© Whitehouse.gov
President Trump speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 19, 2017.
President Trump's U.N. speech showed that despite his America First rhetoric, his policies are virtually the same as the neocon strategies of George W. Bush and liberal interventionism of Barack Obama,.

In discussing President Trump, there is always the soft prejudice of low expectations - people praise him for reading from a Teleprompter even if his words make little sense - but there is no getting around the reality that his maiden address to the United Nations General Assembly must rank as one of the most embarrassing moments in America's relations with the global community.

Trump offered a crude patchwork of propaganda and bluster, partly delivered as a campaign speech praising his own leadership - boasting about the relatively strong U.S. economy that he mostly inherited from President Obama - and partly reflecting his continued subservience to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

However, perhaps most importantly, Trump's speech may have extinguished any flickering hope that his presidency might achieve some valuable course corrections in how the United States deals with the world, i.e., shifting away from the disastrous war/interventionist policies of his two predecessors.