The founders of the United Nations must be rolling in their graves. This venerable world institution, now celebrating its 80th birthday, was born of the ideal that conflicts could be settled by dialogue rather than by force. The US was central to the UN’s founding, but on Tuesday its delegates were treated to a speech by an American president that should be cited in a future thesaurus as the opposite of “diplomacy”.

Donald Trump’s rambling monologue was a mixture of outright falsehoods, petty grievances and hectoring. He said he had personally ended seven wars – though it’s far from clear which seven they were. He railed against the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, denying the man-made warming of the planet that threatens the survival of our species. He even criticised the UN for having previously declined his bid to renovate its headquarters back when he was just a property developer.

Trump did not open a dialogue, he basically told world leaders to shut up and listen to him. It was as though he were claiming that everyone should follow his lead because “I’m really good at this stuff” – except those were his exact words. “Your countries are going to hell,” he told European leaders, whom he claimed were failing to adequately check migration.

The pugnacious and improvisational style of Trump’s presentation, which we have come to expect, is truly one of a kind. This is after all the same man who earlier this week at the funeral of Charlie Kirk contradicted a grieving widow to insist that “I hate my opponent.”

[ America’s accelerating exit from itselfOpens in new window ]

But though his remarks and tone were extraordinary, the content of Trump’s UN remarks reflect the broader Maga movement. Maga has seen the triumph of an “America First” foreign policy with deep roots in the American Right. This current of thought rejects any American responsibility for world peace and order, instead asserting the US power to act unilaterally as it sees fit. It traces back to the America First movement that sought to keep the US out of the second World War, led by aviator and a man often thought of as a Nazi sympathiser, Charles Lindbergh. During the Cold War years, America First took a back seat to the necessity of defeating Communism. But since the Cold War ended, it has once again reared its ugly head.

The United Nations has long been a bugaboo for America Firsters. At its inception, they criticised it as a form of “world government” that would compromise US sovereignty. The voice the UN gave to the decolonised nations of Africa and Asia, and the anti-racist stands it took (for example, against apartheid in South Africa) earned it the scorn of white supremacists. Rightwing Protestants saw it as ungodly. In the bestselling Left Behind novels of evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye, the former head of the UN is the literal Antichrist.

Yet it is not just the American right that has undermined the UN. The five nations of the Security Council were given a veto power, designed to restrain the institution’s democratic principles. The US has frequently used its power to veto policies that practically all other nations support – especially in the case of Israel/Palestine. And Trump is hardly the first US president to fail to honour the nation’s financial commitment to the body.

Trump’s speech can be seen as a kind of unintentional parody of the contempt with which previous US leaders have treated the UN and world opinion. Who could forget the notorious 2003 speech that US secretary of state Collin Powell gave to the Security Council on the eve of the Iraq War, seeking support for a destructive, illegal and unnecessary war that the US had already decided to wage? Powell humiliated himself by offering false evidence of Iraqi programmes of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda that failed to convince most world leaders.

But scorn for the UN and its principles has not just come from Republicans. Former US president Joe Biden spoke of defending democracies worldwide and of rebuilding multilateral relationships after the first Trump administration. And in some cases he did so. But he prevented the UN from stopping the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Four times under Biden’s watch, the US vetoed ceasefire resolutions. And Biden ignored a ruling by the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the UN, that Israel was committing a probable genocide against the Palestinian people.

One thing Trump said in his speech was certainly true: the UN is an often ineffective institution offering mere “empty words”. But the principal reason why the UN’s power has been so limited has been because the US wants it that way. What Trump has made clear is that those who hope for a world based on the principles of dialogue, democracy and peace cannot look to the US for hope, if ever they once should have.

Fortunately, there are some in the world who still voice support for those principles. One of them is Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who addressed the UN just before Trump. Lula said: “All around the world, anti-democratic forces are trying to subjugate institutions and suffocate freedoms. They worship violence, glorify ignorance, act as physical and digital militias, and restrict the press.” If the ideals of the UN are to survive this century, then the vision of Lula must triumph over the destructive megalomania of Trump.

Dr Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor of US history at Trinity College Dublin

Show me an English literature teacher who does not believe in the central importance of William Shakespeare’s work to a proper education and I will show you someone who should be in another line of work. But according to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment these types exist: there are some teachers in Ireland, according to the body’s recent report, who questioned the “necessity” of making Shakespeare’s work compulsory reading in higher-level examinations.

Forcing students to pore over Macbeth, or Sonnet 19? Well, that might impose unspecified “limitations” on the “experience of the students”, these teachers suggested. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest anyone making such a case is not to fit to teach at all; but they are perhaps not the best choice to be designing a syllabus.

And reading about these so-called limitations on the so-called student experience made me wonder: what kind of “experience” do we expect our students of English literature to have if not reading Shakespeare? Is Iago’s motiveless evil getting in the way of their kayaking lessons? Are Ophelia’s spasms of madness taking up valuable time that could be spent on animal husbandry?

These teachers – abrasive and irresponsible iconoclasts that they are – might tell me off for being glib. They are simply suggesting that all the rigour required to parse Shakespeare presents an opportunity cost, where students could be reading something else.

For example, this year I am told that instead of Othello, your main Leaving Certificate text could be Marina Carr’s Girl on an Altar – a 2022 retelling of the Agamemnon and Clytemnestra myth. Let’s work this one out together: a play with a critical reputation that has survived nearly 500 years, which has had observable influence on the literary universe we all occupy? Or one from three years ago with no chance to have made any real impact on the culture? Talk to me about that opportunity cost again.

[ To be or not to be? Why it is time to drop Shakespeare’s compulsory status in Leaving CertOpens in new window ]

“Shakespeare’s work can be difficult for students,” one English teacher wrote in these pages this week, nestled in a longer argument about why the playwright and poet should be made an optional part of the syllabus. Of all the people in the world to be possessed with the bigotry of low expectations, I find it particularly depressing when I identify it in teachers.

I suspect one of the faster ways to ensure your students will struggle with the great works of literature is to claim they already do, as though it is a foregone conclusion.

Thankfully, there are some redoubts against our declining standards: Minister for Education Helen McEntee is arguing forcefully that Shakespeare should remain compulsory. But she will be wading against a strong tide of low-imagination bureaucrats.

Despairing over this Shakespeare conversation, I turned to the Curriculum Specification for Leaving Certificate English, issued in August 2025. I trawled through pages of cliche (“language does not exist in a vacuum”); patronising descriptions of the student body (“enriched, engaged and competent learners”); banal truisms masquerading as insight (“students vary in their family and cultural backgrounds, languages, age, ethnic status, beliefs, gender and sexual identity”); and political ideas that might have been interesting in 2015 (students must consider “the way identities, places and groups are presented differently”).

Within all of this Disneyland guff, I detected no engagement with the meaning of the canon, nor anything about the centuries-deep tradition of literary criticism, nor even a succinct expression about what the discipline of English literature is.

If this is how we treat teenagers, is it any wonder that global literacy rates are declining, and reading comprehension skills are collapsing across the Anglosphere? These expectations are part of a broader global trend that is seeing, for the first time in decades, a reversal in our literary capabilities.

This is comprehensively evidenced: in a collation of “average scores” in high-income countries, the Financial Times found a precipitous decline in reading levels from 2012 to now. An Atlantic chart identified 2012 as a similar dropping-off point for literacy skills. And the number of American teenagers who read in their leisure time has been declining since 1985, from 45 per cent to a meagre 14ish per cent.

Meanwhile, my friend James Marriott in the London Times – from whom I have adopted a kind of collateral fury at the state of literary education – points to a study of English literature students at American universities. It found many of them could not interpret the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. This is a book, he reminds us, “that was once regularly read by children”. Dust off your copy and tell me if it really is so difficult.

Given the climate, English teachers should be arresting the pace of decline, not accelerating it. Instead, they are suggesting we could take Shakespeare out of the syllabus because students find it a bit more complicated than Gatsby. This is not just professionally foolish, but societally negligent.