By Robert Nicholson, Senior fellow of thinc. This article was published in “Providence” on October 10th 2024.
If you haven’t experienced the epic congestion of New York during United Nations week, count yourself lucky. If you have, you know the inverse correlation between the bedlam of the General Assembly’s annual meeting and the march of peace among men. Zoom into any traffic jam across the tristate area and you’ll find men and women cursing Franklin D. Roosevelt in every tongue.
The epicenter of the chaos is Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, where hundreds of heads of state and thousands of hangers-on roil and churn inside the sleek-looking General Assembly building beside the more recognizable 39-storey Secretariat. Understood in biblical terms, the East River complex might be seen as a House of Noah where the patriarch’s long-scattered descendants meet to rediscover their fraternal bonds. But if you witnessed the UN’s record over the past year, you know that mankind’s premier peacemaking body is much closer to a Tower of Babel—and with the world in disarray, you might wonder if it should be disbanded all the same.
Anyone who doubts such a sweeping suggestion needn’t look any further than the UN’s record on Israel since Oct. 7, 2023.
In just twelve months, we saw shocking revelations about Hamas’s penetration of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip; we learned of a Hamas takeover of the UNRWA branch in Lebanon; we watched the Security Council make minimal interventions on behalf of Israeli hostages while making outsized demands to protect Palestinians (and failing to act against Iranian aggression from Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere); we read the International Court of Justice’s unconscionable advisory opinion with its demand that Israel withdraw immediately from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, including the Old City; we heard the Human Rights Council condemn Israel’s highly discriminate “pager-attack” on Hezbollah terrorists; and we listened to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian address the General Assembly and say—unironically and with a straight face—that Iran hopes to “play an effective and constructive role in the evolving global order.”
More glaring than all this, however, is the UN’s total failure to prevent the war now raging between Israel and Iran’s proxies in Lebanon. After the last Hezbollah-instigated war in 2006, the Security Council issued Resolution 1701 calling for the total disarmament of the Iranian militia; yet neither the Security Council, its UNIFIL mission to Lebanon, nor the Lebanese government have been willing to enforce the resolution, giving the Islamic Republic of Iran two decades to rebuild its terrorist army on Israel’s northern border.
Israelis have endured daily attacks from Hezbollah for a year while fending off Hamas in the south, with nary a peep from the Security Council. Now that the IDF is striking back, however, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierres is suddenly crying that “Hell is breaking loose in Lebanon” and urging “leaders to resume a meaningful dialogue.” (His one-sided screeds just got him banned from Israel.) Over at the Middle East Forum, Michael Rubin retorts, “If the UN and Lebanon will not dismantle Hezbollah’s network of arms, then Israel will have no choice but to do the job.”
With its fixation on the Jewish state, perhaps the UN should be forgiven for its failure to stop conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Haiti; but those conflicts, and others, stand to widen over the coming year. The question is why we continue to tolerate this feckless institution on our shores. (Spoiler alert: I won’t have great answers to that question by the end of this essay.)
But the UN must be doing something, you say. After all, US taxpayers are footing 22 percent of its budget and 27 percent of its peacekeeping operations (China and Japan, the world’s next largest economies, are the second- and third-biggest donors respectively). We gave more than $18 billion to the UN in 2022, which is slightly more than it takes to fund the US Coast Guard.
So what has the UN been doing besides harassing Israel? The answer may surprise you—but it probably won’t.
These days, the UN is focused on a Very Big Thing called the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a “supremely ambitious and transformational vision” for humanity adopted by member states in 2015. This Agenda lays out 17 goals, each with its own secondary goals, that include everything from eradicating hunger and poverty to promoting gender equality and clean energy. In short, it’s a blueprint for better global governance.
But the Agenda has fallen on hard times since 2015, its provisions mostly ignored by member states reluctant to take on new burdens. This has created panic inside the luftmenschen class, which designed this year’s General Assembly meeting as a kind of renewal-of-vows in a “Summit of the Future.” Described on the UN website as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the multilateral system and steer humanity on a new course,” the Summit produced the “Pact of the Future”, adopted by acclamation on September 22, which obligates member states to redouble their commitment to the 2030 Agenda.
The details of the 56-page document are too tedious to recount here. Suffice it say, it contains all the buzzwords you’d expect: multilateralism, climate change, xenophobia, empowerment, solidarity, cooperation, universal healthcare, etc. The most important element of the Pact is the expectation that states donate a percentage of national wealth for the benefit of poorer nations and the Agenda’s broader goals. The costs aren’t cheap. In 2023, UN economists estimated that reaching the Agenda’s development targets would require between $5.4 and $6.4 trillion per year until 2030. This redistribution of wealth, combined with other obligations, exacts a heavy toll in the name of a “brighter future for humanity.”
It’s no surprise that the 2030 Agenda, which is often linked to talk of a “Great Reset” after the Covid-19 pandemic, has spawned innumerable conspiracy theories in dark corners of the internet. But you don’t have to be weird to see the UN’s more muscular mandate as the emerging tyranny it is.
At least that’s the view of Argentina’s new president Javier Milei, who came to this year’s General Assembly to deliver the jeremiad we’ve been waiting for.
Self-described “libertarian-liberal economist” and gonzo TV pundit Javier Milei may have been the least-likely person to become president of Argentina. His tastes and personality are rather eccentric and his politics conservative by Latin American standards. (Curiously, Milei, a Catholic, feels a strong pull towards Judaism and the State of Israel which he doesn’t mind sharing.)
Elected to rescue Argentina from a century of failed economic policies, Milei channels the same disruptive anti-wokeism of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele—but the task before him is daunting. A week before arriving in New York, Milei presented his 2025 zero-deficit budget (replete with austerity measures that would make a miser squirm) to the Argentinian Congress where he controls only 15 percent of the seats and faces stiff opposition. The next few months will mark what the Associated Press calls a “new phase of confrontation with lawmakers” and a true test of Milei’s will.
One can imagine, then, Milei’s reaction when he first learned of the Very Big Thing growing on the banks of the East River, engorged by pallets of cash which Argentina doesn’t have. Whatever those feelings were, he no doubt tempered them for his first speech at the General Assembly. Taking the rostrum, he made sure to give credit where credit was due, lauding the UN for helping to repair the world after 1945 by turning swords into ploughshares, etc. But he spent the rest of his 14 minutes tearing into the international body for straying from its founding purpose and leading humanity down the wrong path.
The problem, Milei explained, is corruption—not in the technical sense but the biblical one. Like most “bureaucratic structures that we men create,” the UN slowly mutated from an organization “intended essentially as a shield to protect the Kingdom of Man…into a multi-tentacled leviathan, which seeks to decide not only what each nation-state should do, but also how all the citizens of the world should live.” The 2030 Agenda is the latest phase of this mutation, a “supranational government program, socialist in nature, which seeks to solve the problems of modernity with solutions that violate the sovereignty of nation-states and violate people’s right to life, liberty and property.”
Milei knows socialism all too well and wants no part of it. “Collectivism and moral posturing of the woke agenda have collided with reality and no longer have credible solutions to offer to the world’s real problems,” he said. History teaches “the only way to guarantee prosperity is by limiting the power of the monarch, guaranteeing equality before the law and defending the right to life, liberty and property of individuals.” That’s the kind of prosperity Argentinians elected him to restore.
“We in Argentina have already seen with our own eyes what lies at the end of this road of envy and sad passions: poverty, brutalization, anarchy and a fatal absence of freedom,” he told the General Assembly. “We still have time to turn away from this course.”
Milei ended his speech on an aggressive note, announcing Argentina’s dissent from the 2030 Agenda and his own plans to undo it. “From this day on, know that the Argentine Republic will abandon the position of historical neutrality that characterized us and will be at the forefront of the struggle in defense of freedom,” he said. He then called “all the nations of the free world to join us, not only in dissenting from this pact, but also in the creation of a new agenda for this noble institution: the agenda of freedom.”
Milei underscored his call for a crusade with an invocation to God and the “forces of heaven,” punctuating it with his trademark, if dissonant, “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!”—“Long live f***ing freedom!” And with that, war against the multi-tentacled leviathan was joined.
Milei has come under fire in recent days for apparently plagiarizing a West Wing episode for the speech (his communications director is a huge fan) but his main point stands: The UN is a good organization gone bad, and it needs to be tamed. The question is whether we, the creators of the leviathan, will play a role.
Calls for reforming the UN are legion. While most foreign policy wonks believe the UN remains an indispensable platform for international dialogue, many have conceded its dysfunction and offered various ideas for fixing it. The problem isn’t lack of ideas but lack of will. Real reform will generate fierce blowback. It will involve hard decisions and big expenditures of political capital. Any US president who answers the call must be a true believer.
Domestically, however, the time seems right. While a 2023 Pew poll found Americans slightly more favorable towards the UN than not (52% to 44%), recent polls find them mostly checked out. Less than a third of US citizens listed “strengthening the UN” as a top foreign policy priority—a number which actually decreases among Gen Z-ers—which puts it well below stopping terrorist attacks, reducing drug trafficking, and preventing weapons of mass destruction.
Internationally, the time is also right. Over the past year, the UN has proven itself hopelessly bigoted and ineffective, giving us plenty of reasons to reassess our relationship with its various arms. Having failed its primary mission, it’s turned to secondary and tertiary missions that drain national coffers and undermine national sovereignty. Many of its tentacles are irreparably corrupted; others are just unnecessary.
Even stuck in late September traffic, I would argue for the UN’s utility as a forum for civilizational exchange: a place where the world’s major powers can debate matters of international security (occasionally even agreeing on something) and where representatives of all nations can talk in proximity. But a forum is a forum—not a supranational government.
One thing is for sure: Left unopposed, the dragon will grow. And while Milei is no St. George, his cause is just and his goals are achievable. The UN’s mandate must be narrowed—a lot. Its funding must be slashed—a lot (especially for fruitless peacekeeping missions like UNIFIL). Redundant tentacles must be lopped off, and what’s left must be consolidated around a more realistic—and less invasive—agenda.
It’s a big job, but it can be done. And we know at least one world leader who’s ready to help.
