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Right and Left React to Trump’s Speech at the U.N.

The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen.

Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com.

For an archive of all the Partisan Writing Roundups, check out Our Picks.

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President Trump spoke at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Sohrab Ahmari in Commentary:

“The speech offered the clearest sign yet that the administration has parted with Steve Bannon and other Breitbart types who wanted to use Trump as a bulldozer against liberal order.”

Establishment Republicans should rejoice at the president’s speech to the United Nations on Tuesday, writes Mr. Ahmari, and “give credit where it is due.” According to him, the address marks a “return to the G.O.P.’s postwar foreign-policy traditions” and a shedding of the “pinched, narrow nationalism” of hyper-nationalists like the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen or Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. Read more »

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Daniel Larison in The American Conservative:

“U.S. foreign policy already suffers from far too much self-congratulation and excessive confidence in our own righteousness, so it was alarming to hear Trump speak in such stark, fanatical terms about international affairs.”

Articulating the views of the isolationist wing of conservatives, Mr. Larison criticizes Mr. Trump’s belligerent tone. He compares the president’s confrontational talk with President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” remarks, and worries that Mr. Trump’s speech will commit the United States to more “avoidable wars.” This, according to Mr. Larison, has nothing to do with “putting American interests first.” Read more »

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Rich Lowry in National Review:

“Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations was a sometimes awkward marriage of conventional Republican foreign policy and a very basic version of Trump’s nationalism.”

While some of the president’s more colorful language was sure to turn heads at the General Assembly — “we’ve never heard such direct, undiplomatic language from a U.S. president at Turtle Bay” — Mr. Lowry is not unhappy with Mr. Trump’s address. “All things considered and given the alternatives, it was a fine speech,” he writes, though he would have liked the president to emphasize “how important a vision of liberal democracy was to the United States.” Read more »

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Judith Miller in Fox News:

“The president’s maiden speech to the UN was really two speeches.”

Ms. Miller saw two sides to President Trump’s speech on Tuesday. It was both a “conventional endorsement of the” United Nations and “vintage Trump,” complete with the familiar “America First” message. It was “his version of truth-to-power,” though, at the same time, “long on contradictions and short on proposals for solving the threats he denounced.”.” Read more »

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Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia during Mr. Trump’s speech.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Fred Kaplan in Slate:

“If respect for sovereignty is a pillar of world order, should anyone care what ideology or economic system a country decides to pursue, as long as it doesn’t seek to impose it on others?”

Mr. Kaplan appraises Mr. Trump’s speech as perhaps the “most hostile, dangerous and intellectually confused” address by an American president to an international audience. According to Mr. Kaplan, the president was particularly contradictory in his remarks on sovereignty, arguing that “he invoked sovereignty when it suited his purposes — and proposed violating sovereignty, without a thought, when it didn’t.” Read more »

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Spencer Ackerman in The Daily Beast:

“Whatever nexus between Putin and Trump exists for Robert Mueller to discover, the evidence of their compatible visions of foreign affairs was on display at the United Nations clearer than ever, with Trump’s aggressive incantation of ‘sovereignty, security and prosperity’ as the path to world peace.”

Not only was this speech a “worthy successor” to the president’s inaugural address — the “American carnage” speech — but it also resembles the United Nations address that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia gave to the international body in 2015. And though Mr. Trump briefly mentioned Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, his speech signals a potential opening to a “resurgent, aggressive Russia.” Read more »

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Paul Waldman in The Washington Post:

“Does Trump actually think that if he issues a few more bellicose threats then North Korea will agree to give up its nuclear weapons? It would not be unreasonable for Kim to believe that his nuclear weapons are the only thing keeping the United States from launching a war against him.”

Mr. Waldman asks his readers to put themselves in the place of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Why would any of Mr. Trump’s threats — and hints that he was willing to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal — sway Mr. Kim to give up his own nuclear weapons? Read more »

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Heather Digby Parton in Salon:

“One might even call this speech ‘Global Carnage.’Trump described a Hobbesian world in which decent countries everywhere are under assault from ‘small regimes’ trying to undermine their sovereignty and destroy their ways of life.”

Ms. Parton suggests an alternate title for the president’s speech: “Global Carnage.” In her assessment, Mr. Trump “careened wildly from some warped form of principled realism to threats of mass annihilation and back again.” She also notes that for all his talk about sovereignty, Mr. Trump has notabley ignored a particular instance of international interference: suspected Russian meddling in the U.S. election. “As long as foreign actors interfere on his personal behalf he has no problem with it,” she writes. Read more »

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The General Assembly chamber at the United Nations in New York.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Eli Lake in Bloomberg:

“For a moment, I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.”

In many ways, writes Mr. Lake, Mr. Trump’s speech echoed a conventional, neoconservative worldview, though it stopped just short of the Bush doctrine to “seek democratic transformation for friend and foe alike.” For Mr. Lake, this foreign policy turn is a welcome one: “Let’s hope Trump sticks with this new approach.” Read more »

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Gayle Tzemach Lemmon in CNN:

“A bilateral man addressed a multilateral world. And he left knowing neither is likely to change.”

Ms. Lemmon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, describes the style of Mr. Trump’s address as “Teleprompter Donald Trump” meets “domestic speech-giving Donald Trump.” The result? “Tough talk” that should have surprised no one. Read more »

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