Trump Administration Aligns U.S. With Russia, North Korea, And Belarus At UN, Ending Long-Running American Habit Of Voting With Democracies

UNITED NATIONS. The United States cast its vote Monday alongside the Russian Federation, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the Republic of Belarus in opposition to a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia's three-year-old invasion of Ukraine, marking what State Department officials described as the successful conclusion of a roughly 80-year diplomatic experiment in which the United States typically voted with the world's democracies.

The U.S. delegation, breaking ranks with every European ally, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia, and South Korea, joined a coalition of 18 nations including North Korea, Belarus, Sudan, Hungary, and Nicaragua to oppose a resolution that called for a just peace anchored in the territorial integrity of Ukraine, a position the United States had supported in identical terms for the previous three years. The vote, observers noted, marked the first time since the founding of the United Nations that the United States and the Russian Federation had publicly agreed about whether the Russian Federation should be invading anyone.

"For too long, our diplomatic posture has failed to reflect the views of the parties whose perspectives we have most pointedly ignored," said one senior administration official, citing the importance of "letting the aggressor speak." The official added that the new framework would allow the United States to develop closer working relationships with the small group of governments that share its emerging worldview, and that the State Department was "looking forward to extended consultations with our new partners in Pyongyang and Minsk."

The administration also tabled its own competing resolution: a three-paragraph document that did not name Russia, did not identify Ukraine as the country invaded, and called for an end to the conflict in language diplomats said could be applied with equal accuracy to a contested basketball game. The resolution passed only after European allies added the missing nouns over U.S. objection.

President Trump, asked Monday afternoon whether the vote represented a meaningful shift, said only that Ukraine "should never have started this war," a position not previously held by anyone outside the Kremlin. The President added that he expected to speak with President Putin "very soon" about "a lot of things, big things, the biggest," and praised the Russian leader as "very smart, very strong, much stronger than the people who keep calling him an invader."

At press time, U.S. delegates were rehearsing a follow-up resolution congratulating the Russian Federation on the third anniversary of what the document repeatedly described as "an unfortunate weather event."