"Were it my call, the US ambassador to the United Nations would never cast a vote in the General Assembly.
The suggestion isn't original. It was proposed in the 1960s by the political theorist James Burnham, who died in 1987. To vote on General Assembly resolutions, he argued, is to lend them an authority to which serious countries like the United States know they aren't entitled. If that was true in Burnham's day, it is even truer now, when the General Assembly is dominated by corrupt, authoritarian, or tyrannical governments that are hostile to democratic liberties and contemptuous of human dignity. We should not indulge the pretense that there is moral significance to any proposition merely because a majority of the UN's membership endorses it.
The United Nations was born 70 years ago this October with the ratification of a charter committing member-states to 'save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' and 'reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.' To be sure, those ideals were always aspirational. But what remains of them? Look at the UN today and what do you see? The world's cruelest dictatorships seated on the Human Rights Council. A monomaniacal hostility toward Israel. Global financial and sexual scandals. Thundering applause for speeches by tyrants and terrorists.
The General Assembly has become a moral wasteland and a monument to hypocrisy...
[I]n the General Assembly, where cynicism reigns, we gain nothing by voting. Certainly America's views should be explained and defended. But when the question is called, the United States should abstain. On every issue, every time."