Samantha Vinograd is a CNN national security analyst who served on President Barack Obama's National Security Council from 2009 to 2013. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) This week's emergency UN General Assembly (UNGA) session on President Trump's decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem resulted in another non-binding resolution against Israel. UNGA votes on Israel are nothing new -- because of US veto power at the United Nations Security Council, the General Assembly has been a popular forum for passing anti-Israel resolutions.

Samantha Vinograd

This time, however, the resolution also specifically and strategically distanced countries from the United States in its condemnation of President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to relocate the US embassy. UNGA members who voted for the resolution -- 128 of them -- gave various reasons for their votes: from claiming that Trump's actions violate existing UN resolutions on the status of Jerusalem dating back to 1968, to expressing a desire to stand up against the Trump administration's attempt to bully countries into voting against the resolution by threatening to withhold foreign assistance. The countries that abstained generally followed historic voting patterns.

I have been a part of efforts to persuade countries to vote a certain way at the United Nations. Working through our mission to the UN, the National Security Council members work on carefully tailored policy initiatives that communicate the US position in a manner consistent with the UN charter. This time around, the US approach undercut both the UN itself and exposed the United States as crying wolf, again.

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By voting for the resolution, countries were not doing anything that violated the terms of their foreign aid. Using such aid as a stick, the administration issued an unfortunate set of empty threats. Some of the countries to whom we give the most support -- including Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Iraq -- voted for the resolution anyway. It is unforeseeable that the US will cut off foreign aid to those countries.

It is evident why countries that voted for the resolution did so, but we also need to analyze who sided with the United States in this case. Of the nine nays -- Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru and Palau -- it is unclear whether any of these small countries have a shared policy outlook on the status of Jerusalem.

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