The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945 and was designed to function in the post-WW2 world as an updated League of Nations. The UN was supposed to be tasked with peacekeeping and humanitarian duties. It rarely did either of those things well, and in today's post-Cold War world, the UN seems to struggle for relevance. There have been numerous scandals, charges of corruption, and the UN in recent years has become a playground for dictators and America-hating despots.
Now the UN is struggling for money as well. That presents us with a valuable opportunity: Shut the UN down once and for all.
An editorial at Issues & Insights makes a good case for that.
The Economist reports that “internal modeling” at the U.N. “suggests that the year-end cash deficit will, without cuts, probably blow out to $1.1 billion, leaving it “without money to pay salaries and suppliers by September.”
Apparently “some members are paying their bills late and others not at all” and it is the U.S. and China that “are pushing it to the brink of financial collapse.”
Who says the U.S. and Beijing have no common interests?
All I have to say about this is "Good." It's in the interest of neither China nor the United States to keep the United Nations funded. And now, here in America, we have a president who is actively considering pulling the United States out of this doddering, corrupt institution.
Two weeks into the second Trump administration, the White House announced it was considering withdrawing the country from, and ending funding for, three U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
“UNRWA has reportedly been infiltrated by members of groups long designated by the secretary of state as foreign terrorist organizations,” says the White House, “and UNRWA employees were involved in the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.”
The UN is, of course, like any other bureaucracy. It grows, over time, ever more cumbersome, ever more unwieldy, ever more ossified in its processes, and, not least of all, ever more corrupt. UN workers have been seen aiding Hamas terrorists. UN "peacekeeper" troops are a joke; most of the blue-helmeted supposed soldiers couldn't take a lollipop away from a five-year-old, especially if that five-year-old was a tough little American kid with a Swiss Army knife. And bear in mind that we're paying a lot of the cost; as of 2023, the most recent year for which accurate numbers are available, the United States was the largest donor to the UN, forking over $13 billion. That's over a fourth of the UN's total operating budget.
And what are we getting for our money? See the linked article for an extensive list of UN failures and malfeasances.
The UN is an organization that has outlived its usefulness, and it has been decidedly unfriendly towards the U.S. for quite a while. The only time they smile at the U.S. is when they need something paid for, or need a few thousand young men to go die in some third world country for a brush-fire that’s none of our business. We don’t need that. We don't need the UN. The world doesn't need the UN. Perhaps, as has been suggested, the United States could start some new organization - a Union of Free Nations, an organization for those nations remaining that still value liberty, property, free trade, free enterprise, and free people, assuming there are any such nations left.
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The United Nations is the organizational counterpart to Joe Biden: Too old, too corrupt, too dysfunctional to keep going. It's time to cut the strings and let the UN die. If some of the world's dictators, despots, and oligarchs want to keep it going, let them buy a building in Brussels, the Hague, or Gabon and move what's left of the United Nations there. The United States should have no more to do with it, and our taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to finance it.
So the UN is going broke? Good. Let it. It's well past time this corrupt, anti-American organization ended.
