Nothing wrong in leaders' putting their nations first

IN reviewing a book or a film, some critics would explain to the readers that the novelist or the movie director has done a lousy job because he or she should have produced something else, like the kind of novel or film that the critic likes.

Which is the way several journalists and foreign policy pundits responded to the recent address by President Donald Trump before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. The US president, they pontificated, should have celebrated the "United" part of the UN, not the "Nations" part.

They seemed to suggest that Mr Trump should have sounded more like Barack Obama during his 2016 UN General Assembly when he urged the promotion of "a better model of…