Friday, December 22, 2017

Trump Cards, Con't

So as I was talking about earlier this week, Thursday's UN General Assembly vote happened on America's stupid decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and yes, the world absolutely called out Trump's bluff.

In a stinging rebuke of President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel earlier this month, 128 countries, including some of the US’s most trusted and reliable allies, voted in favor of a United Nations resolution on Thursday calling for a reversal of his position. Only nine countries voted against it. 
Though the resolution doesn’t explicitly refer to the US, it’s clearly directed at the White House. The measure declares that any changes to the status of Jerusalem “have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded.” 
It also “calls upon all States to refrain from the establishment of diplomatic missions in the Holy City of Jerusalem” — another shot at the administration, which announced plans to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. 
The closest thing the US got to support from allies was 35 abstentions. Friends of the US like Canada, Mexico, and Australia refrained from voting on the resolution — which means that while they didn’t support the US with a vote against it, they didn’t criticize the US either with a vote in favor of it. 
While the passage of the resolution isn’t binding — meaning the US doesn’t actually have to reverse its position — it’s a stark illustration of just how isolated the United States is in its stance toward Israel.

While Canada and Mexico understandably abstained (after all they both share very large borders with a dangerous and ludicrously armed rogue nation helmed by a madman) and Australia looked the other way, the other member nations of the UN Permanent Security Council all told Trump to go screw himself.  China, Russia, the UK and France all voted in favor of the resolution, as did India, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia and Turkey.

We look like stupid assholes right now unless you think Honduras, Togo and the Marshall Islands are the arbiters of global diplomatic opinion.  Meanwhile, the rest of the world will simply deal with us and move on.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Sunday that he intends to open an embassy in East Jerusalem — the part of the city that Palestinians officially want as the capital of a future Palestinian state. That came days after he convened a gathering of Muslim leaders to call for the world to see East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. 
A statement signed by more than 50 Muslim-majority countries at that summit declared that the US had lost its role as a “sponsor of peace” in the Middle East. And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech last week that Trump’s Jerusalem announcement was a “crime” and that he no longer wants the US to broker peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

The other major nations of the world will step up in our absence, most notably China.  We're handing them the reins apparently, because we're now headed by a petulant toddler.

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