MSNBC: On Iran, Pompeo and Trump find themselves isolated and defeated

 There was some speculation among experts that countries like Britain, France, and Germany would at least pause as a diplomatic courtesy to consider the United States' position in more detail. Yesterday, however, they didn't see the point in delaying their rejection of Pompeo's demand. [...]

It's hard to overstate the scope of the White House's failure. I realize there's a lot of political news unfolding right now, but Trump and Pompeo have screwed up an important foreign policy -- making the United States and its allies less safe in the process -- to a staggering extent. [...]

It's not easy to (a) isolate the United States; (b) undermine our national security interests; and (c) bring friend and foe together in opposition to our demands, all at the same time. And yet, Trump and Pompeo have managed to pull it off.

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Politico: Pompeo lashes out as U.N. Security Council rejects extension to Iran arms embargo

 The Security Council "rejected a reasonable resolution to extend the 13-year old arms embargo on Iran and paved the way for the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism to buy and sell conventional weapons without specific UN restrictions in place for the first time in over a decade," Pompeo said in a statement. "The Security Council’s failure to act decisively in defense of international peace and security is inexcusable." [...]

A bipartisan group of 387 members of Congress urged the Trump administration in May to extend the arms embargo. House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel said at the time that "Iran continues to be a danger to the United States, our interests, and our allies. We need a realistic and practical strategy to prevent Iran from becoming a greater menace.” [...]

France, Germany and the United Kingdom had also pushed back on a U.S. threat to impose sanctions on Iran if the Security Council voted to let the embargo expire. The U.S. negotiated the right to do so under the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. But the European countries argued the U.S. was not in a position to use the so-called snapback option after withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.

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WorldAffairs: Is the United Nations Still Relevant at 75?

Seventy-five years ago, delegates from 50 countries met in San Francisco to sign the UN Charter. Initially, the purpose of the United Nations was to maintain peace and security through international cooperation and to essentially prevent another world war. Today’s UN has 193 member countries and is facing a time of uncertainty and open disdain from US President Donald Trump, who has cut funding to the world body and declared, “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” On this week’s episode, we look at the UN’s achievements, its shortcomings and what the future holds for international cooperation with journalist James Traub. Then Ray Suarez talks with former Prime Minister of Canada The Rt. Hon Kim Campbell and former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge Castañeda about how the United States is viewed by its neighbors.

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New Statesman: The hot war in the east

In retrospect the hubristic complacency infecting all three communist capitals seems astounding. Stalin, of course, was operating on a policy of limited liability, turning Mao into the banker of last resort as his price for the new Sino-Soviet pact. In Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (Columbia University Press), a magisterial new study using archives from all the key countries, the American historian Samuel F Wells Jr observes that, “At Stalin’s insistence, Mao agreed to give Kim a blank cheque to cash if he got into trouble.” There were shades of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the July crisis of 1914. And the parallels don’t stop there. Kim lacked the logistical capacity for a war lasting more than a few weeks. “Much like the German Schlieffen Plan…” comments the military historian Allan Millett, “the North Koreans planned for a short war since it was the only war they could win.” [...]

Like many crisis decisions by leaders, the president was acting from the gut but also on his reading of the past. “Korea is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman told an aide – alluding to the firm line he had taken on providing anti-communist aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. “If we are tough now,” he added, “they won’t take any next steps.” But, “There’s no telling what they’ll do if we don’t put up a fight now.” The president also took the international dimension seriously, commenting that the UN was “our idea” in 1945 and “in this first big test we just couldn’t let them down”. [...]

As Truman’s biographer Robert J Donovan observes, “war without congressional approval” was “a costly mistake”, for which the president later paid a heavy price when he lost control of the conflict. At this stage in the fighting, political and public opinion was largely supportive. That was true even of a senior Republican such as Senator Robert A Taft, who accused Truman on 28 June of embarking on “de facto war” with North Korea “without consulting Congress” and warned that “if the president can intervene in Korea without congressional approval” he could “go to war in Malaya or Indonesia”. (Taft might as easily have said Vietnam: in the 1960s Lyndon Johnson followed the same tactic as Truman.) Yet Taft added that he would be willing to vote for a resolution of approval if one were put before Congress. The president, however, considered that he had sufficient constitutional authority as commander in chief, and he was confident that the fighting would be over quickly. [...]

Yet Washington had no idea what that job would entail and lacked even rudimentary information about what was going on behind the bamboo curtain. Although Truman had created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, in its early years the CIA lived up to none of those three words. Not only did it fail to deliver accurate intelligence on many of the major crises of the late 1940s – including the Soviet atomic test – its actions were lethargic and, far from being centralised, it operated as a series of rival fiefdoms spread out in ten different buildings across Washington, DC. In the spring of 1950, after a Soviet spy notified Moscow that the US had broken the codes used by the USSR to communicate with its emissaries in Beijing and Pyongyang, the ciphers were changed and the CIA went blind during the crucial months before the North Korean attack.

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Politico: U.N. vote deals Trudeau embarrassing defeat on world stage

Despite being a founding U.N. member and part of the G-7 and G-20, Canada’s size and history once again counted for little: the government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was defeated by Portugal in 2010, even as the former colonial power was in the midst of the humiliating EU bailout. [...]

With Norway, Ireland and Canada all taking similar approaches to such core global issues as climate change, multilateralism and peacekeeping, Canada’s relatively late entry into the race — as well as stumbles like Trudeau’s brownface scandal — hurt Canada’s ability to stand apart and make its case.[...]

The Canadian government shelled out roughly $1.7 million and employed 13 full-time campaign staff, compared to Norway’s $2.8 million budget and Ireland on $1 million. Ireland splurged on U2 and Riverdance tickets for diplomats, and Canada on Céline Dion tickets, BBC reported, in addition to giveaways such as greeting cards, chocolates and Canada-branded facemasks.

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Bloomberg: Britain’s a Small Country. Get Used to It.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a small country that is about to get even smaller. I know that this simple statement of fact will nevertheless infuriate many English people — and I do mean English people, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. Last week, at India’s Raisina Dialogue, the Spanish foreign minister said that there were two types of countries in Europe: countries that are small and countries that do not know that they are small. Aside from the English, no Europeans in the audience were upset at this plain-speaking. Not even the French. [...]

May has resolutely ruled out another referendum, but this is more than just her failure. After all, even if somehow Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party manages to unseat her, Labour’s approach to Europe is as predicated on fantasies as May’s. Corbyn is on record as saying he wants a customs union with the European Union that allows Britain to negotiate its own trade deals; this is, quite simply, impossible. It reflects a notion of British indispensability that nobody outside England shares.

The British can blame no one but themselves. While they’ve never been enthusiastic Europeans, their decision to be the first country to withdraw from the EU is revealing of a basic inability to grasp their vastly diminished place in the world. That they are a member of the United Nations Security Council means little; that reflects merely the power that the British Empire had in 1945, not the U.K.’s power today. Nor is being a nuclear-weapons state much of a big deal any more: Such basket cases as North Korea have the bomb. Most of Britain’s foreign policy influence grows out of its loyalty to the U.S., and Britons’ disproportionate cultural influence derives from the fact that they happen to speak the same language as the world’s sole cultural superpower.  [...]

I write this column from Vienna, an imperial capital grander even than London and one that has also been long without an empire to rule. Austria’s capital, unlike Britain’s, has come to terms with its new status. A profoundly liveable city, it prospers as Western Europe’s bridgehead in the east, and it has an easy pride in its history of intellectual innovation and artistic excellence.

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Quartz: Do we still need the United Nations?

As is often the case with bureaucracies, the rules-heavy system was set up to guarantee fairness, fight nepotism and block corruption—but it has ended up protecting and empowering the few who know how to navigate protocol. UN career officials are hard to fire, while the short-term contractors who work for them have little job security. This has contributed to a culture of impunity in which responsibility for mistakes, harassment and abuses of power is passed “from desk to desk, inbox to inbox” without resolution. In 2016 alone, there were over 300 reported episodes of violence by UN peacekeeping staff against minors. [...]

John Weiss, a professor of history at University of Cornell, argues that the UN still has the power to get things done through “good old diplomacy.” While the UN may never overcome the veto of China or the other Security Council permanent members on resolutions targeting them or their allies, it can still raise awareness of bad behavior.

To return to the example of China: While UN sanctions were never imposed, the UN Commission on Human Rights did publicly condemn Beijing’s violent suppression of protests in 1989, drawing international attention. That ultimately prompted individual sanctions from the US and embargoes from European Union states. [...]

Ironically, losing the financial support of the US (as Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened) could bolster the UN’s credibility in the rest of the world. As Weiss points out, though the financial loss would limit the UN’s activities, it would be an opportunity to reform the organization so that it represents member states more democratically.

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Spiegel: Germany's Anti-Trump Strategy Begins to Take Shape

But the guest from Germany brought more with him in his suitcase than just friendly words. In Tokyo, Maas presented the Japanese leader with his idea for a new alliance between states. It could fill the geopolitical vacuum created by Trump. In the coming months, a network of globally oriented states is to be created that closely coordinates its foreign, trade and climate policies. "We need an alliance of the multilateralists," says Maas -- which is to say, an alliance that stands for the global rules and structures of the postwar order that Trump rejects. "It's better to bend than break" would be the wrong maxim in these times," Maas argues. [...]

The strategy won't likely be fully formed until the end of the year, but the allies have already been determined. In addition to Japan, they are likely to also include South Korea, which Maas will also be visiting this week. Both countries would like to sign wide-ranging free trade agreements with the EU.

Maas is also considering South Africa, Australia and Argentina as strategic partners, as well as, of course, the U.S.'s two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. In late August, Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to be a guest at the German Foreign Ministry's Ambassadors Conference in Berlin. [...]

Maas plans to float the first trial balloon during the General Assembly of the United Nations in late September. Together with India, Brazil and Japan, the German foreign minister is planning a proposal for a reform of the Security Council. Germany will serve on the Security Council for two years starting in 2019. If Berlin is assigned to chair the council, that would be the point at which the new alliance would appear together for the first time. Maas wants to define the new seat as "European," in "radical alliance" with France.

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BBC4 Profile: Karen Pierce

Karen Pierce is the UK's new Permanent Representative at the UN in New York, Britain's most senior ambassadorial post. She only started in the role three weeks ago and has been thrown in at the deep end with the chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Friends and colleagues alike are struck by her glamorous and colourful sense of style. This includes high heels, to the dismay of her security detail in places like Afghanistan, who fear her footwear could impede a swift exit. We hear how she tackles meetings fearlessly, and has been known to reduce a roomful of shouting men to silence, without raising her voice.

Becky Milligan looks at the life of an unusual diplomat, who may now be facing her biggest challenge yet.  

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Jacobin Magazine: The Jerusalem Gambit

Since then, 280,000 settlers have illegally moved in, and Israel has stripped 14,500 Palestinians of their residency rights, made it prohibitively difficult for the Palestinians who remain to get building permits, enacted discriminatory budgets, and provided municipal services unequally. [...]

In fact, Democrats have been pushing for this move for more than twenty-five years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both came into office saying they supported the decision, and, in 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which mandated that the United States move its embassy to Jerusalem. Thirty-two Democrats, including Joe Biden and John Kerry, cosponsored the bill. [...]

Israel has also become a lucrative arms market for US firms, and the ruling classes of both nations are so deeply enmeshed in sectors such as technology and security that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Put simply, Israel could not have committed its innumerable crimes against the Palestinians and others in the region at any approaching the scale that it has without the United States underwriting it financially, military, and politically. [...]

In the years after Oslo, the number of Israelis illegally settled in the West Bank — including East Jerusalem — has more than doubled. Gaza has been largely reduced to a prison camp where Israel has slaughters thousands, and Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination. The violence inherent in all these relationships underlines the fact that “peace” is a misnomer: better to think of the process as one more phase of colonization. [...]

Now Israel seems to be cultivating its own special relationship with Saudi Arabia. After Hariri’s resignation, Israel ordered its diplomats to echo Saudi talking points that claimed he quit because of Iranian meddling in Lebanon. In November, a senior Israeli military official told Saudi media that Israel will share intelligence on Iran with the Saudi state.

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Quartz: The agony and joy of being gay in Africa

This assertion was so off the mark that the American ambassador at the time, Samantha Power, described it as patently false. She would later assert that violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity are “well established,” and have been referred to repeatedly in UN statements and resolutions, including in the General Assembly and Security Council. “In reality, this amendment has little to do with questions around the definition of sexual orientation and gender identity,” she said. “Instead, this amendment is rooted in a real disagreement over whether people of a certain sexual orientation and gender identity are, in fact, entitled to equal rights.”

During my presentation, I posed the same question to the scholars and participants in the room that Botswana, on behalf of the African group of nations, had posed to the UN General Assembly: “Should sexual orientation and gender identity be included in broader issues of human rights concerns?” Then I gave them the unsatisfying response that Botswana’s ambassador, Charles Thembani Ntwaagae, gave to the UN: “Those two notions are not, and should not be, linked to existing international human rights instruments.” [...]

His words give me hope. And back home in Nigeria I am filled with hope when a leading Nigerian online publication, Pulse.ng, calls out Nollywood, our robust film industry, opining that the ‘representation of homosexuality in most Nollywood movies is at best a caricature attempt at bad comedy.’ I have to admit that I used to be of the mindset that, even if it is a poor depiction, at least there is one, especially since many habitually say we gay people do not exist in Nigeria, and in all the years that Nollywood has been churning out films – movies that are sought after all over the continent – we have rarely been seen. But the depiction of Nigerian gay men as bearded effeminates sporting bright red lipstick and making exaggerated arm movements is not funny, nor is it remotely the norm, and I now feel that if Nollywood is going to depict us, then they had better do it right. We are not going to be the butt of their jokes. And clearly the editors at Pulse don’t recognize the caricatures on screen either.

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The Atlantic: Why China Isn't Doing More to Stop North Korea

China has, in fact, proposed a plan for solving the North Korea problem. As part of an approach that it calls “suspension for suspension,” the Chinese government has offered to broker a deal in which North Korea suspends its rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the United States suspending its regular military exercises with South Korea, as a prelude to negotiations to eventually rid the North of nuclear weapons. [...]

Whereas U.S. officials want North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons—or at least take steps toward “denuclearization”—as a precondition for talks, Chinese officials consider denuclearization an end goal of negotiations, not a starting point. Whereas U.S. officials see North Korean militancy as the sole threat to security on the Korean peninsula, Chinese officials perceive North Korean and American provocations as twin threats—“two accelerating trains coming toward each other” and refusing “to give way,” in the words of China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. Whereas U.S. officials identify China as the central actor in the peninsular drama, holding the fate of North Korea in its hands, Chinese officials place their country just off-stage, merely directing feuding parties toward peace. While U.S. officials experiment with ways to exert pressure on North Korea, Chinese officials seek out pressure-relief valves. U.S. officials worry that nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which have backfired in the past, are a trap; Chinese officials claim dialogue is the only way out of the crisis. (Chinese embassy officials declined to comment on the record for this story.) [...]

The main form of pressure under discussion is economic. Trump’s Treasury Department recently imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank for allegedly laundering money for North Korea, and the administration is mulling further “secondary sanctions” on Chinese companies that do business with the North Korean government. It has also floated a range of punitive trade policies, from a tariff on steel imports to retaliation against Chinese intellectual-property violations. U.S. officials have long avoided such actions out of concern that punishing China would make it less cooperative, not more, on North Korea. But Anthony Ruggiero, a sanctions expert and former Treasury Department official, argues that this analysis misses the way that targeted financial measures work. Beyond drying up funding for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, he has written, economic penalties could, for instance, “drive a wedge between Chinese banks that covet their access to the U.S. financial system and Chinese leaders who indulge North Korea. If the banks fear they will be the next target of U.S. sanctions, they will pressure political leaders to change course.” (There’s recent precedent for this: The U.S. sanctions campaign to contain the Iranian nuclear program coerced China into reducing its trade and financial ties with Iran.) [...]

Even if Trump were to go all in on pressuring China, it’s far from clear that doing so would achieve the desired result: the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. That’s in part because of an additional disconnect in how China and America assess and rank the threats posed by North Korea. As Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College has pointed out, North Korea is presently a national-security priority for U.S. officials because Kim Jong Un is building missiles that could carry a nuclear device to the United States, but Chinese officials don’t share that sense of urgency. North Korea has possessed nuclear weapons and shorter-range missiles that can hit China for years now. And while China opposes North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, its top security concern with regard to North Korea is something different: the collapse of Kim Jong Un’s government creating chaos in the North, which in turn could produce a refugee crisis, loose nukes, and an opportunity for the U.S. military presence in the region to expand right up to China’s borders. The Chinese government is therefore unlikely to crack down on North Korea to the extent the Trump administration wants, no matter how much pressure the United States applies, since that could lead to Kim’s downfall. Why would the Chinese fulfill America’s dreams only to usher in China’s nightmares?

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Politico: Britain just can’t shake the ECJ

The U.K. Conservative Party’s base won’t rest until all traces of the European Court of Justice are erased from British life. High profile Brexiteer and former minister Iain Duncan Smith referred to it ahead of the Brexit referendum vote last year, for example, as an “illegitimate challenge to our sovereignty.” [...]

The first is that anyone living or doing business in the EU, including any government body, is subject to ECJ jurisdiction. To be free of it would be to reject the rule of law. So unless the U.K. proposes to stop doing business with Europe altogether it cannot escape the ECJ.

More significantly, the Brexiteers reserve a special hatred for the ECJ while forgetting those other supranational judicial bodies the U.K. is signed up to. Britain is a member of many international law bodies, most prominently as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (Britain is hardly about to give up its Security Council seat on sovereignty grounds).

The U.K. is also a member of the World Trade Organization, a body whose rules it will rely upon in case it fails to strike a Brexit deal with the EU. The irony there is that if the U.K.’s hard-line stance on the ECJ derails Brexit talks, it will force the U.K. into the arms of another international body with the power to dictate its affairs.

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Associated Press: UN: Israel didn't comply with UN call to stop settlements

Israel took no steps to comply with a Security Council call to stop all settlement activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and instead authorized "a high rate" of settlement expansions in violation of international law, the United Nations said Friday.

U.N. envoy Nickolay Mladenov told the council the large number of settlement announcements and legislation action by Israel indicate "a clear intent to continue expanding the settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory."

He was delivering the first report to the council on implementation of the resolution it adopted in December condemning Israeli settlements as a "flagrant violation" of international law. The resolution was a striking rupture with past practice by President Barack Obama who had the U.S. abstain rather than veto the measure as president-elect Donald Trump demanded. [...]

He called "the January spike" in illegal settlement announcements by Israel "deeply concerning." During that month, he said, two major announcements were made for a total of 5,500 housing units in Area C, the 60 percent of the West Bank exclusively controlled by Israel.

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The Conversation: Netanyahu’s visit prompts Australia to rethink its relationship with Israel

Israel can count on only a handful of friends on the international stage. Australia is one of them. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop declared Australia – which isn’t a member of the Security Council and so didn’t get a vote – would have dissented. She said the government was opposed to “one-sided resolutions against Israel”. It is the kind of support Israel needs. [...]

On Monday, more than 60 prominent Australians, including business leaders, academics, senior legal and church figures signed a statement opposing Netanyahu’s visit and the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians. [...]

Australian Jewry has long been described as among the most Israel-centred of global diasporas. A 2009 study by the Monash University Centre for Jewish Civilisation found that 80% of Australian Jews regarded themselves as Zionists and 76% felt a special fear if Israel was perceived to be in danger. It also found over 70% had family in Israel.

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Foreign Affairs: World Order 2.0

But an approach to international order premised solely on respect for sovereignty, together with the maintenance of the balance of power necessary to secure it, is no longer sufficient. The globe’s traditional operating system—call it World Order 1.0—has been built around the protection and prerogatives of states. It is increasingly inadequate in today’s globalized world. Little now stays local; just about anyone and anything, from tourists, terrorists, and refugees to e-mails, diseases, dollars, and greenhouse gases, can reach almost anywhere. The result is that what goes on inside a country can no longer be considered the concern of that country alone. Today’s circumstances call for an updated operating system—call it World Order 2.0—that includes not only the rights of sovereign states but also those states’ obligations to others. [...]

A new international order will require an expanded set of norms and arrangements, beginning with a commonly agreed-on basis for statehood. There cannot be an unlimited right for any and all communities to achieve political self-determination. Reaching a consensus on how to limit such a right will not be easy, but it is necessary lest unilateral actions trigger conflict. A good start would be to amend the concept of self-determination so that it is regarded as something that has to be not only asserted but also granted. (The 1978 Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, for example, did not extend the principle of self-determination to the Palestinians but rather supported the notion that “representatives of the Palestinian people should participate in negotiations on the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects.”) [...]

American policymakers must also face up to the reality that any world order will constrain U.S. choices as well as the choices of others. For although it is true that the United States has a special role in the world and unique responsibilities that sometimes call for bold unilateral actions, whenever it demands more of others than it does of itself, it appears hypocritical and forfeits authority and trust. In the South China Sea, for example, Washington has criticized Beijing for not following the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—even as Congress has refused to ratify that very treaty. (Other similar cases, such as the U.S. refusal to join the International Criminal Court, can be managed through work-arounds, such as allowing for tribunals to be created to handle specific historical events.) Similarly, the United States’ ability to persuade other countries to help refugees more is hampered by obvious limits on what the United States itself is prepared to do in this sphere. The United States must also take care to be transparent: it did little for the cause of R2P when its 2011 intervention in Libya quickly morphed into one of regime change; humanitarian interventions should be narrow in scope.

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Deutsche Welle: Opinion: The two-state solution is just empty talk

Today, it has nearly been forgotten that after the 1948 war and until as late as 1966, more than 100,000 Palestinians in Israeli territory were placed under military administration. The methods of suppression used against the Palestinians formed the basis for the creation of the Israeli occupation apparatus in the Palestinian territories after 1967. Right from the beginning, they focused on reducing the areas where Palestinians could live and, whenever possible, on isolating them from one another.

This strategy was followed by a settling of the occupied areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in violation of international law - which the Israelis began shortly after the Six-Day War. Even at the time, several settlements were not only founded in the so-called Gush Etzion, a relatively densely populated Palestinian area south of Jerusalem; in the Jordan Valley, too, a number of Israeli settlements were established as a type of buffer to make it more difficult for the Palestinians to gain access to the River Jordan. The construction of the first Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, which began as early as 1970, served a similar purpose: to prevent the natural growth of the Palestinian areas there and cohesion between them. [...]

The international community has regularly criticized Israel's settlement policy, but it has left it at that without imposing any painful sanctions. The Israeli government concluded that settlement construction had been accepted, and over time went on the offensive rhetorically with angry outbursts and allegations of anti-Semitism against the United Nations and even against its strongest ally, the United States, which nonetheless continued its massive military support for Israel without restrictions. Under President Barack Obama this support was even increased. It was similar in Germany, too, which, under the Merkel government, supplied Jerusalem with submarines and warships despite all the criticism of Israeli settlement policy.

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Jacobin Magazine: When Abstention Is Progress

On December 23, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 with fourteen affirmative votes, no negative votes, and Washington’s abstention. By withholding its veto, the United States allowed the resolution to be adopted. The resolution declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be in “flagrant violation” of international law and demanded that all settlement activities “immediately and completely cease.”

Strong words. But they were entirely toothless.

The resolution neither provided nor threatened consequences should Israel violate the resolution — just as the US government made sure that no consequences have resulted from Israel’s continual violation of similar Security Council resolutions from as far back as 1979 or from its flouting of the 2004 opinion of the International Court of Justice. [...]

If Obama had wanted to make a clear statement on behalf of Palestinian rights, he could have followed the lead of 137 UN members and the urging of former president Jimmy Carter and recognized the state of Palestine. Or, less symbolically, he could have put forward a resolution declaring that all states should refrain from supplying military aid to Israel as long as its illegal settlements remain — which, of course, would apply mainly to the United States. Just three months ago, President Obama approved an unprecedented $38 billion in military aid over ten years to Israel. [...]

In 2011, the Security Council considered a resolution calling for a settlement freeze. The fourteen affirmative votes (and the wishes of the resolution’s 120 co-sponsors) were overridden by the Obama administration’s veto. Though this was Obama’s only UN veto, the ever-present threat of a US veto assured that his was the only presidency since 1967 under which there was not a single Security Council resolution critical of Israel.

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The Intercept: Obama Allows Toothless UN Resolution Against Israeli Settlements to Pass

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION on Friday finally allowed the UN Security Council to call on Israel to halt its settlement expansion on Friday. The resolution essentially re-states U.S. policy that settlement activity in the West Bank is illegal and counterproductive, and that Israel’s security must be protected.

The U.S. did not support the resolution, but it did not utilize its veto power either. [...]

The resolution is toothless — it does not, for example, authorize any form of sanctions to compel Israel to respect international law. Yet prior to its passage, a long list of both Democrats and Republicans called on the administration to veto it, including President-elect Donald Trump, New York’s Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and Wisconsin-based House Speaker Paul Ryan: [...]

The pressure to veto a toothless resolution shows how constricted U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine has become in recent years, even though the American public appears to favor tougher UN action on the issue. A recent Brookings poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans favor UN resolutions demanding a halt to settlements and that a majority of self-identified Democrats support some form of sanctions towards Israel to bring about peace.

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Al Jazeera: UNSC to vote on ending Israeli settlement activity

The United Nations Security Council is due to vote on a draft resolution that would demand Israel "immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem".

Egypt circulated the draft late on Wednesday and a vote was scheduled for 3pm (20:00 GMT) on Thursday.

Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and seen as major stumbling block to peace efforts as they are built on Palestinian land occupied by Israel. [...]

Trump has signalled that he would support Israel in a number of critical areas and not pressure it to engage in talks with the Palestinians.

Obama's administration, however, has been highly critical of Israeli settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In October, the US joined the European Union, the UN and Russia in calling for a halt to the settlements in a report released by the so-called diplomatic Quartet on the Middle East.

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