Threats over UN health motion: Uncle Sam the bully

America, once the land of mom and apple pie, has shamefully used its superpower weight against a small Central American country that had the temerity to consider proposing, to the UN’s World Health Assembly, that breastfeeding be encouraged.

In its latest abandonment of civilised principles, America bullied Ecuador to the point of threatening to withdraw aid and to impose trade sanctions, to get its way.

Brave officials from the land of the free, the home of the brave, told their Ecuadorean peers that Washington would impose heavy sanctions unless their plan was dropped. They, having no alternative, quickly acquiesced.

And why was America so animated by a proposal to promote healthy, laudable behaviour?

They wanted to protect the interests, the profits, of America’s infant formula manufacturers and were happy to block the breastfeeding health-promotion resolution to do so.

Amazingly, it does not end there.

According to The New York Times, as health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor for the resolution, at least a dozen countries, most of them poor African and Latin American states, declined, citing fears of retaliation.

Thankfully, the Rambo diplomacy failed as a country that America could not bully — Russia — sponsored the motion.

How utterly our world has changed and how very sad it is that a once-great America so demeans itself.

Darkening days, indeed.