The United States built the U.N. during the Second World War, and used the organization to help shape the peace afterward. But it seems to have outlived its usefulness. The U.N. General Assembly is dominated by non-democratic nations that don’t want to see us succeed, and even in the smaller and more influential Security Council the U.S. can be easily countered by autocratic China and Russia.
We should ignore the U.N. as MacArthur ignored Japanese strongholds in the Pacific, island-hopping past them and leaving them to wither on the vine. We can slash our funding and support, and allow the General Assembly to twitter away in New York while we move on and form an organization of democracies to defend liberty in the world.
This would be a small club at first, made up of the U.S., Britain, France, Australia, Poland, Japan, South Korea and perhaps a handful of others. But that would be the point. Only nations with true democratic governments and a record of protecting individual rights would be invited to join.
Together, this group would have virtually unlimited economic clout and military might. Through its very existence it would encourage other nations to join us by meeting our high standards of freedom and liberty.
Finally, the U.S. should reconfirm our support for free trade, the policy that’s helped lift millions out of poverty in recent decades. The biggest stumbling block to new trade agreements is farm subsidies, so we should unilaterally end those.
This would have a double benefit, since most subsidies go to big agribusiness, anyway. In one step we’d slash corporate welfare at home and demonstrate selfless leadership abroad.
If there’s one lesson Americans should learn from our supposed fading popularity overseas it’s that preaching doesn’t work -- leading does. Let’s get to it.