Team Trump didn’t try to stop UN from cracking down on wartime rapists

The headlines were dismal. “US threatens to veto UN resolution on rape as weapon of war,” The Guardian blared. The BBC was more subtle but equally condemnatory: “United States Dilutes UN Rape-in-War Resolution.”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, made sure to get the “T”-word in its headline: “The UN Wanted to End Sexual Violence in War. Then the Trump Administration Had Objections.” Social media outrage radiated as users shared these stories.

To readers so inclined, the story was one more reminder of the Trump administration’s bottomless perfidy: Of course it would object to ending sexual violence in armed conflict! Of course President Trump would try to “dilute” protections for women raped in war!

Except that’s not what happened. The administration does not, in fact, wish to see more women raped in armed conflict. You can breathe a sigh of relief if you figured otherwise.

Here’s what actually happened.

This month, German diplomats introduced a long draft resolution on women in armed conflict at the UN Security Council. Germany, which now holds the council’s rotating presidency, did so without first consulting with the Americans, according to a senior US State Department official. This, even though the United States has been a leader on this issue under successive administrations, Republican and Democratic.

The draft raised several red flags for the Americans. For starters, it contained provisions to which the US and several other member states objected, such as calling on the UN to provide “comprehensive health services, including sexual and reproductive health.” Such language has often been used to promote abortion worldwide — something American law prohibits the US government from doing.

Then, too, as one senior diplomat from a different country told me, “extreme cases” — here, war crimes — “always make for bad law.” France, Germany and other European Union countries, he said, are using wartime rape to “normalize abortion rights as the standard of care” in all circumstances.

The European Union countries consistently push “the same agenda on everyone else,” this diplomat said, namely contraception, abortion and comprehensive sexual education.

Resolutions at the Security Council gain the force of law. Thus, permitting the Germans to pass their original draft resolution at the council would have codified into international law opinions about abortion, gender and sexuality that run contrary to the sense of right and wrong shared by people across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Not to mention many Americans.

The US also took issue with the German proposal to create an expensive new UN “mechanism” to deal specifically with this issue when an independent special representative of the secretary-general already has authority over it. As the State Department official told me, “the answer to every crisis is not an expansion of the UN bureaucracy.”

But here’s the best part, which was played down or missing from nearly all the coverage in the liberal media: The most vigorous objections to the German resolution came not from the US, but from Russia and China.

Much like the US (and the Holy See and others), Russia is worried about the hidden abortion agenda. China, meanwhile, doesn’t like to see “non-agreed” language enacted at the Security Council-level without “international consensus,” according to the diplomat from the third country. Moscow and Beijing were prepared to veto the whole thing, a power they hold as permanent members of the council.

But thanks to US pressure, the Germans dropped the objectionable language, and in the end, the resolution passed, with only the Russians and Chinese abstaining. Put another way: The Trump administration’s diplomacy helped save a resolution with strong protections for women in wartime that would have otherwise been scuttled altogether.

Now go back and revisit the headlines mentioned at the top of this column, the ones that make the Trump administration look like pro-rape fiends. And feel free to check out the stories online. And then tell me Trump is wrong to fume about fake news.

Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor.
Twitter: @SohrabAhmari