Claudia Rosett - What to Do About the U.N.

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W HEN P RESIDENT B ARACK O BAMA during his final weeks in office abandoned Israel to the edicts of the United Nations Security Council, he touched off a furor about the failings of the U.N. itself. The 15-member council, tasked with securing peace for the world, stood exposed as a collection of bigots and hypocrites bent on punishing the only democracy in the Middle East. This has inspired renewed calls from Congress and the American public to reform the U.N., defund the U.N., withdraw from the U.N. calls for something salutary to be done.

The advent of a new administration opens the door to a broader and urgently needed debate over how, precisely, America in our time should deal with the U.N. Created in 1945 by the victors of World War II with a charter mission to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, the U.N. has evolved into an organization notorious not only for its waste but also for its abuse, fraud, bigotry, mendacity, and predilection for actions (or choreographed inactions) that make war more likely, not less.

The need for remedies goes way beyond the need to defang the Security Councils Resolution 2334 savaging Israel, a resolution that is both damaging and disingenuous. In the name of peace, and in the guise of condemning settlements, this resolution invites the world to further undermine an already beleaguered Jewish state. Thats a road to war, not peace.

This diplomatic lynching is all the more alarming because it is no random act of prejudice, no appalling vice of an otherwise benevolent institution. It springs from a fundamental U.N. flaw that continually undermines not only Israel but the rest of the free world: the U.N.s inherently corrupt moral compass. Combined with the U.N. systems privileges, immunities, proliferating ambitions, and ever-expanding overreach, this moral rot is a growing menace to America itself.

Americas leaders have many means available to fight back, if they have the will to use them. But if they confine their mission to yet another attempt to fix the U.N., they will fail. The desire to reform the U.N. rather than simply reject it, or at the very least work around it, springs from a worthy set of impulses, among them a basic prudence about being careful what you discard. However, there is by now a record of U.N. reform efforts stretching back decades and it is horrifying. Among the more recent episodes was a big push in 20052006 to clean up the U.N. following the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal in Iraq, as well as congressional efforts in the 1990s to inspire better U.N. behavior by adding an internal audit department and withholding U.S. funds (a reform effort that failed to forestall the Oil-for-Food debacle).

Each time, the U.N. has emerged not only unreformed in character but bigger in scale, broader in reach, and at least as perverse, if not more so, in its influence and many of its activities. Emblematic of this pattern is the case of the old Commission on Human Rights, which the U.N. set up in 1946 to weave the international legal fabric that protects our fundamental rights and freedoms. The commission became a magnet for human rights abusers among the U.N.s member states, less interested in weaving the promised fabric than in redefining it to suit themselves. By 2003, the commission was packed with despotisms, focused chiefly on condemning Israel, and was chaired by Libya. The U.N.s Potemkin remedy, in 2006, was to dissolve the commission and in its place set up the current Human Rights Council. A skeptical Bush administration steered clear of the new council, whereas Europe embraced it and Spain celebrated its nascence by donating a $23 million artwork ceiling, entailing more than 30 tons of paint, for its meeting chamber in Geneva. In 2009, despite evidence that the new council was already reverting to the vices of the old commission, the U.S. became a member under Obamas policy of engagement, proposing to work aggressively from within to make the council a world-class forum for advancing human rights. Today you guessed it the council is packed with human rights abusers fixated on condemning Israel.

It is time to consider quite seriously whether America should step clear of the U.N., withdrawing both U.S. money and the huge degree of legitimacy that Americas founding membership and participation confers on the institution. The logistics of any such move might appear daunting, and the attendant uncertainties frightening. But for years, like the proverbial frog in a pot of water coming to a boil, America has been the mainstay of a U.N. at which venally corrupt and morally malign behavior is a chronic near-certainty on an amplifying scale. That ought to qualify as even more daunting and frightening.

The clarifying question, too often ignored, is one of opportunity cost. If we did not have the U.N., what system, or set of coalitions, might America choose today to create in its place? What opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have been choked off, around the globe, because the U.N. thanks to the configuration of forces in 1945 gave veto power on the Security Council to Stalins Soviet Union, a privilege since inherited by an increasingly despotic and aggressive post-Soviet Russia?

For instance, would America, starting with a fresh slate, really invent or endorse as the worlds leading human rights body an outfit that la U.N. Human Rights Council routinely welcomes such members as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela?

The task of unwinding the U.S. from its involvements in the U.N. might seem formidable. But at least for the sake of making informed judgments about the future of U.S. sovereignty, security, and foreign policy, surely its worth working out how that might be done and what opportunities it might open up. Theres little in the modern public domain to suggest that anyone versed in the byways of the U.N. has ever tackled the task of charting a full roadmap for such an exit.

It bears noting that the U.N. charter itself is hazy on such matters. The U.N.s founders, mindful of the disintegration of its predecessor League of Nations, made no provision for the withdrawal of a member state. (Indonesia tried it in 1965, and then went back.) In principle, member states can be expelled. But that has not been the practice, although the U.N. charters Chapter II, Article 6, states, A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. That raises the question of why the likes of Iran, Sudan, and North Korea have not been kicked out. Surely they all qualify as being in violation of the charter obligations regarding respect for human rights, and their commitments to any rational definition of peace are at best doubtful. If the U.N. doesnt take its own charter principles seriously, just how seriously should America take the U.N.?