Anti-American UN General Assembly vote presents Trump an opportunity to turn a loss into a win
Shrink the size of the UN bureaucracy, and undo Obama’s legacy of leveraging the UN against America and Israel.
The UN General Assembly voted by a margin of 128-9-35 to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and eventually to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem. The vote is non-binding, but is being cheered in many quarters.
American liberals are loving it, because it is viewed as a loss for Trump. And any loss for Trump, even if it’s an anti-US loss, is okay with the media Resistance.
Joy Reid cheered Trump’s loss with a “Bye Felicia” snark on MSNBC:
(video also here)
Morning Joe was unanimous that Trump’s loss was well-deserved:
Needless to say, the Palestinian leadership, which funnels an enormous percentage of its budget to paying rewards to terrorists and their families, declared it a big victory:
“The vote is a victory for Palestine,” said Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah. “We will continue our efforts in the United Nations and at all international forums to put an end to this occupation and to establish our Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.”
Anti-Israel extremist group “Jewish Voice for Peace” portrayed it as a loss for Trump’s alleged evangelical Christian base:
The number of countries that voted with Palestine today affirms that a U.S. foreign policy designed to bolster Trump’s donors and evangelical Christian base will only serve to further isolate both the U.S. and Israel and inspire a global movement to realize Palestinian rights.
A more sober view is that while it was a loss for the U.S. and Trump, it wasn’t as big a loss as Israel usually received in the General Assembly. Raphael Ahrens at The Times of Israel writes, Why Israel’s massive defeat at the UN isn’t quite as bad as it looks:
In Israeli diplomacy, everything is relative.
Was the outcome of Thursday’s vote at the United Nations General Assembly on the status of Jerusalem a stinging loss or a surprising success for Israel? Depends on how you look at it. But it certainly wasn’t as bad as many expected.
Palestinian officials, naturally, emphasized the fact that there were a whopping 128 yays and only 9 nays….
Israeli officials, however, chose to look at the other side of the coin, focusing on those that countries that did not support the resolution….
The fact that a total of 65 nations did not actively vote against US President Donald Trump’s December 6 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his announced intention to move the US embassy to the holy city was “hugely significant,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nachshon cheered.
This list shared by Nikki Haley of the 65 countries that either voted against, abstained or didn’t vote is remarkable for the 15 sub-Saharan countries that defied third-world and Arab pressure by not joining the anti-Israel and anti-US mob. That is a testament to the success Israeli diplomacy and humanitarian aid projects (including agricultural assistance) are having in Africa:
But a loss is a loss, and the reality is that in the General Assembly, there is an automatic anti-Israel super-majority regardless of the issue. As Abba Eban once quipped:
“If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”
In advance of the vote, Nikki Haley insisted that the US was “taking names,” and Trump even suggested that foreign aid might be affected by the vote. Haley repeated that in her statement at the UN in advance of the vote:
So will Trump follow through?
There are specific UN players who need to pay a price, chief among them the Palestinian Authority which pushed this anti-American resolution. Trump should close the PLO office in DC, should suspend new visas for PA officials with some limited exceptions, and should use his bully pulpit to get the Senate to vote on the Taylor Force Act. That Act has been passed by the House and was voted out of committee in the Senate, but has not yet received a floor vote. Once signed into law, which Trump has said he would do, the Taylor Force Act would cut funding to the Palestinian Authority unless it halted its payments to terrorists and their families.
Trump also needs to make the UN pay a price, which is more than a monetary issue. It is an opportunity to shrink the size of the anti-American, anti-Israel UN bureaucracy, and to undo Obamas legacy of subjugating the American political process to the will of the UN, on a host of issues from climate to the Iran nuclear deal.
The U.S. contributes $10 billion per year to the UN, of which $4 billion are assessed dues, and $6 billion are voluntary contributions. This places the US as the largest funder of the UN by far, more than double what China contributes. Trump should announce that he has instructed the state department and other necessary agencies to propose a specific plan that cuts the US contribution in half. That would still leave us as the largest funder, but would present the UN with serious consequences.
The US could still maintain some voluntary funding that serves our interests, and would continue to participate in the Security Council. But the days when American taxpayers funded people who actively work against us would come to an end.
These steps against the UN are long overdue. The anti-American UN General Assembly vote presents Trump with the opportunity to leverage a loss into a win.
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“Trump should announce that he has instructed the state department and other necessary agencies to propose a specific plan that cuts the US contribution in half. That would still leave us as the largest funder, but would present the UN with serious consequences.”
From your pen to God’s eyes, Professor.
It would represent a more than 10% cut in the UN’s total budget… enough to really hurt.
Better yet, announce we are dropping our membership, and they have three months to vacate the offices. Diplomatic immunity from our As a is suspended immediately!
Bill to Get U.S. Out of UN Introduced in New Congress,
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/item/25078-bill-to-get-u-s-out-of-un-introduced-in-new-congress
But you have to call your Member of Congress to sign on to the bill, or it will go nowhere. Ron Paul had been introducing this bill since the 1990s.
Not enough of us know just how much sovereignty is lost by our being in the UN. But the good news is that we can take it back, retrieve it. That’s hardly isolationism, the greatest sin to the internationalists.
Paraphrasing Richard Cobdan (UK, 1804-1865), “Let the peoples of the world have as much to do with one another as they wish; their governments the least.”
Paranoid Bircher nonsense. Being in the UN does not affect US sovereignty in any way. It can’t. The only downside of being in the UN is the money we pay, and that comes down to the same practical analysis as any other expense: do we get our money’s worth or do we not? If we do, keep paying; if we don’t, stop. No principle involved.
Without the U.S., the UN is irrelevant. I’d like to see the U.S. declare an end to our membership entirely and cut our deficit accordingly. Give them 30 days notice to move somewhere else. If the anti-Americans out there whine and cry, so what? Business as usual.
It is way past time this country became fed up with being ordered about by third-world ninnies whose personal fortunes are the result of looting their treasuries and ours.
The question is whether we get our money’s worth out of the UN. There’s no question that it has been very useful to us; the question is, if we’re paying $10B a year, is the benefit we get from it worth $9B or $11B.
A loss is when you are compelled to do what you do not wish to do. We are not so compelled. Those who voted against us suffered the loss, as they voluntarily handed us a stick with which to beat them senseless. Even Australia and Canada had better sense. You know where their hearts lie, but their common sense got the better of them. The UK voted for. Even their famed pragmatism was insufficient to overcome their deeply abiding antisemitism.
The rest of Europe, excepting former Soviet satellite states, were loud and proud. It’s the kind of impractical stand taken by children rebelling against their parent who has cared for and sheltered them until they have forgotten what it’s like to not be cared for and sheltered. I wish no ill will toward Europe, except the spanking they richly deserve for their ingratitude, but I fully expect for them to pay a terrible price for indulging their fantasy, and hope that they will come to their senses while there’s still time to sort things.
we have saved the Euros at least 2 WW’s and Cold War –
now they want to be on their own –
good luck amd don’t let the door hit you in the butt.
There’s another issue going on – most of the Europeans still hate the Jews as much as they ever did. They got embarrassed into pretending they didn’t for about 50 or 60 years, but that generation is gone and the old jew-hatred is back again in all of the same old places.
It is very sad that some countries which should know better voted against the US on this: Poland and Japan.
Poland should know better than to accommodate Islamic threats. This is surprising.
I have a low opinion of Japan as our ally. It is a very one sided relationship IMO. Mandate Japan get in line or start taking rape-fugees.
Read that list again. Poland did not vote for this resolution. They either abstained or didn’t vote.
What Granny said. Poland and Japan did NOT join the “condemn America” crowd.
Also did not side “with” us.
an abstention is as good as vote with us, in my opinion. I give the poles a pass.
Frankly, I think this was President Trump’s first move to extract the US from this insanity. If he does, he will seal his legacy as America’s Greatest President….at least for me! 😀 😉
That 6 billion in voluntary contributions could fund a lot of CHIP payments here, don’t ya thing? Think of the children.
So the majority of the UN throws a snit. It shouldn’t be we pick up our toys and leave.. we just leave. The UN has been another welfare program where the indigent (indignant) countries of the world are made to feel better about themselves but carry on as they wish.
The US funding the UN is akin to an African American funding the KKK. Why would we fund, to the tune of 25% of all its costs, any organization which continually works against our interests?
At the very least, we should reduce our funding to the same level as China currently provides and no more. We might even consider leaving the body entirely in 2019. By that time we should have rebuilt out domestic manufacturing capability to be able to thumb our noses at foreign markets. Japan, along with South Korea, Germany, France, Great Britain and Sweden, can sell all of their cars, produced outside the US, to Europe and Asia. The same with other consumer goods. Other manufacturing countries realize just how large an economic stick the US actually has. And, it scares them.
The voluntary funding is for programs we actually want; if we don’t fund them they won’t happen, and we’ll be worse off.
Don’t bet on it. All UN programs are rife with waste and misappropriation. We can run the same programs ourselves and save money. While we’re at it, we should also stop funding the Palestinian Authority.
Trump is unafraid to threaten the UN, use the funding lever, and ultimately kick them out of Manhattan and turn the UN building into a Trump property/hotel.
I love it.
Look, the General Assembly is and has always been irrelevant. It has no authority, and its resolutions — whether we like them or not — aren’t worth their weight in toilet paper. So carrying on like this about it is…silly. Beneath us. It’s treating the GA as if it mattered.
When you get to the point of the UN there are only five nations that matter. The rest are parasites. The US, UK, Russia, China, and France are the five permanent members of the council and after that the rest just sort of vote on things that we do not have to do if, as a nation, we do not want to do. They tend to be poorer nations and many are islamic. What they are basically saying is that a sovereign nation, the US, has no right to move its embassy to the capital of the sovereign country it is in. It isn’t binding and is not something that Trump need worry about. It does separate the wheat from the chaff though and will make future decisions easier when it involves nations that voted against us.
Haley overlooked the Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Turkey, Portugal…that is NATO… Republic of Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines that is our allies and near allies in Asia.
We need to shut down our alliance system, all of it, including UK and France, now. NATO and our Asian allies are a liability and a threat to our security. We get nothing from them.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your point. Those countries did NOT vote to condemn Pres. Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. How is that bad? Indeed, most of the Eastern European countries in your list are probably our most stalwart allies and are the most stalwart defenders of traditional western culture.
In the USSR, Khruschev—a True Believer, and one not burdened with the crushing weight of Stalin’s brutality and paranoia—was finally going to lead the worker’s worldwide revolution into the promised land of Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
But it didn’t happen.
In contrast, the succeeding Brezhnev era was a facade, as before, but with nothing behind it. But by that time, the rest of the world was accustomed to the Soviet Union, and willing to play along with the pretense that the Communist path to the future still existed, even if they themselves didn’t care to walk it. It was all a front, supported by the Soviet Union on one side, and by the West on the other.
Initially, Gorbachev played the same game, perpetrating the same fraud. Then he was hit by several disasters—the Chernobyl accident and the Armenian earthquake—and, most importantly, an American President who was no longer willing to follow the old playbook, supporting the pretense that the Soviet Union was an inevitable entity … and Gorbachev realized the jig was up.
We may be seeing the same gradual process with the UN. It was perhaps not a bad idea at first, and most of the players were already on the same team by the end of World War 2. In fact the rudiments of the organization already existed, but it was commonly called Allied Command, and only occasionally the United Nations. And to be fair, after its launch as a non-military affair it did work better than its predecessor, formed out of the alliances at the end of World War 1. But it’s obviously in a state of decline, and now seems to serve mainly as a vector for African peacekeeping troops to spread infectious diseases. And maybe now President Trump is unwilling to continue the pretense that a world without yet another huge bureaucracy, endlessly flailing about in search of relevance, is unthinkable.
Hey, sounds good to me—should have happened forty years ago. Maybe 60. Everything coming out of the UN after the Korean War has been mere noise.
THe UN like it’s predecessor the League of Nations has never lived up to it’s lofty ideals. I believe the ideals to be unattainable. While I am pleased By President Trump’s attitude regarding the UN, I think we, the USA, need to be careful not to give advantage to our many enemies by not subsidizing certain nations. Historically we have subsidized regimes we normally would have nothing to do with except that they were the lesser of two evils.
Thanks for the AWB. One of my favorites! Enjoy.
Since when is a UN vote against Israel “news”? They have some sort of vote against Israel several times every year. The only “news” is that UN ambassador Haley isn’t going to roll over and play dead like the last one did.
No ‘voluntary’ or non-assessed dues should be given to the U.N. Period, full stop.