U.S. diplomats stormed out of a United Nations Security Council meeting in New York on Monday after the French ambassador displayed a remarkable level of stupidity in his criticism of Washington.
In a post on X, France’s ambassador's office said the United States “used to be a beacon of human rights” but that “Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it.”
The comments came after the U.S. opposed the reappointment of U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk.
The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it.#AmericaAlone https://t.co/GLNMsYEH9n pic.twitter.com/UTVvljTMeO
— France ONU Genève 🇫🇷🇺🇳 (@FranceONUGeneve) July 25, 2026
BBC News reported that the U.S. team left the chamber while French Ambassador Jerome Bonnafont spoke at an emergency session on Russia’s war in Ukraine. U.S. Alternate Representative Dan Negrea explained the move by saying, “There is a member of this council that will feign moral outrage and pretend to lecture the rest of us about every topic, whether it’s about the very conflict we’re discussing yet again today, or even those unrelated to international peace and security, like human rights.”
Negrea further explained that the delegation would continue such protests until France “renounces their condescending and disrespectful rhetoric” and that “we will not be affording them the benefit of listening to their politicized drivel.”
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The clash grew from a U.N. General Assembly vote on July 24. Member states approved a second four-year term for Türk by a vote of 144 in favor, 10 against and 13 abstentions. The United States, Israel, Russia, North Korea and six other countries voted no.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz clapped back at the ambassador’s comments, pointing out that France had voted “for someone who has been lecturing free, sovereign democracies like the United States, the UK, and Israel, while cozying up to the world’s worst oppressors.”
As is the tradition for the United Nations, Türk’s record shows a sharp imbalance in his public criticisms. UN Watch reviewed statements he made between October 2022 through October 2024 and noted that he issued 58 condemnations of Israel, 49 of them tied to the Hamas-Israel war. He condemned the United States far more frequently than China, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Qatar combined.
Türk made only three criticisms of China and never mentioned the mass imprisonment of more than one million Uyghurs. He blatantly ignored gross human rights violations by the regimes of Cuba, North Korea, Algeria, Eritrea, Mauritania, Lebanon and Qatar while freely criticizing democracies including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy and France.
By contrast, he issued 19 statements on Russia and 11 on Iran.
This pattern fits a longer history of U.N. bodies treating Israel with disproportionate scrutiny while going soft on brutal regimes. According to UN Watch data, the General Assembly in 2025 adopted 15 resolutions on Israel compared with 12 on the rest of the world combined. From 2015 through 2023 the body adopted 154 resolutions against Israel and only 71 against all other countries.
The Human Rights Council has similarly focused its criticism far more on Israel than on China, Iran, North Korea or Syria despite the scale of abuses in those places. Türk’s tenure continued that selective approach even as he criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine and some Iranian executions.
This is yet another reason why the United States should pull out of the United Nations. It has shown itself to be an impotent and deeply biased institution that, as Waltz suggested, cozies up to brutal regimes that have meted out some of the worst human rights abuses in the world.
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