longwayhome -> RE: US threatens exit from UN Human Rights Counsel (3/14/2017 10:26:37 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Nnanji quote:
ORIGINAL: longwayhome Of course the US can disentangle itself from any international body, but it only makes it more difficult to achieve your international policy objectives. For all the isolationist talk and claims of US victimhood, even the Trump administration has international policy objectives and those are best met through engagement rather than storming off every time someone does something you don't like. The cost is that you have to put up with the fact that other countries don't always do or say what you want. The US was instrumental in setting up the League of Nations and the UN and has serious influence there, just as the UK largely wrote the European Declaration of Human Rights and, despite some jokers in the UK saying that we should leave, the UK is actually more successful than many other states in terms of being successful in cases that come before the Court. Likewise the UN is a forum where the US is more powerful than any other individual state. The presence of the US on the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies is a positive good. The US only has to live with not always getting its own way, which I realise is a big ask for your new President. Have you watched, at all, what the human rights council has been involved with over the last several years. It's hardly been your description. It's been an in your face gotcha directed at the US. Everything you said is fluff compared to the reality. Oh poor ickle US. Are the other children kicking dirt in your face? The US gets an awful lot of what it wants - even when the moral case is arguable. Drone strikes on Pakistan, which is not a hostile combatant but a friend of your allies and a country trying to live with the sort of terrorist infiltration you can only dream of in the US. Military operations without UN consent but very few consequences. The use of allies' military and civilian facilities to facilitate rendition and torture. Widespread hacking of friendly governments' politicians. As it happens I am not anti-US in any way and I want to see positive involvement. I have no problem with the UK and other European allies spending proportionate amounts on defence in line with what President Trump (and Obama before him) though was appropriate. We all have to be serious about maintaining our alliances. But I have no time for this argument that the US is being badly done to by the rest of the world. The US is out there playing the game hard and expecting other countries to suck it up. This has been the case under successive administrations, despite what Trump says about refocusing policy to meet US interests. The US is the richest and most powerful country in the world. I think you can handle it.
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