The Trump administration is hinting it will soon follow through with threats to curtail foreign aid to countries that don’t vote with Washington at the United Nations. The irony is, more and more countries are voting with the U.S., at record rates, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping the moves to punish those perceived as ungrateful.
President Donald Trump laid the groundwork during his State of the Union address in January, when he called on Congress to “ensure American foreign assistance dollars always serve American interests, and only go to America’s friends.”
UN Ambassador Nikki Haley amplified this statement before a recent UN vote stating, “Across the world, and at the UN, we are standing up for our allies and our ideals again, paying close attention to who stands with us and who goes against us.”
Haley is reported to be proposing a reassessment of American foreign assistance with a view to penalizing countries that vote against U.S. policies at the UN, according to a recent report in Foreign Policy.
This begs the question, should cuts in international assistance be justified by how countries vote at the UN? For those who argue it should, such an argument makes intuitive sense. Why give international aid to a country unwilling to acknowledge a primary benefactor?
It’s an argument that has been made before. In 2013, the Heritage Foundation published a report arguing that bilateral development assistance should be tied with a country’s voting practices in the UN General Assembly. The report drew upon data that Congress mandated in 1984, requiring the State Department to compile an annual report on the voting patterns of individual countries at the UN.
But a closer look at the State Department’s Voting Practices in the United Nations-2016, the most recent year available, turns the very assumption that most countries regularly vote against the U.S. upside down. The State Department’s data reveals that an overwhelming majority of countries vote with the U.S. regularly.
Here then, is a 3-point guide to countries and their UN voting records based on the latest State Department report:
Count the entirety of a country’s votes at the UN. There are two types of votes in the UN General Assembly; consensus and non-consensus. Most UN votes are by consensus where no formal votes are taken, the result of prolonged negotiations on issues of critical importance to U.S. policy objectives.
For example, in just the past few months alone, there have been unanimous votes on countering violent extremism, combatting illicit financial flows as well as votes supporting women in development, food security and human rights. Indeed, in a manner like the workings of our own Senate—which makes extensive use of unanimous consent agreements—the great majority of resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly are decided on consensus.
When consensus resolutions are factored in to a country’s voting patterns, the concurrence rate is remarkably high. In 2016, the State Department found that the average voting coincidence of all UN member states with the U.S. was 84.1% (up slightly from 83.6 percent in 2015).
The average percentage of concurrence with the U.S. on non-consensus resolutions is the highest it has ever been. Even if you omit consensus votes and only count recorded votes on “non-consensus” resolutions, the average voting coincidence of all UN member states with the U.S. was still 54.8% in 2016. This 54.8% global concurrence rate is an historic high and a continuation of a trend showing more agreement with the U.S. over the past 10 years. In 1988, the rate of concurrence was 15.4% In 2000, it was 31.6%. In 2015, it was 43.2%. As a result, the data shows that, even on non-consensus issues, countries are siding with the U.S. much more frequently than they have done in the past, and that’s without having to resort to draconian measures.
Strategic Relationships Can’t Always be Reduced to Votes. General Assembly resolutions are not binding. The proposition that we should slash international assistance to countries who fail to agree with us in the General Assembly – an arbitrary percentage of the time – is a self-defeating response.
The fact is, if we use votes on non-binding resolutions as a cudgel to punish those who disagree with us, we would end up hurting countries with whom we have important strategic relationships, which would in turn negatively impact our own foreign policy and national security interests.
In the end, that remains the single biggest reason that international assistance should not be tied to UN votes: Beyond addressing humanitarian needs that symbolize our values as a country, international assistance promotes America’s interests. Removing that aid could easily result in removing America’s influence and our ability to pursue strategic objectives.
Jordie Hannum is the executive director of the Better World Campaign, advocacy arm of the UN Foundation.
