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It’s Time to Get Rid of the United Nations
Please note that I wrote get rid of, not just get out of, the United Nations. Yes, I know we’ve talked about making this move for years, but it’s way past due to act. Let’s do a quick review of this feckless and inconsequential organization. Since many people have written so cogently on this topic, I have let them speak for me to a great extent.
To provide background, the U.N. was formed after World War II:
The Roosevelt administration strove to avoid Woodrow Wilson’s mistakes in selling the League of Nations to the Senate. It sought bipartisan support and in September 1943 the Republican Party endorsed U.S. participation in a postwar international organization, after which both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed participation. Roosevelt also sought to convince the public that an international organization was the best means to prevent future wars. The Senate approved the UN Charter on July 28, 1945, by a vote of 89 to 2. The United Nations came into existence on October 24, 1945, after 29 nations had ratified the Charter.
In what way is the UN so useless?
Bruce Walker in the American Thinker explained, in part, why that hasn’t worked out:
The United Nations was created primarily to preserve peace, but it has never succeeded in that at all, nor has it prevented the genocides that so horrified the civilized world after the Second World War ended. The reasons why are pretty clear. Most of the “nations” represented in the United Nations are little more than brutal ruling gangs, who suppress captive peoples like the Kurds and Tibetans and who routinely deny the most basic human rights to those they rule.
The UN has no enforcement authority.
So what can the UN do in terms of enforcing their mandates? Here’s a paragraph on their enforcing protection of the rights of women:
Enforcement mechanisms are usually categorized by the type of UN body that receives communications or carries out the monitoring process. There are three broad categories of enforcement mechanisms: (1) charter-based mechanisms, such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women; (2) convention or treaty-based mechanisms, such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women; and (3) mechanisms contained in UN specialized agencies, such as the International Labor Organization or the World Health Organization. Each of these bodies monitors either a specific human rights issue or particular treaties.
If you look farther down the page, it explains that remedies for violations are submitting complaints and reports. So much for enforcement.
The Conservative Review published an article on its reasons for the US to defund and leave the United Nations: (1) the UN is pro-abortion, except for those Muslim countries who prohibit abortion; (2) the UN has become a lobbying group for the LGBT movement. (One of the organization’s agencies, UNESCO, even jumped into the fray in 2016 with a report called “Out in the Open” which calls for the public school teaching of the world’s children on transgender issues); (3) it referenced an article in the Washington Times which explained how the UN was working to supersede our gun control laws:
The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was negotiated from 2006, during the Bush administration, through 2013 with the Obama administration. The original intent of the treaty was theoretically to prohibit arms transfers to regimes that abused human rights. From the very start though, gun control groups looked upon the treaty as an end run around America’s domestic reluctance to adopt their agenda — if Congress and the state legislatures wouldn’t pass gun control why not get the U.N. to make it a permanent part of its agenda or even better part of international law? The proposed ATT gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for, a legally binding treaty imposing regulation and conditions on the transfer and maybe possession of any weapon from a pistol to a battle ship. As incredible as it seems, the U.N. Human Rights Commission has already interpreted lack of gun control as a human rights abuse.
The treaty is now in effect internationally and approved by Obama but the Senate didn’t sign it into law.
There are those who say that the UN does do some good work in humanitarian assistance, the World Food Program, UNICEF, and the UN Refugee Agency. I didn’t research the work of these agencies, but we have to ask if there are other ways to provide these programs without the UN?
Finally, Charles Krauthammer said in an interview with Fox News:
So we’re paying an organization that spends half its time — more than half its time and energy and resources and bureaucracy– trying to attack the only Jewish state on the planet, a tiny little speck, while genocide mayhem, murder, terrorism is going on all over the world. It’s an obsession that to an outside observer appears to be insane. Why are we doing this? And the rest of the time is spent undermining the United States and democracy and our allies around the world.
He closes by saying:
It is an organization that exacerbates tensions, it does not assuage them. It was born in hope, the end of the second World War. It turned out to be a disaster . . . imagine if headquarters were in Zimbabwe. The amount of weight and coverage it would get would be zero. I think it’s good real estate in downtown New York City. Trump ought to find a way to put his name on it and turn it into condos.
It’s time to dissolve the UN by pulling out funds and US participation. What do you think?
Published in Foreign Policy
Hear! Hear!
From your lips to God’s ears.
Mike, what do you think it will take to make it happen? Any thoughts?
Implode the building and then salt the earth where it once stood.
I will vote for Trump to be emperor of america if he eminent domains the UN building for himself and turns it into a hotel and convention center.
That is corruption I can get behind.
I am not Mike, but reading this post to every person in the country and then putting it to a referendum would be an excellent start.
I think relocating the U.N. would be a good first step. My top four choices for relocation, in ascending order:
4. Pitcairn Island. But this would be unfair to the native occupants.
3. Tierra del Fuego. But this would be unfair to the emperor penguins.
2. St.Helena. But this would be unfair to the memory of Napoleon.
and at number 1. The TENTH ring of Dante’s inferno. I know there’s only nine rings,but I was hoping Trump could work out a construction deal with Satan. The catch is that Satan may not want the U.N. at any price. The other catch is he may already have them.
<sarcasm off>
<cynicism always on>
No We don’t, but if You just have to…
How about asking,”are there other ways to provide these programs without any government extortion?”
Yes, there are. They’re called charities. And if You want to provide voluntarily, then by all means knock Yerself out.
Diana West reminds us that
This denial and falsification was no accident: Soviet agent Alger Hiss was a central player in the American delegation that set up the UN. And:
Rotten from the beginning.
Ryugyong Hotel. Plenty of room still available and They’ll feel Right at Home.
That would be a great start (and I think you know I wasn’t exclusively asking Mike). I wonder who would be willing to sponsor that kind of referendum?
Maybe we could dump them in the middle of the Gobi desert? I like your style, aardo!
Such hostility, Jimmy. I’m certainly not going to volunteer! Charities work for me.
great ideas all
but not severe enough
We could always count on Kirkpatrick’s candor! I had no idea; thanks OTLC!
Nope.
The best place on the planet to locate the UN is in Beijing. There, the UN ambassadors can deal with the pollution of the Chinese, while assuaging the desire of the Chinese to be the “Middle Kingdom” – the center of world negotiations.
At the same time we can turn the UN building in NY into low rent alien housing – fulfilling the prophecy of the animated film “Heavy Metal”.
Hopefully Trump’s people are reading this.
Maybe the British and Argentines could work out something about Thule Island. I think the U.N. should be required to run everything off of wind and solar power.
I guess with my usual inclination toward caution I’ll suggest reform instead of completely smashing and destroying it.
I think there’s probably value in having a forum and we’d probably want one if we didn’t have it. Also, besides the humanitarian agencies, I’d say the peacekeeping missions do some good that we’d miss otherwise. Not always, and there have been some embarrassing failures, but there have been successes as well. Liberia, for instance. Several people I know from my church, including my uncle, have served as missionaries in Liberia for some time recently, and I visited for a week in 2010, while the UN mission was still ongoing.
Get rid of the UN Human Rights Commission, for sure. Or at least withhold funding until strict membership criteria are adopted, like free democratic elections, and not allowing any members with grave human rights violations.
Great discussion on it here, and ideas for reform here from the Heritage Foundation, including reining in the budget, shifting long-running peacekeeping missions to voluntary funding by the parties at stake, etc.
Like cholera in Haiti and widespread rape by the blue helmets?
Unnecessarily nasty sarcasm there.
Some new rules have been put in place, but there needs to be further accountability as called for by the Heritage Foundation.
You could have just said that in your opinion, the bad outweighs the good, or even that there’s no way for anything good enough to outweigh this bad.
I will look over these links tomorrow, Matt. It’s hard for me (and some others, too) to get excited about a way to continue the U.N. There are so many things that they do that are unproductive or destructive. If you look at the peacekeeping efforts, some work, but others are incapable of making a difference. I appreciate your points, though.
Defund the beast. Let the rest of the countries pay for it when Uncle Sap closes our coffers.
G-d created the United Nations to give international approval to the State of Israel.
Since then, it’s been all downhill.
The UN’s failures are the least of my concerns. The UN fancies itself a world government in training. The International courts, the Law of the Sea Treaty, the efforts to get “international law” wormed into national legal systems…. the UN is the second greatest threat to sovereignty in the world, behind the EU, which goes even further with open borders mandates, a common currency, etc. Don’t think the UN isn’t taking notes when the EU steals yet another piece of national sovereignty from it’s members.
They’d have no shortage of wind…
I’m not precisely sure, but it would probably take a spectacular act of malfeasance on the UN’s part to motivate the Trump administration to withdraw America from that organization and then compel it to leave the country.
Ah.
Peacekeepers. Hezbollah’s human shields.—————-
Talk about damning with faint praise. And don’t get me started about UNRWA, either. Or UNESCO’s growing antisemitism. Or the OIC – the UN’s biggest voting bloc, IIUC.
Or maybe cordon off the building and lob in a small nuclear device…
If I remember the story correctly, prior to his years in the Senate, when Daniel P. Moynihan was the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations, some of the members suggested moving the UN from New York. Amb. Moynihan replied that we would help pack and meet them all at the harbor dock .
I hope we can get rid of the UN before ex-Prez Omega gets some sinecure in the organization from which he can denigrate, oppress and generally demoralize our country for the rest of his life.
The only argument I’ve ever heard in favor of it is, it’s a big part of the economy of New York City.