The Spire

Tucker Scott ’26

Opinions Editor

The charter of the United Nations states that their purpose is, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women of Nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” The reality is that the UN has utterly failed and has been a full scale disaster area ever since its founding; serving instead as a propaganda tool on behalf of Third World Autocracies, genocidal terrorist groups, and tin pot dictators rather than in defense of democracies and equal rights that it was originally established to do. The United Nations should be disbanded. The United States should defund it. Never again should anyone pretend that The United Nations has the power of the moral high ground. What we as Americans need to do are two things if we ever want to repair the damage that the UN has done. First, we need to leave the United Nations and instead focus on agreements with individuals or groups of nations that only benefit our interests. Second, we need to accept the fact that there is no family of nations and there will never be a global order. 

The United Nations not only costs us $12 billion every year but it also imposes moral imprimatur for the world’s worst governments. From 2015 to 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted a stunning 140 resolutions against Israel. In that same time period, it adopted one against North Korea, one against Afghanistan, zero against Venezuela, zero against Hamas, and zero against China. In fact, the entire rest of the world combined merited a grand total of 68 resolutions of condemnation. Israel supposedly merited more than double that with 140. According to the UN itself Hamas has stolen at minimum 87% of the food aid sent into Gaza. Yet despite that fact they refuse to allow the IDF to defend aid trucks and instead spend their time ripping Israel for the hunger crisis that Hamas itself is causing and trying to stop the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from getting food to the people who really need it. 

And even if somehow the United Nations got together and agreed on something, they don’t have the power to do anything about it anyway. The most it can do is send a very strongly worded letter to which the enemies they send it to scoff and laugh because who really cares what the United Nations thinks? When the United States pulled out of Afghanistan the UN sent a letter to the Taliban saying that they expected women to keep the rights they had. To which the Taliban immediately responded by not allowing women to go to school, kidnapping and raping girls, and throwing women into the home and hijab or forcing them into slavery. Because they do not care about what the United Nations has to say, and why should they? 

The United Nations as a premise was always wrongheaded. It was always idealistic to pretend that the United States and China are going to get together in a room and decide world policy. Why? Because we don’t share the same values. Simple as that. The United States values things like freedom, equality, truth, and justice. And China values things like tyranny, control, subjugation, and death. It’s as simple as that. To say you are a family of nations assumes that everyone basically wants the same thing and we all share values. Well the truth is we don’t. Every country in the United Nations and not in the United Nations, whether they are friend or foe, ally or enemy, have priorities. Sometimes those priorities are in line with America’s values and interests and if so, great. But many times they aren’t. 

Instead of having the United Nations we should instead be looking to have mutually beneficial military partnerships, like NATO. NATO is the perfect example of how an international organization should be run. It does not attempt to dictate policy on random issues, it does not pretend to be morally superior, and everyone in NATO shares the same basic values, except for maybe Turkey but that is a complicated situation. Or we could just have mutual defense pacts with singular nations, like we do with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Either way both are more beneficial and more in America’s interest than being part of a giant organization that doesn’t do anything but waste time, space, and money.

Featured image courtesy of Britannica