Pundits and patriots have been telling us for years that the United Nations headquarters in New York City is peopled with anti-American connivers and clods who haven’t even the social grace to be civil to their American hosts. Senator Robert W. Kasten, Jr. (R-WI) has just proved all of the above with a 225-page Report to Congress on Voting Practices in the United Nations. The report, which assesses the degree of support of U.S. foreign policy by other countries in the UN during 1985, was prepared by the State Department. The reason it is informally known as the “Kasten Report” is that he authored the legislation which requires the State Department to compile this information annually.
Our staunchest ally is Israel, which sided with the United States 92 percent of the time in UN General Assembly votes. Runners-up were the United Kingdom with 87 percent, West Germany with 84 percent, France with 83 percent, Belgium with 82 percent, and Italy with 82 percent. South Africa and Switzerland, both strong friends of the United States, are not UN members, so they are not listed.
Now let’s jump to the bottom of the list and see which countries vote against us most of the time. Ranking from the bottom up are four Communist regimes in Africa (Angola 4 percent, Algeria 5 percent, Mozambique 6 percent, and Libya 7 percent), four Communist regimes in Asia with 6 percent each (Yemen, Laos, Afghanistan, and Vietnam), two Communist regimes in Latin America (Cuba 6 percent and Nicaragua 8 percent), and four Communist governments in Eastern Europe (Albania 7 percent, Yugoslavia 12 percent, the Soviet Union 12 percent, and East Germany 12 percent).
After the Communists, the strongest opposition to the United States came from the 21-member group of Arab nations, which supported us only 12 percent of the time, and the African nations which, as a group, logged in at 15 percent. The most shocking parts of the report are the figures on those countries in the middle, which are large recipients of U.S. foreign aid but only supported us less than half of the time. Let’s call the roll.
India, one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid, supported the U.S. position only 9 percent of the time. Egypt, another beneficiary of U.S. generosity, voted with us only 15 percent. The Philippines supported us only 22 percent of the time. Turkey, which received $739 million from us during the current fiscal year, voted with us only 38 percent of the time. Greece gave us only 33 percent support in General Assembly votes.
Did you think that Western Hemisphere nations would manifest neighborly friendship in the United Nations? They don’t, except for post-liberation Grenada and Canada. The group average of the rest of Latin America was only 23 percent. The prize for ingratitude goes to Panama (to whom we gave our great canal) which supported us only 20 percent of the time. Special honors also go to Mexico, which voted with us only 15 percent of the time, but is now demanding that U.S. banks forgive the interest as well as the principal on billions of dollars of U.S. loans.
Key UN General Assembly issues of the last year included resolutions on world terrorism, the Soviet invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan, Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, human rights abuses in several countries, and efforts to delete name-calling against various U.S. foreign policy positions.
For years, one of the “fun” games at the UN has been to insult America and other Western nations. The United States finally decided to propose motions to delete the name-calling clauses from UN resolutions. The votes on these name-calling motions are a good way to measure any country’s attitude toward the United States. There has been a bit of improvement since the United States made an issue of this. The State Department brags in the report that, in 1985, “there were only nine hostile references to the U.S. by name in draft resolutions.”
There’s just one thing wrong with the Kasten Report. It should include another column in the tables to show the amount of U.S. foreign aid that goes to each country. That would enable us to rank foreign countries not only on their anti-Americanism but also on their ingratitude.
