Abstract

It Should Be Late, It Was Never Great

The author argues that the United Nations mainly serves the interests of the United States, while failing to help or fairly represent developing countries. It would be a great step forward if several big Third World countries were to quit the UN, declaring that it has no function beyond ratifying the world's present distasteful political arrangements. The trouble is that national elites in pretty much every UN-member country--now 191 in all--yearn to live in high style for at least a few years, and in some cases for decades, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and to cut a dash in the General Assembly. They have a deep material stake in continuing membership, even though in the case of small, poor countries the prodigious outlays on a UN delegation could be far better used in decent domestic applications, funding local crafts or orphanages back home. Barely a day goes by without some Democrat piously demanding an "increased role" for the UN in whatever misadventure for which the United States requires political cover. The Rooseveltian vision was of an impotent General Assembly, with decision-making authority vested in a Security Council without, in Gowan's words, "the slightest claim to rest on any representative principle other than brute force," and of course dominated by the United States and its vassals. So please, my friends, no more earnest calls for "a UN role," at least not until the outfit is radically reconstituted along genuinely democratic lines.