By Fred Fleitz
Saturday, December 30, 2017
President Trump and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley
made a lot of news last week with their condemnations of the United Nations
over a U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) resolution criticizing President Trump’s
decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S.
embassy there.
President Trump threatened to withhold billions of
dollars in U.S. aid from states that voted for the resolution and said after
the vote, “Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
Ambassador Haley warned that the U.S. would be “taking names” of states that
voted for this resolution.
Although these comments didn’t represent anything new —
U.S. officials have lamented the U.N.’s anti-Israel and anti-U.S. bias for
decades — they were still very significant, since they involve the United
States’ holding the United Nations accountable again after a 25-year hiatus.
As a CIA U.N. analyst from 1986 to 1994, I remember well
the intense focus by the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations to punish
U.N. members who voted for anti-U.S. and anti-Israel resolutions. Nations were
given scores on their support of the United States in the U.N., which were used
to determine U.S. aid.
For example, in 1990, after Yemen voted against a U.N.
Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in
response to its invasion of Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker told Yemen’s
U.N. ambassador, “That was the most expensive ‘no’ vote you ever cast.” Several
days later, a $70 million U.S. aid program to Yemen was halted.
There also was a push during this period to curtail the
use of the U.N. for espionage against the United States by hostile powers,
especially the Soviet Union. In addition, U.S. diplomats fought to lower the
U.S. contribution to the U.N. and to address the organization’s epic corruption
and inefficiency.
In 1991, then–assistant secretary of state John Bolton
scored a huge win against anti-Semitism and animus toward Israel in the U.N.
with his successful campaign to persuade the U.N. General Assembly to rescind
its odious 1975 resolution that equated Zionism with racism.
While I was providing intelligence support to Bolton for
his campaign to rescind the U.N. Zionism/racism resolution, I learned that his
main challenge was not twisting the arms of foreign leaders; it was fighting
with State Department careerists who did not want to upset Arab countries and
seemed to have their own biases against the Jewish state. This problem
continues today, and it is why President Trump must fill vacant State
Department positions ASAP with people who will defend his policies.
This twelve-year campaign against U.N. bias and
mismanagement by two Republican administrations ended with the Clinton
administration, which took a “see no evil” approach to the U.N. and adopted a
policy called “assertive multilateralism,” which tried to end civil wars with
U.N. peacekeeping and used U.S. soldiers as peacekeepers. I explained in my
2002 book Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the
1990s how this policy led to a string of major peacekeeping failures in the
former Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Somalia.
The George W. Bush administration ended the Clinton
administration’s naïve approach to the U.N. However, with one notable exception
— John Bolton’s 18-month tenure as U.N. ambassador — this administration showed
little interest in addressing anti-U.S. and anti-Israel animus in the
organization or pushing for U.N. reform.
(An important related point: One of the worst George W.
Bush administration officials who worked on U.N. issues — Brian Hook, who
served as assistant secretary of state for international organizations — was
brought back to the State Department by Secretary Rex Tillerson and reportedly
runs the department for Tillerson as director of the policy-planning staff.)
The Obama administration was the worst of all. Not only
did Obama officials do nothing to combat anti-America and anti-Israel bias in
the United Nations, they actually encouraged it. President Obama used his
annual addresses to the U.N. General Assembly to apologize for past U.S
policies, criticize our nation, and suggest that powerful nations like the
United States should subordinate themselves to the U.N. Obama’s hostility to
Israel was obvious throughout his term and was epitomized on December 23, 2016,
when he made the unprecedented decision to abstain on a U.N. Security Council
resolution censuring Israel over settlement building.
Israeli officials accused President Obama and Secretary
of State John Kerry of abandoning Israel by this vote. The Palestinians
declared a “day of victory.” Israel officials also claimed to have “hard
evidence” that U.S. diplomats drafted this resolution, a charge Obama officials
denied.
Although the extreme anti-Israel and anti-U.S. bias in
the U.N. of the Cold War days is long over, the organization is still working
against American interests, a situation made worse by the naïve U.N. policies
of the Clinton and Obama administrations and the general neglect of the U.N. by
the George W. Bush administration.
Thus President Trump inherited another foreign-policy
mess at the United Nations. So what should Mr. Trump do about the U.N.?
Conservative experts are divided.
Some believe the United Nations is so anti-American and
flawed that the U.S. should withdraw from the organization. I oppose this
option because I believe the U.N. still has value as a venue to peacefully
resolve international disputes.
Although Ambassador John Bolton is not calling for the
U.S. to completely pull out of the U.N., he argued in a December 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “How to
Defund the UN” that President Trump should withdraw from and stop funding U.N.
bodies that do not serve U.S. interests. Bolton also called for major budget
cuts to the U.N. bureaucracy and replacing America’s assessed contributions to
fund the U.N. — which is essential a mandatory bill foisted on Washington by
U.N. members — with voluntary contributions under which the U.S. would pay only
for U.N. expenses that it supports.
Ambassador Haley is already working to cut U.N. spending,
and she announced last week that she has negotiated a $285 million reduction in
the U.N.’s 2018 budget. Although this was a good start, next year’s U.N. budget
will be about $5.2 billion, so Haley must work to extract much larger cuts.
Holding U.N. members and the U.N. bureaucracy accountable
for their votes and actions must be part of the Trump U.N. policy. While Trump
officials have already said they may deny aid to states that vote against the
United States, there are many similar steps they should take to punish the U.N.
and its members for actions that violate the principles of liberty and freedom
on which the organization was founded.
For example, U.N. bureaucrats won’t allow the Dalai Lama
to speak to U.N. bodies, and until last year refused to allow him on U.N.
premises due to objections from China. The United States and Israel are
regularly condemned for bogus human-rights violations, but no U.N. resolution
has ever passed on human-rights violations in Tibet and Xinjiang by China, or
on human-rights violations by Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
It is worth noting that although the U.N. never passed
resolutions condemning Vladimir Putin’s bloody crackdown against Chechnya, it
has passed resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately,
these resolutions were non-binding. The U.N. has approved several resolutions
condemning the dire human-rights situation in North Korea, but the first did
not pass until 2003.
Meanwhile, some Muslim states want to uproot modern
principles of human rights by passing a U.N. resolution to amend the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights to make it compatible with sharia law by removing
language on the right of a person to change his religion and adding new
language banning the “defamation” of religions.
President Trump must make clear that the United States
will no longer tolerate U.N. votes and actions that violate our principles of
freedom and democracy and will take retaliatory steps in response when
necessary.
The Trump administration also should turn the tables on
anti-U.S. and anti-Israel bias in the U.N. by aggressively using the Security
Council against rogue states like North Korea and Iran. The administration
already has been successful in doing this against North Korea by winning
unanimous approval of several resolutions imposing the stiffest sanctions ever
in response to its nuclear weapons and missile program. Growing concern by
European states about the Iranian missile program could lead to similar
resolutions against Iran over the next few years.
At the same time, Trump officials need to realize that
since the U.N.’s globalist diplomats and bureaucrats will never agree to most
of America’s demands, they need to focus on those that are doable. A priority
should be ensuring that America’s allies stand with it in the U.N. as a united
bloc for freedom and international security. Based on the shameful decision by
the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and many other
U.S. allies to vote for last week’s UNGA resolution on President Trump’s
decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, it is clear that Ambassador
Haley has her work cut out for her.
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