Even before Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, Congress is planning to escalate the clash over the UN Security Council’s anti-Israel resolution into a full-on conflict between the United States and the United Nations.
If Trump embraces the strategy – and all signals indicate he will – the battle could become the Trump administration’s first confrontation with a major international organisation, with consequential but largely unpredictable results.
Immediately after the Obama administration abstained last Friday from a vote to condemn Israeli settlements as illegal, which passed the Security Council by a vote of 14 to 0, Republicans and Democrats alike criticised both the United Nations and the US government for allowing what Congressman Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, called “a one-sided, biased resolution”.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee for the State Department and foreign operations, pledged to lead an effort to withhold the US funding that makes up 22 per cent of the UN’s annual operating budget.
Read the full article by Josh Rogin of The Washington Post at WAtoday.