Two milestones in the decline of the United States’ international standing during Donald Trump’s second term, as reported here, were a pair of votes last year in the United Nations General Assembly. One in February, when the US dissented from a resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the other two months later, when the US voted with Russia in a small minority against an otherwise unexceptional resolution because it also happened to criticise the war against Ukraine.
Now there’s another one to add to the list, but this one doesn’t mention Ukraine at all. It’s a resolution adopted by the General Assembly on Wednesday (yesterday in Australia), welcoming and endorsing a recent decision of the International Court of Justice to the effect that countries have an obligation under international law to address climate change and could be held liable if they fail to control greenhouse gas emissions.
I don’t propose to assess the resolution itself; you can read it here and make up your own mind. Like most UN products it is verbose and somewhat nebulous, idealistic in intent but evidently drafted to mean the maximum number of different things to different people. What’s interesting is the politics of the vote on it.*
The resolution was carried by 141 to eight, with 28 countries abstaining and another 16 not voting. The United States and Israel were among the dissenters. So far, so relatively common: it’s not unusual for those two countries to be in a small minority, usually on matters concerning the Middle East.
What’s unusual is the company they were keeping. The other six votes against were cast by Belarus, Iran, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – a precarious democracy (Liberia) and five autocracies, one of which the US is currently at war with. And there was the same pattern in the abstentions: only one European Union member among them (Czechia, whose foreign minister is from a climate denialist party), and most of them either dictatorships or places heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Argentina, whose president is another denialist, also abstained, as did those two stalwarts of what we used to call the non-aligned movement, India and South Africa. A few of Russia’s usual allies absented themselves (North Korea, Nicaragua, Serbia, Venezuela), but others joined the rest of the world to support the resolution, including Cuba, Georgia, Mozambique, Tajikistan and Vietnam.
On most occasions when the US finds itself in a small minority it can at least say that its supporters (to the extent of abstaining even if not of voting with it) are its allies. But that’s conspicuously not the case this week. Countries voting against the US included not just the whole of the EU apart from Czechia but also such usual friends as Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, Micronesia, Palau, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and of course Australia.
I can’t recall ever seeing a pattern like that before. It’s not, like the Ukraine vote, a matter of direct appeasement of Russia – although Russia, with its dependence on oil exports, has a strong vested interest in climate denial – but rather a matter of independently reaching a conclusion that otherwise comes naturally only to a certain sort of dictatorship. Such, it seems, is American policy in the Trump era.
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* Thanks to Sol Salbe for drawing it to my attention.
The World is Not Enough 