The GOPs Bibi-Centric Foreign Policy
By Ed Kilgore
December 29, 2016
10:54 a.m.
It is entirely unsurprising that congressional Republicans, along with some Democrats, have jumped with both feet on the last-minute dispute between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government over the latter’s defiant settlements policy and the former’s willingness to let the U.N. Security Council condemn it. But already there are signs of an overreaction to the dustup that tell us a lot about the strangely central role Netanyahu plays in the GOP version of foreign policy.
The most predictable part of the brouhaha is the GOP backlash against the United Nations for this latest incident in its long history of antagonism to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands. The U.N. has been a perennial target for conservatives of almost every hue, and thus a point of unity for people who don’t agree on much of anything else. For President-elect Donald Trump, the U.N. is the obvious symbol of international restraints on U.S. freedom of action. The Security Council resolution is thus an easy pretext for a fight that was going to happen anyway, as Richard Gowan observed at Politico:
Now they have their answer. The president-elect is gearing up to do battle with the U.N. even sooner than expected, and his casus belli is a classic sore point in U.S.-U.N. relations: Israel. Trump not only tried to stop the U.N. Security Council’s recent resolution condemning Israeli settlements, but also suggested the U.N. itself will face consequences once he is president, tweeting, “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.”
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