It’s Time to De-Fund the UN

Melanie Morgan has an essay arguing that the U.S. should defund the UN and kick its headquarters out of the U.S. You can find out more about Melanie and the organization she belongs to at http://www.moveamericaforward.org/.

I agree with Melanie but I object that her objectives are dinky; she really should be working to extricate the U.S. from the UN as well as the worthy goal of evicting the UN’s headquarters.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, the UN should be regarded as a well-intended experiment that failed. Dr Frankenstein didn’t have the guts to destroy his terrible mistake and paid the price; we should learn from his example.

The UN can’t even be defended on the grounds that it doesn’t create more problems than it solves; it doesn’t. The UN coddles bloody tyrants, psychopaths and criminal regimes (e.g., Arafat, Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, Iran Syria, North Korea) and cannot even agree to a definition of the word terrorism because too many of its members use terrorism.

Similar to a banker brazenly frequenting opium dens or a sheriff being greeted with hugs and kisses by Mafiosi, the U.S. stains her good reputation by deigning to descend into the UN.

We gotta stop swimming in this cesspool.

Melanie’s objectives are an OK first step but we have to leave the UN and take its decent members with us when we go. Unfortunately—as tempting as the idea seems—it is impractical to leave the UN without creating a replacement first.

In my view, the U.S. doesn’t need the UN: we can readily create ad hoc organizations and otherwise do whatever we deem necessary without the UN’s interference. On the other hand, if the leftist press is to be believed, all of the other countries think they cannot act without some transnational organization to give them “legitimacy”. I’ll restrain myself from ranting about the UN’s “legitimacy” since I have larger fish to fry. (I can imagine your joy.)

In my view, the solution is for the U.S. to create another transnational organization that is designed to assist the U.S. in solving problems (e.g., terrorism, criminal regimes and so on). One of the primary world problems that such a transnational organization would solve is the UN; it would solve the “UN problem” by making it irrelevant. Once decent countries begin cooperating under the sponsorship of this new transnational organization then the UN can be left to wither away. This is easily done: the U.S. continues to “participate” in the UN but only for the purposes of vetoing malignant UNSC resolutions. We just discontinue trying to work through the UN.

After international consensus acknowledges that the new transnational organization has proven itself to be beneficial then the U.S. can safely rid herself of the UN.

Good bye, good luck, good riddance.

What should this new transnational organization be like? Well, I don’t want to see anything that aspires to world government. Personally, I think the right model is a group of vigilantes, and I think the world’s Anglo-Saxon nations are just the right countries for the job.

Others have a rather different view. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay of the The Brookings Institution propose, in their essay An Alliance of Democracies: Our Way or the Highway, that the U.S. should form a new alliance limited to countries where democracy is so rooted that reversion to autocratic rule is unthinkable. They noted:

Using criteria and rankings compiled by the widely respected Freedom House and the Polity IV Project at the University of Maryland, nearly five dozen countries meet this membership threshold. These include not just the obvious candidates, such as the OECD countries, but also Botswana, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Mauritius, Peru, the Philippines and South Africa. The diverse mix of regions, cultures and traditions represented makes for the basis of a truly global institution. More countries could join as they demonstrated a deeply rooted commitment to democratic governance.

Further, they state:

The second key to making such an alliance work is to give it a broad mandate with real responsibilities. The Community of Democracies seeks to promote democratisation worldwide. The purpose of an Alliance of Democracies would by necessity be far more ambitious: it would unite democracies to confront their common security challenges. Alliance members would work jointly to strengthen international co-operation to combat international terrorism, halt weapons proliferation, stop the spread of infectious diseases and slow down global warming. And it would work vigorously to advance the values that its members see as fundamental to their security and well-being—democratic government, respect for human rights and market-based economies. It would accomplish these objectives in part by working through existing international institutions—it would become a powerful caucus at the UN and its affiliated agencies, enabling its members to pool their votes and exercise diplomatic clout in a co-ordinated fashion.

But to achieve its full potential the alliance would also have to develop its own capabilities. On the military front, that means emulating Nato. The alliance would develop doctrine, promote joint training and planning and enhance inter-operability among its member militaries. These efforts could cover high-intensity warfare and peacekeeping operations.

Now I’m somewhat skeptical that a group that is so diverse can accomplish the mission sketched by Daalder and Lindsay but I’m sure that they will be more effective than the UN. I suppose, in theory, they could manage to be even less effective than the UN, but this underachievement will take a lot of time and talent.

In any case, I strongly doubt that the Alliance of Democracies proposed by Daalder and Lindsay can possible be as hostile to the U.S. (as the UN is) or would protect tyrants (as the UN does). Put another way, it would be what the UN was originally intended to be.

Still, most of the potential members cited by Daalder and Lindsay are just to weak and poor to provide much more than moral support and some troops. I’m sure the heavy lifting will continue be done by the usual Anglo-Saxon nations. That would be, of course, the U.S., the UK and Australia. The exceptions, I’m afraid, would be Canada and New Zealand. Canada is too European to do men’s work and New Zealand is too much of a deadbeat to help. On the other hand, I think that we can expect some material help from Israel and—I think—India. I believe that certain other European countries (e.g., Poland) will exert themselves while they can but will eventually be suppressed by France after the EU assumes responsibility for its member’s foreign polices.

This also means that the U.S. will be freed from wasting her energy trying to make the UN work. The miscreants that remain in the UN will thereafter be saddled with whatever heavy lifting the UN does; which I suspect will be none at all.