UNITED NATIONS — Has the world order as we know it ended because Secretary of State Pompeo tweaked America’s attitudes toward Israeli settlements? France’s ambassador to the United Nations seems to think so.

“International law,” the Quay d’Orsay’s man here, Nicolas de-Rivière, told the Security Council Wednesday, “is binding on all. It is not up to a nation to decide what is legal and what is not.” He went on to denounce Israel’s “colonization” project.

“All settlement activity is illegal under international law and it erodes the viability of the two-state solution and the prospects for a lasting peace,” Britain’s Ambassador to the UN, Karen Pierce, said on behalf of the other European Security Council members — France, Germany, and Poland. Germany later led ambassadors from all 10 non-permanent Council members in similar protest, as separately did four Arab diplomats.

In the end, all 15 council ambassadors, except for “one member,” were ready to pass a statement strongly denouncing America’s move, according to council diplomats. That one member, of course, was the country at issue, America.

Many of the talking heads in Wednesday’s council meeting referred to Israeli settlements in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” or OPT in the local vernacular.

Never mind that the first, and most consequential, UN decision on the Israeli-Arab dispute, General Assembly Resolution 181 or the Partition Plan of 1947, called those territories “the hill country of Samaria and Judea.”

How quickly they forget. Nowadays Israel alone uses their proper, and biblical, name.

Which goes to show how elusive “international law” can be when it comes to promoting Arab-Israeli “peace.”

Mr. Pompeo said he intended to “reverse the Obama administration’s approach.” In December 2016, after President Trump already won the election, Mr. Obama decided to abstain on a Security Council resolution that denounced all settlements, including in Jerusalem and at Judaism’s holiest sites, as opposed to international law.

The administration at the time considered even the least consequential Jerusalem zoning law tweaks an overwhelming blow to peace. President Trump’s first representatifvehere, Nikki Haley, in her new book, “With All Due Respect,” describes her alarm when Israel’s ambassador, Danny Danon, told her his American counterparts completely shut him out before their abstention on the security council’s “anti-settlements” resolution.

That treatment, Ms. Haley writes, signaled that America was being led by the UN consensus, rather than leading it.

“The passage of Resolution 2234 convinced me that effective support of American interests and values at the UN required steadfast support for those countries, like Israel, that share our values. Silence was not an option.”

Ms. Haley often denounced the Settlements resolution during her tenure. More generally, she wrote, America should never abstain at the UN.

Indeed, the Obama administration at one point almost comically abstained on a resolution that condemned its own approach to Cuba.

Either way, despite its aversion to Israel’s elected prime minister and his policy the Obama administration couldn’t bring itself to vote the resolution denouncing Israel. That is because America has often reversed its position on settlements’ legality. Hence the abstention.

President Carter called settlements “inconsistent with international law.” President Reagan disagreed, saying they were “entirely legal” by his reading of UN resolutions. President George W. Bush wrote to Prime Minister Sharon that some settlement would remain, while President Obama’s deputies said they were “illegitimate.”

Mr. Pompeo sided with Reagan this week, adding he expresses “no view on the legal status of any individual settlement.” An American official quoted by Israeli television reporter Barak Ravid said, however, that just because settlements are not illegal doesn’t mean America supports them, and equated them to cigarettes: while legal they are bad for you.

On Wednesday the entire Security Council save for America agreed with Palestinian Authority’s observer, Riad Mansour, who said nothing can trump “international law” as defined in the Obama era’s settlement resolution — never mind that it overturned previous, more ambiguous, resolutions.

Yet, as Israel’s Mr. Danon said, peace will not emanate from ever-shifting legal arguments, but from direct negotiations between the parties. Ask the Palestinian ambassador how many times he talked to me, he said, signaling a zero.

But the Palestinians now are beyond simply refusing to talk to Israeli counterparts. They now refuse to talk to American officials as well, which may explain their lack of influence over this week’s announcement by Mr. Pompeo.

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