weak.” His December 2025 National Security Strategy went further, warning of “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure” and stating that Europe would be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less” if present trends continued.
The mainstream reaction was predictable: dismissal, condescension, lectures about xenophobia. Then both the reality and data arrived.
The turning point was 2015. More than one million people, primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, entered the EU that year. Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das” (translated: “we can do this”) became the symbol of optimistic open-door policies. Viktor Orban and a handful of European conservatives were pilloried for questioning it. Critics warned about specific, measurable outcomes: higher rates of violent crime, welfare dependency, the growth of parallel societies, and eventual political backlash. Those warnings received the same smirk Germany had aimed at Trump’s energy speech.
The decade that followed bore those warnings out. Swedish government data showed significant concentration of foreign-born individuals among rape and violent crime convictions. German federal crime statistics documented rising public-space insecurity in areas with concentrated migrant populations. Studies from the Netherlands, France, and Germany showed high welfare dependency and unemployment among recent non-Western migrants years after entry. The Alternative for Germany went from a marginal party to a leading opposition force. Sweden, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK all shifted rightward, not because those voters turned xenophobic, but because they were living with consequences their leaders refused to recognize.
Mainstream European parties have since adopted border controls and accelerated-return policies they once condemned as extremist. That says everything about who was reading reality correctly.
The UN’s Accountability Deficit
Back at the UN itself, the funding picture is its own indictment. The United States remains the largest assessed contributor to the regular UN budget at 22 percent and carries the highest share of peacekeeping costs, a tab running into the billions annually. What do American taxpayers get for it?
The Human Rights Council seats serial abusers while directing disproportionate attention at Israel. The International Criminal Court applies selective enforcement that generates American and Israeli scrutiny and European applause. UNESCO carries its own archive of politicized decisions. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has overseen a decade of bureaucratic expansion serious enough to produce a rare no-confidence vote from his own staff on reform plans in 2025. When the people inside the building lose confidence in the leadership, the people writing the checks are entitled to ask what their return on investment is.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei showed up at the same 2026 General Assembly and bluntly delivered an assessment the UN press office won’t be adding to its promotional materials. He called the organization “a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” He added that “there’s no shortage of words or resolutions. What is lacking is consequences.” When a sitting head of state delivers that verdict from the institution’s own podium, to its face, the polite diplomatic fictions are finished. Trump and Milei come from different traditions, but they’re reading the same ledger.
The UNRWA Standard
Nowhere is the accountability gap sharper than in the UN Relief and Works Agency. Israeli intelligence reported that roughly 10 percent of UNRWA’s Gaza workforce had ties to Hamas or allied terrorist groups. Some participated directly in the October 7, 2023, atrocities. The UN eventually dismissed a fraction of the accused after sustained donor pressure. Past UNRWA leadership once described Hamas members on the payroll as simply “part of the social fabric.”
I coached youth sports for years. If I left a player on the field who had attacked a teammate, I’d be fired and with justification. Every parent in the league would demand it. Yet American taxpayers fund an agency that cannot, or will not, police its own ranks against the very terrorists it claims to help civilians escape. Call it what it is: institutional failure hiding behind humanitarian language.
Results vs. Process
Trump’s approach combines direct pressure, funding leverage, and bilateral deal-making outside multilateral frameworks. Whatever its imperfections, it generates measurable outcomes. The Abraham Accords were built entirely outside the UN’s infrastructure. The Armenia-Azerbaijan peace accord signed at the White House on August 8, 2025, came through direct U.S. mediation, not the Security Council process. One can apply appropriate skepticism to the less-formalized arrangements and still see the contrast: American engagement built around accountability produces agreements. Engagement built around consensus produces communiques.
Congress should codify that leverage: condition U.S. contributions on transparent staffing audits for agencies operating in conflict zones, independent review of senior appointments, and enforceable reforms to Human Rights Council membership criteria. Member states that refuse basic accountability should face reduced voting weight or funding. Milei put it plainly: cooperation and subordination are not the same thing. The Security Council veto is a feature of the original great-power bargain. The broader bureaucracy’s immunity from democratic accountability is an accretion that no one voted for. Limited government at home demands the same discipline abroad. American sovereignty is the constitutional starting point, not a slogan.
The Mirror
I tell my kids that character shows up in results, not speeches. When I watched Trump at the UN last week, I didn’t see a polished diplomat offering global governance poetry. I saw someone holding up a mirror to an institution that has spent 80 years perfecting the former and neglecting the latter. Milei named what was looking back. The working families who balance budgets, coach teams, and pay taxes to fund all of this deserve to know what they’re getting for their money.
If the United Nations looks in that mirror and sees a PR problem, its relevance will keep shrinking. If it sees a results problem, there is still time to matter. The Germans who smirked in 2018 eventually had to face the energy crisis they were warned about. The diplomats who dismissed concerns about Europe’s migration wave eventually had to adopt the policies they once called extreme. The institution that keeps ignoring these lessons will find the United States increasingly unwilling to keep paying for the privilege of being dismissed. As Milei reminded the chamber, no nation is guaranteed a place in history. Neither is any institution.
Jay Rogers
Source:https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/05/while-others-talked-america-acted/
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