Karen Greenberg was quoted in a Courthouse News article about President Trump’s upcoming appearance at the United Nations General Assembly.
The path that Trump offers the United Nations this year is in some ways starker than that of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who strutted on the world stage wearing an empty holster, saying he offered “an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter’s gun in the other.”
Trump also carries a fearsome, metaphorical weapon: control over the purse strings of the organization’s largest funding source.
Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University, predicts minimal shakeup.
“The thing about Trump is that he often pulls back on things he said,” Greenberg said in a phone interview.
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Trump’s pledge to unravel former President Obama’s agreement with Iran bodes the possibility of two confrontations involving nuclear technology at once.
Ironically, a milestone in the struggle for disarmament will occur on the morning of Rouhani’s speech, when at least 38 countries plan to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which passed by a 122-1 margin in December 2016.
None of the ratifying countries are nuclear powers, and the only NATO country to vote on it — the Netherlands — was the lone voice against the treaty.
Nevertheless, the Center on National Security’s director Greenberg cautioned that U.N. watchers should not write off its importance.
“The first significance of the treaty is that there is such a thing,” she said in an interview. “Hopefully, it will grow and include at some point the nuclear powers.”
