President Obama Wins One President Obama won a significant victory in the United Nations yesterday. President Putin found himself surprisingly isolated. I am often critical of President Obama and his foreign policy team but when he gets one right, he deserves recognition and the event deserves some notice. When the United Nations votes to repudiate Putins takeover of Crimea -- and does so by a ten to one margin -- something good has happened. Votes in the United Nations General Assembly are expressions of sentiment. They are not legally binding. Only the Security Council -- in which Russia and China have vetoes, as do the United States, Great Britain, and France -- can pass a binding resolution. Nonetheless a decisive General Assembly vote is psychologically useful. Yesterdays vote in the General Assembly was so one-sided that I was startled. I cant remember the last time the United States had an almost ten-to-one vote for its position. The actual vote was 100 Yes to 11 No with 58 abstentions and 25 countries not voting. Abstention is a method of voting without taking sides. The non-voting countries are overwhelmingly small and their government may not have been able to issue instructions in a timely manner or they may have wanted to avoid offending anyone by simply hiding. The most startling result was the tiny number of countries who sided with Russia in voting No. The pro-Putin alliance consisted of Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Putin has to be a little sobered by being reduced to an alliance of the outcast, the self-destructive and the decaying. This is a long fall from the glory days of the Soviet Union in the United Nations. The Obama Administration, on the other hand, has to worry about two sets of countries that abstained and refused to vote against the Russian takeover of Crimea. First, some of the largest and most important countries in the world, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa abstained. These are big countries with big populations and big economies. Their abstention is not a good sign and indicates some space for Putin to gain allies. Second, and in some ways more troubling, are the countries in which we have invested - and in some cases for which we have bled - who refused to stand with us. Look at Afghanistan, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, and Pakistan. If we havent earned the right to expect some support from these countries, something is seriously wrong. Even with these exceptions, this is still a significant psychological victory and vividly signals how isolated Putin is in his Crimean adventure. It has to cause some of the Moscow leadership to urge caution before undertaking more adventures. President Obama deserves credit for following through on a political-diplomatic strategy which has led to a significant psychological victory. Written by: NOT ME
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 20:56:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015