How Joe Biden Is Vetoing American Interests in the U.N.

By Elliott Abrams

Monday, April 25, 2022

 

With a frequent, often automatic majority against the United States, the U.N. General Assembly is a danger to American interests, allies, and beliefs. One need only recall the infamous “Zionism Is Racism” resolution to see just how far that majority may sometimes go.

 

What protects the United States in the United Nations is our veto in the Security Council. It is therefore a blow against our country’s interests that the Biden administration is supporting — indeed, it is co-sponsoring — a General Assembly resolution designed to undermine and delegitimize the veto.

 

On Tuesday, April 26, the General Assembly will vote on a draft resolution whose provisions are, from the American point of view, astonishing.

 

The draft begins by “recalling . . . the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations relating to the powers and functions of the General Assembly in matters pertaining to the maintenance of international peace and security,” which is an effort to raise the General Assembly to the level of significance that the Security Council has always had when dealing with such war-and-peace issues.

 

To back this up, it then throws in the International Court of Justice as a legitimator of General Assembly power: “recalling in addition that the International Court of Justice has observed the competence of the General Assembly on questions relating to the maintenance of international peace and security.”

 

The draft then turns to the operative paragraphs to undermine the veto. Paragraph 1 “decides that the President of the General Assembly shall convene a formal meeting of the Assembly within ten working days of the casting of a veto by one or more permanent members of the Security Council, to hold a debate on the situation as to which the veto was cast.”

 

In other words, the General Assembly is to have oversight over the Security Council. Vetoes are henceforth not to be a normal feature of the U.N. Charter, but a kind of crime that must be reported to and debated by the General Assembly.

 

Paragraph 3 “invites” the Security Council “to submit a special report on the use of the veto in question to the General Assembly at least 72 hours before the relevant discussion in the General Assembly.” Again, the delinquent on the Security Council must now explain and defend his action to what is clearly viewed as the superior body, the General Assembly.

 

And paragraph 4 of the resolution “decides to include the item ‘Use of the veto’ in the agenda of the 77th session of the General Assembly,” which begins this coming September. Have no doubt that the purpose of that debate is to delegitimize the veto even further, and to seek ways to prevent or limit its use.

 

Bizarre, hostile, and damaging actions by a transient or permanent majority in the United Nations General Assembly have rarely been a great danger for the United States because the most serious business was always done in the Security Council, where we have the veto. It’s entirely clear why unfriendly nations would like to undermine the veto. It is also clear why the smallest states, such as Nauru or Tuvalu — or Lichtenstein, population 38,000, which developed the resolution — might want exactly the same weight in the United Nations as the United States.

 

More astonishing than all these facts is that anyone, even the Biden administration, can believe that this resolution and the delegitimizing of the veto is in America’s interests. The Lichtenstein draft will surely pass. It will be left to another administration to protect the United States against the mischief we and our allies would face if these efforts ever succeeded.

 

Since the U.N. was founded, the veto has been abused, first by the Soviet Union and then by Communist China once it joined the United Nations. That is the price we pay for having a veto that can be cast when important American interests are at stake, and it is a price well worth paying.  Think of the impact of binding resolutions that jeopardize the rights of American servicemembers, limit the rights of American citizens abroad, or implement the U.N.’s obsessive hatred of Israel — if the United States could not block them because the veto were weakened or eliminated. The resolution to be voted on tomorrow does not achieve all that, but it is an obvious and dangerous step down that path.