OPINION:
Driving up First Avenue in New York this week, just hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s impassioned address to the U.S. Congress, I passed the green-glass United Nations Secretariat Building and couldn’t help but think that perhaps one day it would be riverfront condos. Perhaps that time is coming.
The deficiencies of the U.N. system have been apparent to those willing to see them for years, but the war in Ukraine has highlighted the institution’s unfortunate decline into near irrelevance. The Oil for Food scandal, ineffective and interminable peacekeeping operations, failures to prevent genocide, sex abuse scandals, a Human Rights Council stocked human rights abusers, billions in waste and fraud, and a clear anti-Israel, anti-American tone have damaged the credibility of the once vaunted institution of post-war peace likely beyond repair.
When it comes to Ukraine, the sprawling global bureaucracy again failed to prevent the territorial violations and atrocities we are seeing daily. It has been almost entirely absent from the humanitarian response, as the largest refugee crisis in Europe in nearly a century gets more desperate.
Given Russia’s Security Council veto, the U.N. cannot recommend that Russian President Vladimir Putin be tried for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Russia was in fact the president of the Security Council when it attacked Ukraine without provocation.
U.N. reform efforts that would address both the structural and operational deficiencies over the last several decades have made little progress.
Mr. Zelenskyy’s speech will be remembered for its powerful words and images but also for raising the clear ineffectiveness of current international organizations that are supposed to respond with clarity to threats to freedom.
“And we propose to create an association — U-24. United for Peace. A union of responsible states with the strength and conscience to stop conflicts. Immediately. Provide all necessary assistance within 24 hours. If necessary, with weapons. If necessary, with sanctions, humanitarian support, political support, money. Everything we need to keep the peace,” Mr. Zelenskyy said.
He has an inconvenient point for many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
As the world realigns, the time has come to finally create new international alliances that can meet the challenges of the new global construct we face. Instead of debating the effectiveness of the U.N. or the rest of the alphabet soup of international organizations, the U.S. can again play a leadership role in establishing new cooperatives for a new era that this time marginalize the power of China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and others who are part of the authoritarian bloc.
A successor to the U.N. would not merely have what we call peacekeeping responsibilities but be a new global economic, energy and military alliance to counter the New Axis.
The U.N. and other international organizations in the post-Soviet era were intended to promote freedom, democratic principles and peace. That idealism has led to paralysis, abuse and authoritarians like communist China taking advantage of the situation.
China’s influence in particular, in all the major arms of the U.N. has grown significantly over the last decade including in the areas of food, agriculture, aviation, telecommunications, industrial development and as we learned during COVID-19, the World Health Organization.
The United Nations and many of the IOs that have been part of our global environment since the end of the Second World War were designed for a time and set of aspirations that may no longer be relevant or achievable. World peace cannot be achieved when communists and authoritarian regimes still exist with imperial designs.
Continued U.S. engagement at the U.N. is critical to counter these corrosive influences of the communist Chinese, but the end game should be realigning free nations away from organizations that empower authoritarians and human rights abusers toward a more potent, efficient and effective new multi-lateral organization.
It’s time we took the concept of creating institutions seriously as Mr. Zelenskyy suggests. Allowing brutal regimes like Russia, China and Iran to have outsized power in the same room as the community of free nations led by the United States is a sign of our weakness. Our international organizations should seek to strengthen the free world, not play defense in the face of leaders like Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping at the expense of the vulnerable in places like Ukraine.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax Television, an author and a former Bush administration official.
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