The Fallacy of Joe Biden’s ‘Bank of Multilateral Goodwill’
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By Colin Dueck
October 15, 2021
Contrary to progressive opinion, affixing the term “multilateral” or “global” to a given organization does not render it sacrosanct.
In a ballyhooed speech at the United Nations last month, President Joe Biden called for “endless diplomacy” through multilateral institutions to address common problems. But what does this mean? Must it exclude the application of American pressure through these institutions toward distinctly American ends? The Trump administration’s more thoughtful foreign policy critics admitted that the forty-fifth U.S. president built up unexpected leverage on a range of international targets. The question was always what to do with that leverage. In some important cases, the Biden administration has now answered that question: do nothing, reference liberal values, and dismantle said leverage without receiving anything in return.
Take the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Here we have a case of a multilateral organization supposedly dedicated to the promotion of basic rights worldwide. And yet numerous anti-American dictatorships with appalling human rights records sit on this council, sitting in judgment of the world’s leading democracies while receiving little criticism themselves. The council is dysfunctional and unbalanced. Israel, in particular, receives a wildly disproportionate share of UNHRC criticism, completely unrelated to any sense of fairness or reality. The Trump administration, therefore, withdrew the United States from the UNHRC. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, correctly says that the UNHRC is problematic and needs reforming. But the administration for which he works seems to have no plan to ask for such reforms. Instead, Biden announced soon after his inauguration that the United States would rejoin the UNHRC as an observer. Unilaterally, you might say—and without asking for any constructive changes on that council in return. Not only is U.S. support restored, free of charge. The Biden administration, in its wisdom, now asks foreign dictatorships to comment on structural racism inside the United States, using the UN as a helpful platform.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/10/15/the_fallacy_of_joe_bidens_bank_of_multilateral_goodwill_799034.html
