There’s this great exchange in the movie “Clue” between Tim Curry (may he rest in peace) and Christopher Lloyd:
“You were once a professor of psychiatry specializing in helping paranoid and homicidal lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur.”
“Yes, but now I work for the United Nations.”
“So your work has not changed.”
The quote seems germane to today as we go through de-globalization or re-globalization or whatever it’s going to be called in 10 years. The United States must reassess and terminate its ongoing support of the United Nations, holding its 2026 high-level General Assembly this week.
Founded right after the end of World War II, the U.N. had the goal of creating a diplomatic vehicle that could prevent World War III. While there hasn’t been a WWIII (yet), the organization is creating a worse world, not a more peaceful world.
The U.N. has routinely demonstrated either the inability to stop conflict or complicit support for it. Even former President Barack Obama lambasted the U.N. for this in his memoir, “A Promised Land,” where he criticized the organization for — among other things — standing idle in the face of ethnic slaughter in Sri Lanka and Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary.
The most egregious example is of course the Rwandan genocide. Although the U.N. peacekeeping commander Roméo Dallaire warned for months that the Hutu were arming, the U.N.’s attitude was, “Nah, it’s cool.” Dallaire inspired the Nick Nolte character in “Hotel Rwanda,” a movie which is actually generous to the U.N.’s indifference to genocide. The much more accurate depiction was in “Shooting Dogs,” a film titled so because while the U.N. soldiers were not permitted to shoot the Hutu militias massacring their Tutsi neighbors, they were permitted to shoot at stray dogs who tried to eat their corpses.
While that’s the worst example in the U.N.’s history, its day to day is pretty awful too. We have long known that U.N. staff members are guilty of persistent sexual abuse in the countries they’re “helping” — frequently of children. It’s so bad there’s an exhaustive Wikipedia article about it.
Beyond that, the U.N. is complicit in helping terrorists. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been deeply infiltrated by Hamas, a terrorist group so evil it makes Al Qaeda look like Cub Scouts. UNRWA workers were identified as participating directly in the October 7 massacre in Israel and one top Hamas commander was an UNRWA employee on “administrative leave”! Meanwhile, the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) serves as the public affairs team for these jihadists.
Former President Bush rebuked UNHRC for focusing so much on Israel but ignoring actual threats to the world like Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran. Even though our oil-rich Gulf Coast “partners” financially support UNRWA, we cannot be complicit in any U.S. tax-dollars supporting terrorists.
And the U.N. would not exist without our financial support. America provides 31 percent of the U.N.’s total funding for its operating and peacekeeping budgets. Meanwhile, China (the world’s second largest economy) pays for but 5 percent, while Germany (the world’s third largest) pays for 10 percent. All this for an organization with more waste, fraud, and abuse than any program out of Washington.
However, the invisible costs are incalculably higher. The U.N.’s campus covers 17 acres of prime New York real estate and does not pay taxes. It further fleeces the New York taxpayer as the NYPD is simply expected to serve as the U.N.’s de facto body guards during times of heightened security — there was even an episode of “Brooklyn 99” about this problem. Moreover, the impact on New York traffic, something which is terrible on a good day, means countless hours of lost productivity in a city that’s almost 10 percent of the U.S. economy.
There is no U.N. without the U.S. So, one would think then that U.N. would represent our overwhelmingly benevolent interests. Alas. It has long been known that the U.N. gives material supplies to illegal immigrants to help them invade the United States and thereby destroy our sovereignty. Groups like the John Birch Society warned us about this decades ago.
The suggestion to pull the plug on the U.N. might have sounded crazy 20 or even 10 years. But defending its continued existence is an extremist position now. “The practical reason for continuing our system is the same reason for continuing anything: it works satisfactorily,” as Robert Heinlein wrote in “Starship Troopers.” Ergo if a system works unsatisfactorily, it must be ended.
The U.N. did nothing to stop the Rwandan genocide or other atrocities. The U.N. supports jihadists and sex predators. The U.N. costs us billions while actively trying to destroy us. The group is run by homicidal lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur. Let’s finally pull the plug.