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.