The U.S. must get out of the U.N.

OPINION:

More than 20 years ago, while researching my book about the United Nations, I asked British historian Paul Johnson about the international body. He told me, “The U.N. is now a central problem for the world because we take too much notice of it.”

That dismal assessment has been proved correct again and again, and the United Nations has only become worse.

Thanks to President Trump’s reining in of the budget, the U.S. reportedly paid nothing to the United Nations in 2025. Now, Ambassador Mike Waltz has said the U.S. is “in arrears” and will be paying the United Nations a lot of money in a matter of weeks. Indeed, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier this month that the world body faced “imminent financial collapse” if nations (meaning the U.S.) didn’t pay up.

We shouldn’t do anything of the sort. The United Nations has taken so many actions against U.S. interests that we should boot it out of the United States.

It was bad enough when, in 2004, Sudan (which still had chattel slavery) was elected to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Now, Iran has been elected as vice chair of the U.N. Commission for Social Development, which is supposed to promote democracy and gender equality and ensure tolerance and nonviolence.

Last month, Iran slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, demonstrators against the ayatollahs’ regime. Its religious police routinely beat women who don’t wear the hijab correctly. No country is less interested in tolerance and nonviolence than Iran.

Iran is the principal sponsor of terrorism in the world. Its principal terrorist arms, Hamas and Hezbollah, are doing their best to extinguish Israel.

Israel, meanwhile, has been condemned by at least 45 U.N. Human Rights Commission resolutions since 2013, and many of those condemnations have been adopted by the U.N. General Assembly. Those were more than any other country has suffered at the United Nations.

The reason the United Nations is useless is its structure. The Security Council’s resolutions supposedly have the force of international law, but to get anything passed, we have to get by probable vetoes from Russia and China (and France). The General Assembly is even worse. Anything proposed by the U.S. probably will be voted down by dozens of tin-pot dictatorships, despotic and terrorist nations.

In my book “Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think,” I condemn the United Nations for that and more. Remember the oil-for-food scandal that rocked it 20 years ago?

That program was supposed to ease sanctions on Iraq for the purpose of making food and medicine available to the Iraqi population, but the United Nations allowed Iraqi intelligence to infiltrate and use it. As much as $4 billion was siphoned off by Saddam Hussein. Much of the food and medicine that actually reached the Iraqi population was unfit for use.

As William Safire wrote in The New York Times in 2004, “Never has there been a financial rip-off of the magnitude of the U.N. oil for food scandal.”

The United Nations is full of fat-cat bureaucrats. Mr. Guterres’ annual salary is about $420,000, more than that of the U.S. president. His deputy makes about $300,000 annually. The United Nations has 36 undersecretaries-general, each earning about $228,000 per year, and 46-plus assistant secretaries-general, who earn about $200,000 per year plus benefits.

Nice work if you can get it.

Being based in the U.S., the United Nations benefits from a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, but it would have us believe that it is composed entirely of statesmen. In his novel “Flashman and the Mountain of Light,” author George MacDonald Fraser wrote, “There is a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.” That is a perfect description of the United Nations.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be the greatest statesman since his predecessor George C. Marshall. Last week, he tried to reassure our allies of American dedication to Europe’s defense. He said, “We know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own,” and “We, in America, have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Mr. Rubio also spoke about the United Nations. He said, “We cannot ignore that today, on the most pressing matters before us, it has no answers and has played virtually no role.”

He could have added that the United Nations is useless in solving the problems of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the China threat.

We shouldn’t pay the United Nations one more cent. We should end our membership and form an alliance of democracies in its place.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.