President-elect Donald Trump described the United Nations like it was a diplomatic holiday party Monday, saying it has “great potential” but implying it does little good.
“The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time,” he tweeted.
The criticism comes after Trump pressured the Obama administration this past week to use its U.N. Security Council veto authority to thwart a resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. “The resolution being considered at the United Nations Security Council regarding Israel should be vetoed. As the United States has long maintained, peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians will only come through direct negotiations between the parties, and not through the imposition of terms by the United Nations,” he said in a statement posted Thursday. “This puts Israel in a very poor negotiating position and is extremely unfair to all Israelis.” But U.N. ambassador Samantha Power abstained from a vote decided 14-0 Friday that allowed the resolution to pass, a reversal of past practice—the United States blocked a similar measure in 2011—that Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes attempted to explain later in the day:
Trump responded to the U.N. action by tweeting that “things will be different after Jan. 20th,” or Inauguration Day.
The president-elect slammed what he called the “utter weakness and incompetence” of the United Nations during a speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference earlier this year. “The United Nations is not a friend of democracy, it’s not a friend to freedom, it’s not a friend even to the United States of America, where, as you know, it has its home. And it surely is not a friend to Israel.”
