The UN is still living in a fantasy world. Until it learns its lesson, the West cannot rely on it
TFar from being the guarantor of world peace, the oncenoble organisation is often biased, blinkered, and a barrier in the pursuit of justice
Simply being in the 21st century is no guarantee of an end to rogues, despots and bloodthirsty war-mongers
here is a particular type of internationalism beloved of the Left, rooted in the idea that if only the bloated immoral West stopped being so greedy and arrogant and made proper amends for its imperialist past, then peace and love would reign in the world.
The once-noble UN, formed in 1945, has become the embodiment of this dubious breed of internationalism. Still hailed by the world’s lefties as the very imprimatur of humane global order, it is in fact often biased, ideological and actively obstructive of the pursuit of international justice – with sets and subsets of its 193 member states clubbing together to advance all manner of malign interests. All in the name of peace and human rights, naturally.
Much like the WHO, the UN specialises in making grand-seeming yet troublingly useless statements. Last week, for example, a belated visit to Ukraine (only after a trip Moscow to meet with the Russian foreign minister), saw secretary-general António Guterres declare: “The war is an absurdity in the 21st century – the war is evil and when you see these situations our heart of course stays with the victims, our condolences to their families,” adding that: “there is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century.”
It’s hard to know where to begin. The first part of the statement is just inane. The second is more concerning. In fact, a child could point out its lazy folly by noting that simply being in the 21st century is no guarantee of an end to rogues, despots and bloodthirsty war-mongers. As long as there are people, and especially men, there will be Vladimir Putins and Kim Jong-uns and Xi Jinpings – and there will be a need to stop them, sometimes through brisk deterrence, sometimes through spirited and uncompromising military retaliation.
But then, when you’re the grand vizier of the UN, you’ve long-since drunk your own Kool-Aid. The problem is that while UN top dogs fly around the world attending dinners and conferences and Oxbridge debates (former director general Ban Ki-moon made an appearance at the Cambridge Union when I was an undergraduate), and making majestic statements about non-violence and condemning this or that atrocity, Chinese Uighurs are being mass-murdered and people like Putin are mustering troops and launching invasions.
But it’s worse than a case of the UN simply having its head in the sand. Despite being cloaked in moral authority and pacifist virtue, it has actually become an actively malign force. As the redoubtable Hillel Neuer, head of UN Watch, said last week, the UN is essentially an alliance “between the world’s worst countries”, legitimised by far-left NGOs with radical anti-West agenda like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (who are doing business with the Taliban) and dictatorships, including those of Iran and China.
Neuer noted that the 47-nation Human Rights Council, which is meant to be the world’s highest human rights body, included Russia until two weeks ago, and of course continues to include China, Venezuela, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea and so on: countries with appalling human rights records, that crush and poison dissidents, that commit mass murder. Meanwhile the UN’s New York-based Commission on the Status of Women’s latest member is Iran, a country in which women can be arrested if their headscarves slip. “It is Orwellian,” noted Neuer. “The complete opposite of what the UN was meant to do. They spend most of their time ignoring the world’s worst abuses.”
Not quite a vision of virtue, peace and international community after all. And then there’s Israel. Although it helped bring Israel into being in 1947 with Resolution 181, since the 1970s, strong anti-Israel alliances within the UN have produced volleys of resolutions designed to isolate, undermine and harm the Jewish state, checked solely by America’s vetoes at the Security Council level.
Just as the EU includes 27 countries all treated as equal, so that the likes of Hungary and Romania and Malta can scupper things for everyone (but not us anymore!), the UN’s grossly misapplied internationalism means the world’s many anti-Semitic countries are free to gang up on Israel year after year.
The 1970s gave us vicious groups including the Division for Palestinian Rights of the Secretariat, the Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices in the Territories, and the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. In 1975, an Arab and Sovietsponsored resolution declared Zionism a “form of racism and racial discrimination” – thereby delegitimising Israel’s right to exist. This was only repealed in 1991, and the UN continues to indulge its anti-Israel bias on a near-weekly basis.
Bastion of sprawling, malign internationalism, the UN is dangerous on two fronts, a fact that is particularly clear at crisis points like the present. In welcoming the worst countries in the world into the fold, and letting them play at human rights, it actively empowers untold evil. Indeed Russian entitlement might have come to a less perilous pass had its UN dominance been curtailed in recent decades. Then there is the preference for hollow peace-talk and even hollower human rights talk over and above an engagement with reality.
This combination of complicity with despots and anti-Western forces, and a pseudo-pacifist outlook, is exactly what got us to this point.
As Guterres’ embarrassing commentary last week should make plain, we accord far too much respect to grand organisations like the UN. We have chosen to be lulled into their fantasy of a world in which we can continue to enjoy peace and prosperity while our enemies point missiles at us. Who knows where that choice will end.