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OPINION:
When I was in graduate school, back in the previous century, I took two courses simultaneously on the United Nations. One was taught by a professor who made no attempt to conceal his enthusiasm for global governance.
The other was taught by a New York Post reporter, Mike Berlin. He saw his job as exposing the politics, the inefficiencies and the cronyism within this most elite international institution.
Before long, I decided to go into journalism rather than academia.
Back then, of course, the United Nations was better, or at least more promising, than it subsequently became.
In 2006, Claudia Rosett, then the journalist in residence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in Commentary magazine: “Recent years have brought a cascade of scandals at the United Nations, of which the wholesale corruption of the Oil-for-Food relief program in Iraq has been only the most visible. We still do not know the full extent of these debacles — the more sensational ones include the disappearance of U.N. funds earmarked for tsunami relief in Indonesia and the exposure of a transnational network of pedophiliac rape by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa — and we may never know.”
From then till now, the United Nations has undertaken no serious reform efforts.
Meanwhile, the U.N. Human Rights Council has become a club for human rights violators, including China, Cuba and Algeria. The World Health Organization performed shamefully in handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
From 2015 to this year, the U.N. General Assembly has condemned Israel 173 times and the U.S. 11 times. China: zero. Turkey: zero. Hamas: zero.
Russia and China, now joined in a “no-limits” partnership, are permanent veto-wielding members of the Security Council, the most powerful U.N. body. So are the U.S., Britain and France, but their partnership is decidedly limited.
Most of the 193 nations in the U.N. General Assembly are unfree.
Last week, dozens of heads of state descended upon Turtle Bay for the “General Assembly High-level Week” and to mark the organization’s 80th anniversary. President Trump’s speech was the most newsworthy, despite a malfunctioning teleprompter that annoyed him and caused his remarks to be even more off-the-cuff than usual.
He asked the assembly an essential question: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?”
At its inception in October 1945, in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, the United Nations was meant to learn from the mistakes of its predecessor, the League of Nations, and work “to maintain international peace and security, give humanitarian assistance to those in need, protect human rights, and uphold international law.”
Unable or unwilling to accomplish those missions, the United Nations today, Mr. Trump observed, is instead “creating new problems,” including “the No. 1 issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration.”
More precisely, mass population movements from failing countries to developed countries are causing tumultuous political and cultural transformations in developed countries, especially when many of the new arrivals are Islamists.
“The U.N. is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them,” Mr. Trump said, and “every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders. … It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders.”
He pointed out that he did exactly that for his fellow Americans, ending the Biden administration’s open borders policy. He also condemned U.N. climate extremism as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
He noted that as Europe has reduced carbon dioxide emissions, China has been building coal-fired power plants by the score, producing “more CO2 than all the other developed nations in the world.”
In Africa, the United Nations is perpetuating poverty by discouraging access to hydrocarbons, leaving millions of people to rely on wood and dung for their basic energy needs. Does anyone expect African farmers to plow their fields with electric tractors anytime soon?
Mr. Trump announced that the U.S. stands “ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies.”
Other speeches that deserve honorable mention: Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, castigated the United Nations for “overreach” and called for a refocus on ending conflicts and defending the principle of national sovereignty. He also demanded the release of the hostages still held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu observed that the spate of recent recognitions of an imagined Palestinian state rewards Hamas and incentivizes terrorism. “You know what message the leaders who recognize the Palestinian state this week sent to the Palestinians?” he asked. “It’s a very clear message: ‘Murdering Jews pays off.’”
The other speech that impressed me was by Prabowo Subianto, president of Indonesia, the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population: more than 246 million souls.
He began by reaffirming the principles established by the United States almost 250 years ago.
“The words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence have inspired democratic movements across continents,” he said. “It also gave birth to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. in 1948.”
Humans, he said, are “created equal, endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Mr. Subianto reiterated Indonesia’s support for “an independent Palestine” but added that “we must also recognize and guarantee the safety and security of Israel. Only then can we have real peace: peace without hate, peace without suspicion.”
He ended by saying “peace” in four languages. Hebrew was one of them.
Perhaps that suggests the answer to Mr. Trump’s question. The United Nations can be a place where leaders and rulers — let’s not confuse the two — occasionally meet for a talkfest. As for more lofty missions and global governance … well, let’s just say a noble experiment has been conducted and we now know the results.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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