Last week, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Hamas had signed off on the first phase of his Gaza peace plan — one of the most significant diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East in years. For our nation and the world, this was a moment of rare convergence, of both clarity and action.
While much of the world has grown accustomed to the language of stalemate and moral equivocation, Trump’s foreign policy achievements underscore a deeper principle that realism and prudence are themselves instruments of peace. His most recent address to the United Nations General Assembly reflected the same conviction. It was not the speech of a diplomat pandering to anyone, but of a statesman determined to reassert that truth-telling is the first act of order.
Instead of masking hard truths in euphemisms, Trump offered a direct summons — that candid, realistic assessments of the world must precede our return to civilizational greatness. His address exemplified the essence of statecraft: speaking what we know is true (what many dare not say) and turning uncomfortable realities into a foundation for decisive action. In Trump’s realism, the statesman’s first task is not to flatter but to prepare, not to admire decline but to arrest it.
More than once in his speech, Trump bluntly invoked the mass migration and energy crises of the West, telling Europe, “You’re destroying your heritage,” and plainly warning, “Your countries are going to hell.” Here, the president deliberately bound truth-telling to deterrence because, following that up, he addressed the cartels, saying, “We will blow you out of existence.”
Far from just rhetoric, his words are a testament to the civic habits needed to preserve the West: fidelity to inheritance and the sacrificial courage to act on hard truths. This is about the art of rhetoric and even statecraft in a fallen world. There will always be evil, wrongs, and harsh realities to speak about. Statecraft is not about crafting the perfect phrase to win applause in a chamber of diplomats, but about shaping incentives, deterring aggression, and, especially now, safeguarding a people’s inheritance. President Trump understands that the U.N. stage is the opportune moment to state a realistic assessment of decay while summoning the resolve for repair.
For conservatives, the first habit — fidelity to inheritance — deserves particular praise. Though many debate whether Trump is a “real conservative,” his language in this speech is a reminder that to preserve the enduring things, you need to change. As Danny Kruger says, “the conservative remembers that the purpose of these practices is simply to sustain the community of the people, that the reason for change is to stay the same.” Stewarding one’s inheritance must resist the vanity of thinking we can improve everything by sheer managerial or technocratic will. Inheritance is a living trust, kept alive by institutions of family, faith, law, and civil society. It has endured because proud patriots across generations treated them as treasures to be handed forward, and especially sacrificed for.
The second habit, sacrificial courage to act on hard truths, is key. When leaders like President Trump are willing to use blunt language — saying things like, “Your countries are going to hell,” because their decline is real — they are modeling the courage needed at every level of society to stand up against this.
We saw what happened when the U.S. had a leader with the opposite approach on the U.N. stage: Problems were not named and thus went unsolved. Delicate euphemism and abstractions in speech accelerate societal erosion. The Biden years marked in America what our allies in Europe experience regularly from Brussels bureaucrats. The point is not to delight in provocation but to catalyze responsibility.
The immigration issue shows that forming humane legislation must first acknowledge the evil that cartels and human traffickers pose. Trump’s blunt recounting of horrors experienced by migrants on migration routes — including rape, slavery, death, and exploitation — revealed the unspeakable suffering inherent to mass migration that is often ignored. But it must be said, because it’s true, regardless of how unfashionable it is.
We should not be surprised that President Trump’s rhetoric is used not just to defend border enforcement but also energy independence. As the president underscored, energy is another decisive test of whether we will choose realism or delusion. In naming the fallacy of embracing green-energy absolutism, he made clear that no amount of self-imposed pain in the United States or Europe will solve the problem if nations like China, the world’s largest polluter, continue to operate without accountability. This practical candor requires that we stop pretending unilateral sacrifice is virtue, which leftists across the West do, sacrificing their citizens’ needs for affordable, reliable power.
Ultimately, Trump’s address was a call to arms of the spirit. In naming the crises plainly, he insisted that language match reality. His invitation to the world, particularly our Western allies, was to join in the battle for nationhood, embracing a posture that says, “Yes, our inheritance is in peril. No, we will not bow to fashionable despair. Yes, we will live up to the sacrificial task of stewarding what is good and true.” At its core, it’s a deeply Christian view — one that rejects despair and affirms instead that we are called to act even when the odds are daunting, trusting in providence and the moral arc of justice.
If we are to properly set the conditions for a civilizational rebirth, we must accept that realistic rhetoric is the statecraft needed for renewal. Only then will the heirs of our age be able to pass forward a civilization worthy of the sacrifice of those who came before.
