Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump made clear to the world he has abandoned any pretense of global leadership.

In an hour-long speech Tuesday, the president bragged that America “was the hottest country in the world” under his leadership. While he demeaned a toothless U.N. Trump repeated his hugely exaggerated claims that he had “ended seven unwinnable wars” (most of which were skirmishes, and none of which ended in peace treaties).

But when it came to the hard stuff — Russia’s war on Ukraine that has now expanded to drone attacks and air threats against NATO partners — he said almost nothing. Ditto about ending the war in Gaza. Nor did he mention China’s growing military threats to Asian allies and support for Russia’s war.

Rather, he addressed his real audience — the MAGA crowd at home and the far-right nationalist parties in Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere that he has publicly supported. The “number one global crisis of our time,” he insisted, was migration — “which is ruining our countries [and] will be the death of Europe.”

The second greatest threat, he claimed, is “the climate hoax” that threatens drilling for more oil. Address both threats, he instructed America’s allies, or “your countries are going to hell.”

In fact, the military hell that threatens our allies and us is largely due to Trump’s refusal to stand up to the autocrats he openly admires, who will be further emboldened by his U.N. performance.

Vladimir Putin’s escalation of threats to Europe, which began right after Trump’s red-carpet welcome at the Alaska summit in mid-August, and ramped up just before the president’s U.N. speech, was an open test of Trump’s toughness. He failed in humiliating fashion before the eyes of the world, never even mentioning this dangerous Russian military challenge in his remarks.

On the eve of the U.N. meeting, drone sightings forced authorities in Denmark and Norway to close the main airports in Copenhagen and Oslo. While the perpetrator is not known for certain, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she “cannot rule out in any way that it is Russia.” She noted the new incursion fit into a pattern of recent Russian-suspected hybrid attacks across Europe.

On Friday, Russian pilots violated Estonian airspace and ignored signals for long minutes from Italian NATO jets that scrambled to warn them. And on Sept. 10, around 19 drones entered Polish airspace, in what Polish officials believe was a coordinated Russian test of NATO defenses.

At a special session of the U.N. Security Council on Monday, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski angrily warned Moscow not to whine at the U.N. “if another missile or aircraft enters our space without permission … and gets shot down.”

Of course, Russia denied all accusations, just as it denied invading Crimea in 2014 with soldiers in unmarked green uniforms until its forces had taken over the Ukrainian peninsula.

The Kremlin’s successful test of Trump’s wobbly backbone was successful. His determined refusal to criticize Putin, in his brief mention of his own failed “peace” efforts in Ukraine, was shameful. “I thought it would be the easiest [of global conflicts] to solve because of my relationship with Putin,” the president said. “It is making Russia look bad,” he continued, because Russia didn’t win quickly.

In other words, the problem isn’t that Putin attacked a peaceful neighbor, but that he failed to subdue it quickly. Moreover, Trump made clear he still won’t impose sanctions on Russia — which he has pledged to do so often (and regularly reneged on) that such threats have become a global joke. Instead, the president insisted Europe would have to stop energy purchases from Russia.

What Trump neglected to say was that the countries that still buy oil from Russia are led by far-right leaders in Slovakia and Hungary, whom he continually praises. And that the Europeans are doing far more to pressure Putin than Trump himself.

Trump’s head-spinning, off-the-cuff remarks later in the day that NATO should shoot down planes that enter its airspace totally contradict what Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said earlier. Such a warning — which I believe is needed — would require solid U.S. backing to make Putin take it seriously, and Trump offered none.

Similarly, the president’s social media post after a meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he now believes Kyiv could take back all Russian-occupied territory are meaningless unless Trump radically ups military aid to Kyiv and finally imposes sanctions against Moscow.

All that is clear is that Trump has been steadfastly unwilling to act to curb Putin’s outrageous war crimes.

Similarly, the president condemned the recognition of a Palestinian state by many European allies, but has so far refused to rebuke an Israeli government policy that seems bent on driving two million Palestinians out of Gaza. Nor has he withdrawn his Gaza Riviera plan that calls for doing just that.

The president’s performance on the U.N. stage was a tragic reminder of how much the world still needs U.S. leadership. It underlined the vacuum Trump has left by making war on his domestic enemies and abandoning focus on dangerous real wars.

Even in the Mideast, where he deserves credit for the Abraham Accords, Trump is permitting Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to risk destroying that achievement via a policy of ethnic cleansing aimed at pushing millions of Palestinians out of the West Bank to Jordan and out of Gaza into Egypt.

Not only would that end any possibility of recognition by Saudi Arabia and of regional peace, but it would jeopardize Israel’s vital peace treaties with Amman and Cairo.

And having goosed NATO allies in Europe to spend more on defense and rally more seriously to Ukraine’s side, Trump is now treating those allies like enemies rather than joining them in standing up to Putin. The Russian leader and China’s Xi Jinping clearly recognize that Trump’s war-like bluster at home is cover for his unwillingness to confront their threats to Europe and Asia.

So when Trump castigated the U.N., saying, “Empty words don’t solve wars,” he should have been looking in a mirror. All his harangues on immigration and climate change can’t hide the fact that his speech was empty of any promise to resolve — in concert with allies — the wars that most threaten global security right now.

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