President Joe Biden is making a pitch to reform the United Nations. We would be better off if he pushed for the United States to leave the organization altogether.
Biden’s big proposal for reforming the U.N. is to increase the size of the U.N. Security Council, adding permanent seats for countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The council currently has five permanent members, who earned their seats as victorious powers in World War II: the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, China, and Russia. These permanent members can automatically veto any proposal, which means China and Russia dictate what the council can do.
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Therein lies the problem with the U.N. Biden urged the permanent members to use their vetoes only “in rare, extraordinary situations to ensure that the council remains credible and effective.” This is eye-roll-worthy — as if China and Russia care what anyone else thinks it means to be “credible and effective.” Russia is in the middle of an aggressive war against its neighbor, an act that contravenes international law, but its ability to paralyze the Security Council means there are never any consequences. As long as China and Russia can veto anything in the Security Council, the council itself is worthless. No reform that fails to address this underlying problem has any point at all.
You can’t reform an institution that is rotten to its very core, which is what the U.N. is. It is a bloated bureaucracy with no ability for change or self-reflection. Free of charge, the U.N. gives seats on human rights bodies, women’s committees, and other organizations to authoritarian regimes that reject all of its stated goals. They do not need to reform their laws, and countries that do protect human rights do not get rewarded with additional influence.
The U.S. contributed more than $11 billion to the organization in 2020, even though its fatal flaws were highlighted once again by the World Health Organization peddling Chinese propaganda during the pandemic. Instead of learning that lesson, Biden has embraced the U.N. as some paragon of diplomacy and reversed some of the funding cuts implemented by former President Donald Trump.
The U.S. provides nearly one-fifth of the U.N.’s collective budget. But this has done nothing to make it less of a playground for authoritarians and human rights abusers. The choice is clear: the U.N. must be discarded. It serves no purpose but to make some world leaders feel good about “cooperation” and to burn billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars for no global benefit.
Biden should be seeking to build a new global diplomatic organization that actually incentivizes countries to protect human rights. The status quo is a waste of billions of dollars, as its worst offenders have all the power they need to prevent meaningful reforms. The sooner American leaders recognize that, the better.
