United States President Donald Trump has threatened to cut off American aid to any country, including those in the Caribbean that votes for a resolution at the United Nations condemning his recent decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Trump’s statement, delivered at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday in which he exulted over the passage of a tax overhaul, followed a letter to UN General Assembly members from US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R Haley, in which she warned that the United States would take note of countries that voted in favour of the measure.
“All of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council or they vote against us, potentially, at the Assembly, they take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us,” Trump said.
“Well, we’re watching those votes,” he added. “Let them vote against us; we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
But while Trump can hold up aid unilaterally as a form of leverage, cancelling it would require new legislation.
The bitter confrontation at the United Nations shows the lingering repercussions of Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem, which defied world opinion and upended decades of American policy.
While the decision has not unleashed the violence in the Arab capitals that some had feared, it has left the United States diplomatically isolated.
The UN General Assembly is scheduled to vote today on a resolution that would express “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem,” according to a draft text.
In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Haley said of the vote in the General Assembly, “the US will be taking names”.
On Monday, the United States used a rare veto to block a resolution in the Security Council calling for the administration to reverse its decision on Jerusalem.
It said the vote on the resolution, which was drafted by Egypt, was 14 to 1, suggesting there could be a similarly wide margin against the United States in the 193-member General Assembly, of which all 14 members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are members.
Earlier this month, St. Vincent and the Grenadines urged the United States “to refrain from recognising Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel” as Washington had prepared to do so.
“Any such recognition would imperil the internationally-agreed Two-State Solution, destabilise the Middle East region, and invalidate the important role of the United States as an honest broker and driver of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” said the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement.
The Ralph Gonsalves’ administration noted that, in 1980, in response to an Israeli attempt to declare Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel, the United Nations Security Council condemned that declaration as a violation of international law.
“There can be no more destabilizing and potentially incendiary deviation than unilateral declarations concerning the status of Jerusalem. The role of the United States as a valued facilitator and interlocutor would be irreparably compromised by any attempt to pre-empt the negotiating process by making unilateral pronouncements on final status issues,” the statement added.
