The Great U.N. Delusion

LA Times ^ | 7/20/06 | Jonah Goldberg

[Oshkalaboomboom]

Find another false idol to worship, multilateral fetishists -- the U.N. is a failure.

ONCE AGAIN the "international community" is clamoring for the U.N. to fix things in the Middle East. It's reminiscent of an episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer is in dire straits. In a panic, he yells heavenward, "I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!" For some fetishists of multilateralism, the U.N. seems to fill this odd space in their brains once reserved for God, providence or even Superman — whatever force of good that can save civilization from evil. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the U.N. is the opiate of the elites.

Global U.N. worship is based on an odd mix of delusion and realpolitik. To self-described internationalists, the U.N. is supposed to be a counterweight to America's "unipolar" dominance. In the wake of the U.S. victory in the Cold War, America greeted an ungrateful world eager to see the remaining superpower counterbalanced by, well, something. And the U.N. was the only viable candidate. As Shashi Tharoor wrote a few years ago, "American power" — not AIDS, genocide or global warming — "may well be the central issue in world politics today." Of course, there are others who pay lip service to idealistic globaloney but who really just like to use the place as a grand global rug under which any problem can be swept. If you hear a world leader start out by saying "something must be done," odds are he's going to finish that sentence by saying "and the U.N. should do it." Now, it would be one thing if the U.N. actually, you know, worked. But the problem is that the history of the U.N. is a history of unrelenting failure.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

The US should just cease to fund the UN. Don't withdraw, just divide the budget by the number of nations and contribute that percentage. Then kick them out of New York and let them relocate to some neutral place like Geneva and let them spend their worthless days out of sight and out of mind.

[coconutt2000]

In the wake of the U.S. victory in the Cold War, America greeted an ungrateful world eager to see the remaining superpower counterbalanced by, well, something. And the U.N. was the only viable candidate.

Not true. Bill Clinton, a subscriber to this idea that the U.S. must be counter balanced, gave away weapons technologies to the Chinese, who have since disseminated those technologies to others who are our enemies. Those technologies enabled China to increase its threat of nuclear deterrence against a non-threatening United States. Thus, increasing China's ambitions.

China was the first choice for a permanent counter balance to U.S. power. The U.N. is an unreliable counter balance because we can veto the U.N. Security Council any time we want.