Reject law of most powerful: Macron
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday urged world leaders to reject "the law of the most powerful", offering a rebuke to Donald Trump's go-it-alone approach to global challenges.
Macron did not refer to the United States President by name, but his address to the United Nations General Assembly outlined positions that were polar opposites to Trump's world view. "Some have chosen the law of the most powerful, but it cannot protect any people," said Macron, who reaffirmed his strong backing for multilateralism embodied by the UN and its global peace efforts.
Earlier at the UN podium, Trump vowed to "never surrender America's sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable global bureaucracy" and to reject "the ideology of globalism". Since Trump took office in 2017, the US has ditched the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate deal - two international accords that France has championed.
The US administration has cut funding to the UN, aid agencies and to UN peacekeeping, whose missions in Mali and the Central African Republic are working with French troops to bolster stability.
Macron pointed to growing economic inequality as one of the drivers of the crisis in the world order, with some 783 million people living under the threshold of poverty and 250 million children out of school. Touching on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the French President said there was no credible alternative to the two-state solution.
