The Security Council Veto Record

On February 18, 2011, the United Nations Security Council voted on a draft resolution declaring Israeli settlements in occupied territory illegal and an obstacle to peace. Fourteen of the fifteen members voted yes. The United States voted no, and because the United States has a veto, the resolution died.

Then Ambassador Susan Rice explained the vote. She told the council that the United States rejected “in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” and that Washington agreed with the rest of the council and the wider world about “the folly and illegitimacy” of it.

That is the shape of the thing in a single afternoon. The American position on settlements was that they were illegitimate. The American vote was to kill the resolution saying so. The stated objection was not to the content but to the venue, that a Security Council resolution would harden both sides rather than help negotiations.

The number

The Security Council’s veto record is public, maintained by the United Nations itself, and it can simply be counted.

By the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ tally of that record, as of December 2023 the United States had cast 89 vetoes since the founding of the organization. Forty-five of them were on draft resolutions concerning Israel. Thirty-three of those forty-five specifically concerned the occupation of Palestinian territory or Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Further Israel-related vetoes have followed since, including on Gaza ceasefire and humanitarian resolutions.

Slightly more than half of every veto the United States has cast in the history of the United Nations was cast on behalf of one country.

There is no comparable figure for any other subject. Not the Cold War, not Iraq, not Cuba, not Vietnam, not counterterrorism, not any American war. The single largest use of the most powerful instrument in American diplomacy has been to prevent the Security Council from acting on the conduct of one ally.

How it started

The first American veto in defense of Israel came on September 10, 1972. The draft resolution called on Israel to halt air attacks on Lebanon and Syria that had begun on September 6, the day after eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics.

It was only the second veto the United States had ever cast. The ambassador who cast it was George H. W. Bush.

The pace picked up considerably after that. Between 1982 and 1990 alone the United States vetoed twenty-one draft resolutions concerning Israel, close to half the eventual total, in nine years.

The exception that shows the rule

On December 23, 2016, in the final weeks of the Obama administration, the Security Council voted on Resolution 2334, declaring the settlements a flagrant violation of international law with no legal validity.

The United States did not vote for it. It abstained, and the resolution passed fourteen to nothing.

An abstention is the weakest possible expression of disagreement available to a permanent member. It required nothing except declining to act. It happened once, after the president who ordered it had already left office in every practical sense, and it produced a political reaction in Washington intense enough that the incoming administration attempted to have the resolution disowned.

That is what it costs to not use the veto once. Which is a fair measure of why it gets used.

The case for it

The American position has been consistent across administrations of both parties, and it is not frivolous.

Security Council resolutions are binding instruments with legal consequences that ordinary diplomacy does not carry. Successive administrations have argued that a negotiated settlement between the parties is the only durable outcome, that resolutions imposed from New York substitute pressure for negotiation, and that many drafts have been one-sided, condemning Israeli conduct while saying nothing about attacks on Israeli civilians. Rice made exactly that argument in 2011, and it is why she voted no while agreeing with the text.

The veto is also a sovereign right that the permanent members were given deliberately and that every one of them uses in defense of its own interests and friends. Russia and the Soviet Union have cast far more vetoes in total than the United States.

Those arguments defend individual votes reasonably well. What they explain less well is the aggregate. A blocking instrument used across five decades, under every president from Nixon to the present, on the same subject, more often than on all other subjects combined, is no longer a series of case-by-case judgments about diplomatic timing. It is a standing policy that the Security Council will not be permitted to act in this one area.

Why it matters

The rest of this archive documents things done in secret and revealed later. This one was done in public, on camera, in a chamber built for the purpose, roughly fifty times.

Its practical effect is to remove one country from the reach of the enforcement body the United States built, largely wrote, and hosts. Every mechanism the Security Council has for compelling a state to change course, from formal condemnation to sanctions to referral, has been unavailable in this one instance for half a century, because the United States has spent its most valuable diplomatic asset making it unavailable.

The cost of that is not borne by the Security Council. It is borne by American credibility everywhere else the United States asks the council to act, and everywhere else it argues that international law binds other states. Rice’s 2011 explanation is the clearest illustration on record: the American representative told the world that her own government believed the conduct described in the resolution was illegitimate, and then prevented the world from saying so.

Sources

• United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library, Security Council veto list and dataset covering all vetoes cast since 1946, the underlying public record for every figure here
• Chicago Council on Global Affairs, analysis of the U.S. veto record, giving 89 total U.S. vetoes and 45 concerning Israel as of December 18, 2023, of which 33 concerned the occupation or the treatment of Palestinians
• Washington Post, “U.S. Vetoes Security Council Resolution Denouncing Israeli Settlements,” February 18, 2011; CNN and VOA reporting on the same vote, including Ambassador Susan Rice’s statement in explanation of vote
• U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016), full text and voting record, adopted 14-0 with the United States abstaining
• Contemporaneous reporting on the September 10, 1972 veto of the draft resolution on Israeli air attacks in Lebanon and Syria, cast by Ambassador George H. W. Bush
• U.N. records of vetoed draft resolutions on Gaza ceasefire and humanitarian pauses, October and December 2023 and subsequently