Meanwhile, the United States is expected to bear a ridiculous share of the cost of operating the United Nations. The U.N. assesses dues based on the member country's relative share of the world's economy. Since the U.S. economy represents about a quarter of the world's economy, we're expected to pay 25 percent of the costs of running the bloated, frequently corrupt U.N. bureaucracy. We're also expected to share an even greater burden of the U.N. peacekeeping budget. The United State's failure to pay its full dues -- we've been as much as a half billion dollars behind in recent years -- causes much consternation among elite opinion leaders here and abroad.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, American Enterprise Institute scholar Joshua Muravchik argued that France's veto threat actually rescued the United States from a serious blunder, namely creating "a presumption that Security Council approval is the necessary prerequisite for the use of American force abroad," which he claimed "would have posed incalculable dangers to world peace in the long term."
Muravchik is right. The best way to be sure that we never be tempted to do so in the future would be to withdraw our support altogether. If we are not prepared to do that, we could at least continue to withhold payments, give our excellent U.N. ambassador John Negroponte a new job befitting his talents, and downgrade our representation and participation in this feckless institution. Pretending that the United Nations is worthy of our unqualified support is not in our nation's best interest.