With China, UK, Russia, France, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Italy and an ally such as India voting last Thursday at the UN against the position of the US, it shows the superpower is really lonely. Canada which did not vote at all was neither with Trump. The voting confirms the reported decline from 64 to 42% in global reckoning with US leadership in the wake of Donald Trump’s Presidency. Thursday’s disastrous outing of the US in the UN is probably not so surprising except that even then, it was not expected that the superpower’s superpower would be so lonely.
From Africa, only Togo found it convenient to support the position. All the powerhouses voted against. That is Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa. Malawi, South Sudan, Rwanda, Benin Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda all abstained, for what might appear be understandable reasons.
Left so lonely, Trump issued threats of cutting material backing for countries that rely a lot on such from the US. It shows how far from any theories of international politics the Trump team is. The mention of power without a mention of resistance makes it a dry statement, especially in international politics.
Although the voting is only a normative statement, it is so resounding and damning a rebuke. But it is to Donald Trump and his psycho-dynamic variant of “liberalism with teeth”, not a denigration of United States itself. Even if it were not Israeli-Palestine conflict, the world would still have said no to Trump. It is global verdict on illiberal, unilateralist temptations that goes against the consensus that the question of Jerusalem would be the last item to be brought to the table because it is such a divisive and charged one. Why was it necessary for the United States which should be worrying most about world peace to bring it up at a point like this? Trump got what he was looking for: humiliation
