Theodore R. Malloch and Felipe Cuello
Monday, March 3, 2025
Can you believe the United Nations turns 80 years old this year.
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Is the globalist one world institution useful? Is it cost effective? Or should it be shuttered and closed as past its prime? Would it make a great location as a glistening gold Trump Tower of condos on Turtle Bay?
Prof. Robert Conquest’s second law states: “Any organization not explicitly or constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.”
Nowhere on earth is the left’s industriousness graver than within the one intergovernmental organization which commands genuine political-legal power, derived from the charters and treaties that “member states” have – perhaps foolishly – bound themselves by. The United Nations, planet earth’s closest instantiation of a one-world global government, upcoming birthday should raise legitimate and timely questions about its future and America’s role in it.
One of the UN’s first Secretaries-General, Dag Hammarskjöld from Sweden, wisely said at the outset that its mission was not to bring about heaven on earth, but to prevent hell on earth. Sadly, through the familiar ills of bureaucratic bloat, mission creep, corruption, and the aforementioned perseverance of those who would indeed bring hell to your neighborhood, the UN has stepped into the role states are meant to fill, like providing shelter, food assistance, health or even the pretense of peace and security that pacifist blue helmets try but often fail to bring.
It does none of these things well, as a long trail of disastrous failures can attest. Even in its role of providing “good offices” for someone else to get things done, it is often lackluster and second-rate when compared to the convening power of regional hegemons or friendly superpowers. The Security Council does not prevent wars, and the UN’s duplicative and many-handed organs abound with dubious content and overt anti-Americanism.
Ordered to keep a permanent peace through “conflict resolution,” the proxy war has become enshrined as the go-to replacement for interstate armed conflict. Jaw-jaw may be better than war-war, as Sir Winston Churchill once quipped, but kicking each other under the table while talking is the sort of upgrade only a UN bureaucrat could love.
Another “pillar” of the sky-blue & white-flagged “organization for peace” is the ridiculously foolish and one-sided human rights agenda. Tracing its roots back to the French revolution – famously but not too recent to pass judgment on – it saw its apex in the Helsinki declaration, which U.S. President Ronald Reagan instrumentalized in empowering labor unions and opposition political parties with legal-rhetorical devices under which to operate against our erstwhile friend, turned geopolitical opponent – the Soviet Union.
We must face it, the UN gets little done, is a horribly bloated, expensive bureaucracy, costs far too much with limited outcomes and is today an obstacle to what it was originally established to accomplish.
Where once Moscow and Washington found common cause in promoting the anti-imperialist decolonization movements throughout the world – creating or re-creating such civilizational states as India and Egypt, along with dozens more nation-states out of crumbling European empires – this cause too has long since been perverted far beyond the merits of its original substance.
Witness the tragedy of South Africa as a case in point, a country that graces both the UN’s annals of denuclearization (Pretoria almost got the bomb) and tops the index of power outages worldwide. Good Job. And now it is a failed one-party racist state. The decolonial imperative has been perverted to the maximum extent, where it now serves precisely the opposite end it was meant for – the plight of captive nations is ignored, while Anti-Americanism remains rife within all the UN institutions and its profligate resolutions. This despite the whole project being unviable without America.
The U.S. contributes more than $800 million, or 28% of the entire world’s outlay for the UN. No other country comes anywhere close. China, the second leading contributor in the world, provides more than $300 million less than the U.S. and Japan comes in third at 8.5%. Only a handful of other countries surpass the $100million mark, with the vast majority providing far, far less. The Russians notably only spend $73 million despite being a member on the UN’s Security Council.
Why should the U.S. foot the bill? What do we get out of it. Almost nothing but hate and castigation. At minimum we should cut our contribution to that of China, our adversary. Perhaps more radically we could take a DOGE accounting and save the whole wad and drop out altogether.
Both of us have experience with the UN, one as the highest ranking American in the body in Europe at the end of the Cold War and the other as a UN University graduate with experience in UN development schemes and its left-wing agenda. In 1993 I gave the then U.S. Secretary of State a letter based on my experience at the UN suggesting its limited value and suggested we either radically reform the organization, its budget and management, or drop out of most of its organs. Nothing happened.
This anniversary year under a nationalist America First conservative President Trump presents a new opportunity.
Where democratizing the world was one of the original goals, the permanent presence of dictatorships gives them the advantage over democracies, who must often change horses while fording a river. One-party states, or states that infrequently change one ruling party for another (or even, God forbid, countries where all parties are functionally the same) maintain a heady advantage in pursuing their interests in the longest game of them all – international negotiations.
Today the UN development agenda presents us the worst offenders. Economism and ideological contamination plagued the effort to educate, feed and employ the world’s poor from the beginning, but it takes the repeated insistence of first-world leftists to waste scarce, valuable resources on teaching transgenderism to folks suffering “extreme poverty.” The COVID response provides some of the best objections of all time to international globalism – late, lumbering, high-debt “solutions” many of which were actively counterproductive, rife with profiteering and in all cases subpar to doing nothing at all.
It is imperative that any next UN Secretary-General be selected with utmost care. Where the Ghanaian Kofi Annan and South Korean Ban Ki-Moon both had (some) anti-communist antibodies due to their respective national situations, Portugal’s Socialist Guterres has forced something even worse than failure – a situation where success is undesirable.
The Millennium Development Goals developed by Annan were handed off to Ban, who refined them into the Sustainable Development Goals but left many of the details to his successor, whose replacement is due to be elected this year. 10 years of Guterres has seen the indicator defining process for the 17 goals turned into every recipe for Fabian (slow acting) socialism ever invented. Rather than focus on the many dimensions of poverty, Guterres wantonly threw away the many years of near-zero interest rates when serious inroads could have been made in bettering the human condition worldwide.
“Multipolarity,” the battle-cry of anti-Americanism in 2025, can easily be defeated. The post-1945 world was always multipolar and was designed by the victorious allies to be multipolar on purpose – but the polarity of the system was never meant to include gravitational pulls in the totalitarian and Anti-American direction.
This is the window to decide. Should we stay or should we go? Based on the facts and eight decades of bad experience the decision is not all that difficult to make.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch and Felipe Cuello. Malloch was the top American in the United Nations Europe from 1988-9192, and ambassadorial level position. He and Cuello are co-authors of Trump’s World: Geo Deus about the president’s foreign policy.
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