OPINION:
In his Sept. 23 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Argentine President Javier Milei said many things that brought discomfort to the globalists and United Nations worshippers gathered in the chamber.
Mr. Milei made every representative who is not a dictator or from a terrorist state uncomfortable because what he said was true.
He called the United Nations a “useless organization” run by “fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” He argued that the organization has broken its foundational “sacred covenant,” failing to guarantee collective security, allowing international terrorism and violence to flourish and sheltering dictatorships while systematically voting against Israel.
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The U.N. bureaucracy is composed of overpaid people who are attuned to the long history of the General Assembly rather than to any moral code. They are clearly not aligned with the world’s democracies.
The average U.N. bureaucrat — there are about 37,000 — makes $95,000 to $124,000, and salaries rise from there to more than $230,000 at the senior director level. That number is only the employees who work at the U.N. headquarters and does not include the 120,000 people who work for the United Nations worldwide.
The U.N. secretary-general makes about $420,000, slightly more than the U.S. president. More than 50 well-compensated undersecretaries are at the United Nations, with salaries ranging from $173,372 to $239,200.
The bureaucrats, including many of the national representatives, do not identify with anyone but themselves.
When my late, great friend Jose Sorzano was deputy to President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, he tasked the CIA with finding out how many U.N. ambassadors received instructions from their governments. The CIA found that only 30 of the then-159 delegates — about 18% — did.
That problem is worsened by the fact that the despots, rogues, dictators and terrorists are given legitimacy by the United Nations. Whenever they speak — in the General Assembly, the Security Council or any other U.N. body — they are equated to the representatives of the free world.
All the non-democracies, especially terrorists such as the Tehran regime, benefit greatly from this false legitimacy.
Around the time of the United Nations’ founding, President Truman liked to carry with him a passage from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.” Part of the poem reads, “In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world, There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, and the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”
This airy-fairy nonsense led to the U.N. Charter, which compels peace among its now-193 member nations.
Yet there is no peace among them. Russia is in a war to conquer Ukraine. China is in a cold war with its neighbors, which will soon be a hot war, especially to conquer Taiwan. The U.S. is at war with Iran, the world’s principal sponsor of terrorism.
My favorite novelist, George MacDonald Fraser, wrote in “Flashman and the Mountain of Light”: “There’s a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.” That is the principal practice in the United Nations.
In 1975, the United Nations condemned Zionism, resolving that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” From 2014 to 2024, the U.N. General Assembly condemned Israel 173 times, more than any other country.
In the latest example, French President Emmanuel Macron said in his U.N. speech that “Hamas has never been active in the West Bank.” That is blatantly false, but we should make allowances for the fact that Mr. Macron is French.
The U.S. has, since the founding of the United Nations, been the greatest contributor to the organization’s budget. China has been in arrears in its payments for decades. President Trump has greatly reduced funding and withdrawn the U.S. from several U.N. organizations, including the World Health Organization and the U.N. Human Rights Council, of which China, Cuba and Iraq are members.
To avoid losing its vote in the General Assembly under Article 19 of the U.N. Charter, the U.S. transferred $725 million for the regular budget and $102 million for peacekeeping, though significant arrears — amounting to billions of dollars — remain outstanding.
Why are we still members of the United Nations? It makes no sense. Instead, we should revive separate alliances, such as NATO — if it can be revived — and seek new ones.
Mr. Trump has reduced our involvement in the United Nations; he should now withdraw us altogether.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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