The best line about low expectations for diplomacy belonged to Adlai Stevenson, President John F. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations. Diplomacy and the reproductive lives of elephants, Stevenson observed, have this in common: there's a great deal of commotion, all of it occurring at very high levels, and then you have to wait two years before anything happens.

Last week's 93-24 vote of the U.N. General Assembly to boot Russia out of the U.N. Human Rights Council for its barbarism against Ukrainians was welcome, with a wrinkle. Jurists may be obliged to insert the word "alleged" before "war crimes," but the rest of us have no need to mince words: Russia is guilty of war crimes. Friday's missile strike on a train station in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk where thousands of civilians were waiting to escape to safety killed more than 50 civilians, including 5 children, and maimed 100 more. The Russians had painted "For The Children" on the missile they aimed at the train station, well-known as a safe passage point for civilians.

This was simply the latest act of genuine evil committed by Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February, and more come daily. For Russia to be permitted in a human rights organization whose stated purpose is to "uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights" is, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield put it, "a farce." Indeed, that Russia should remain on the U.N. Security Council is just as farcical.

The wrinkle is that the Human Rights Council is itself a farce, a body historically dominated by totalitarians and autocrats whose governments are themselves egregious human rights violators that could not tell the difference between due process of law and a pina colada. Votes on toothless resolutions that virtually no one reads and even fewer care about are bought by governments whose focus is on keeping themselves from being scrutinized.

Mostly what the Council does is condemn Israel for... whatever. Over the past week or so, Israelis, including Israeli Arabs, have been murdered in cold blood by anti-Jewish fanatics, egged on by the rhetoric of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, promises of posthumous payments to their families and the prospect of celebrations honoring them in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, complete with the distribution of candy for all, to mark their heroism and the happy occasion of Israeli deaths. The Human Rights Council will say nothing about these massacres of innocent Israeli souls. It never does. It isn't that the Council is indifferent to the murder of Israelis. It's just that it couldn't care less.

But the overwhelming vote in the General Assembly to expel Russia from a body that is eye-rolling doesn't make it less of a good thing. The Biden administration's leadership in making Russia a pariah state is just one part of its multifaceted achievement in mobilizing much of the international community against Russia, capitalizing on the credibility it has in part because it isn't the Trump administration and in part by dint of the Biden team's experience and skill. Across the globe, often underneath the radar, Americans working for the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and other agencies have been working for months on turning the screws to the Russian economy, engineering boycotts of Russia, isolating Russia diplomatically and delivering weapons, weapons systems and intelligence to the Ukrainians. For Biden and his administration, this is not the stuff of self-congratulatory tweeting, unlike for some people. Their efforts frequently go unreported and are woefully under-praised. But they are having a huge impact.

The level of appreciation that Americans have for our countrymen serving overseas runs the gamut from scant to nonexistent. They work in circumstances that are exhausting, emotionally draining, obstacle-filled and dangerous. It helps that they have an administration to be proud of. It would help even more if they were given the credit they are due.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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