It’s United Nations General Assembly week in New York, which means horrible traffic jams, hotel prices through the roof, and tinpot dictators spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Oh, and one other thing: Speech after speech after speech by world leaders, many of whom will use their time to denounce their host, the United States, and our ally Israel. Is it all a big waste of time and money? Rupa Subramanya says yes—the United Nations needs to be put out of its misery. Eli Lake says let’s keep it around—it can be surprisingly useful to us. Here, they fight it out.
First up is Rupa, who says the American taxpayer is what keeps the UN alive, yet we get nothing good in return:
Every September in New York, the world is witness to the spectacle of an assorted rogues’ gallery of dictators, human rights abusers, and corrupt heads of state. They parade around the city with their entourage of hangers-on, enjoying the New York high life while using the United Nations General Assembly as a platform to grandstand and play to fawning audiences back home.
Many of these heads of state are openly hostile to the United States and our allies. They use the annual meeting of the General Assembly to rail against the West, our values, and our institutions.
Every year, whoever happens to be president of Iran condemns Israel and calls for its destruction. Last year, then–president Ebrahim Raisi explicitly vowed to take revenge upon and assassinate U.S. officials for the 2020 assassination of General Qasem Solemaini, who was in command of Iran’s Quds Force, an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that rules the country with an iron fist.
In other words, at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, a foreign leader threatened Americans with assassination on American soil. This was no one-off. In 2006, to pick just one example, the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez, in his UN address, compared then–president George W. Bush to the devil.
When the UN was founded in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, it was a reboot of the League of Nations, created after the First World War. The League was established with the goal of preventing a future war—a task it failed miserably. Likewise, the UN has failed spectacularly to unite the world.
The General Assembly issues resolutions but they have no teeth and are therefore worthless. It has devolved into nothing more than a forum for crackpots to attack the U.S. and Israel. The body has passed numerous resolutions condemning the Jewish state, including, most recently, an entirely one-sided resolution condemning Israel but not Hamas for the ongoing war in the Middle East.
Most of the UN’s agencies are bloated, unaccountable bureaucracies rife with mismanagement and corruption, adding little or no value. In the late 2000s, when I spent time in Delhi, where the UN has a large presence, it was better known for its lavish parties at five-star venues than for its work.
Some UN agencies are not only useless; they’re positively evil. The UN Human Rights Council has included past members such as Saudi Arabia, which is like having a mafia boss sit on the police board. Current members on the council include China, Somalia, and Sudan—all well known, of course, for their devoted adherence to human rights.
Members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which operates in the Palestinian territories, have been credibly linked to the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Despite this, the UN has refused to lift the diplomatic immunity from prosecution that UNRWA members enjoy.
Despite it all, the U.S. is by far the largest funder of the United Nations, contributing 22 percent of its budget. In 2022, that came to $18 billion. Most American taxpayers have no idea how their money is being spent, or misspent.
It’s time that we defund the UN. The American taxpayer is what keeps it alive, yet we get nothing good in return. Neither does the rest of the world. For those who claim that American hegemony requires the UN, my answer is: American hegemony comes from our nuclear missiles, which have kept the world safe from World War III. If the United Nations disappeared tomorrow, the only people to notice would be the dictators who would no longer have an all-expenses-paid trip to America each year to denounce America.
Eli Lake says the UN is a valuable intelligence asset for America’s surveillance state:
I do not come to today’s fight club to defend the United Nations. It is a den of jackals, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Its layers upon layers of bureaucracy have been marked by scandal after scandal. Powerful rogue states like China and Russia retain a veto on any UN Security Council resolution that might criticize their aggression or the aggression of their allies. In nearly every sense, the institution has failed to live up to the high ideals set forth when it was chartered after World War II.
So I understand the urge to be done with the United Nations and convert the valuable real estate in midtown Manhattan into condominiums. But to give the UN the boot would undermine America’s national interests.
To start, the United Nations is a valuable intelligence asset for America’s surveillance state. It’s uncouth to discuss this openly, and technically this kind of skulduggery is a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. But it’s true. The National Security Agency has the UN’s Turtle Bay neighborhood wired for sound. In 2013 this was confirmed thanks to the publication of documents pilfered by former NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden.
Before you weep for the fate of international law and wail about America’s Big Brother tentacles, calm down: Everybody does it. And when the headquarters of the world’s leading international organization happens to be in our largest city, it’s a built-in advantage. There’s no need for FBI spy catchers to do the intensive work of building a cover and forging false identity papers when the target area is a few blocks in New York City. Plus, every time some tinpot regime needs another Xerox machine or a new router, the FBI or the NSA is there to, er, “modify” the equipment.
This is important when one considers that UN members include state sponsors of terrorism like Iran, which has been credibly accused of smuggling the guns used to murder a Kurdish opposition figure in 1989 through its embassy in Vienna. During the Cold War, the Soviets routinely placed KGB officers inside UN international organizations. In other words, the bad guys abuse diplomatic protections all the time. Sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.
Beyond the intelligence value of hosting the United Nations in New York, there is also the revenue generated for the Big Apple. In 2016, the office of then–New York mayor Bill de Blasio released a report that the city reaped some $3.69 billion from hosting the UN—in 2014 alone. Accounting for inflation, that comes to nearly $5 billion today.
For the city that never sleeps that’s not necessarily a game-changer, but it’s not chump change either. Besides, who else can afford the lavish suites at the Plaza, the Four Seasons, and the Waldorf? The world is unfair. Should Geneva, Paris, or Tokyo be the beneficiary of a third-world despot’s annual shopping spree when all that lucre can be creating American jobs?
So I get it. The United Nations is a self-important debating society. It acts as if it runs the world, but it really just erodes the international system by equating democratic states with tyrannies. It’s feckless, annoying, and snooty. And it has an unhealthy obsession with the world’s only Jewish state. But so long as there is a United Nations, it should remain in New York City. Think of our spies. Think of our hotels. Think of our overpriced restaurants.
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on Twitter at @rupasubramanya and read her piece, “Anti-Hindu Violence Is Met with a Shrug.” Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his piece “Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers.”
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