Thirty Years of Voting in the U.N. General Assembly: The U.S. Is Nearly Always in the Minority

Heritage Foundation - Congress has been concerned for decades that countries receiving American foreign aid often oppose U.S. initiatives and priorities in the United Nations. A State Department annual report on the voting practices in the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), mandated by Congress since 1983, shows that in the past 30 years voting coincidence with the U.S. surpassed 50 percent only twice.

Moreover, the vast majority of recipients of U.S. foreign assistance routinely oppose U.S. diplomatic initiatives and vote against the U.S. The most recent report confirms yet again that most recipients of foreign aid voted against the U.S. in the UNGA in 2012.

To address this issue, Congress should instruct State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to take into account countries’ U.N. voting practices when allocating America’s development assistance.

Low Support for the U.S. in the U.N.

In 1983, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick testified on how the U.N. could be “made a more effective instrument for problem-solving and peace-making among nations, an institution which helps resolve difference rather and exacerbate them.” Among her recommendations was to make “voting behavior, in multilateral organizations like the United Nations…one of the criteria we employ in deciding whether we will provide assistance, and what type of assistance and in what amount.”[1]
 
To help implement this recommendation, Congress required the State Department to track how individual countries vote in the U.N. and report the results to Congress in its Voting Practices in the United Nations report submitted annually since 1984.[2] Each report includes tables listing the percentages with which countries voted with the U.S. on U.N. Security Council and UNGA resolutions, including consensus and non-consensus votes and votes deemed “important” by the State Department. These reports serve as a unique and valuable source of information for gauging support for U.S. priorities and policies and show that, to the detriment of American interests, the U.S. is often in the minority at the U.N.

Most UNGA resolutions are adopted by consensus—i.e., without a recorded vote or dissent. For instance, 180 of 269 resolutions (66.9 percent) were adopted by consensus during the 67th UNGA session in 2012,[3] which is typical of recent U.N. sessions. Although some consensus decisions are the result of prolonged negotiation, it is difficult to separate the significant consensus votes from those of little substance.[4] Therefore, analysis is better focused on non-consensus votes—when actual votes are taken on resolutions and, by definition, involve substantive matters where member states disagree—where there is a transparent metric for measuring support for U.S. positions.   More