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>And the United Nations is an organization so useless, everyone would be better off without it. This is evidence of how badly internal US culture war politics
by _djo_ 5y ago
>And the United Nations is an organization so useless, everyone would be better off without it.
This is evidence of how badly internal US culture war politics have damaged the public’s understanding of institutions and the way the world works.
Which United Nations is useless? The World Health Organisation? The World Food Programme? The UN Security Council? It’s a big organisation with both technical agencies (like the WFP) and forums for countries to coordinate like the General Assembly and Security Council.
The UN is not and never was a world police with the power to stop injustice or war. There are no UN troops or police. The UNSC has no power of it’s own, it’s just a coordination point where the world’s major powers can decide whether or not to take action on any given event. They can choose to fund and approve international interventions, but all that does is give them a budget and legal authority. After that countries still need to voluntarily send troops and equipment for any mission.
The problems with ‘the UN’ are really the problems of our global system and the outsized power that some countries have by virtue of their economic and military strength and geographic control. The only thing that would change if the UN disappeared is that those global powers would have even fewer checks on their behaviour and ability to interfere in less powerful countries.
- baybal2 5y ago> The UN is not and never was a world police with the power to stop injustice or war. That pretty much was the original design of the UN, a league of democracies. I encourage you to dig into history a bit, and find the name of the country which almost forcefully dragged USSR into the UN project, among protest of entire Western Bloc. It was a very conscious sabotage.
- _djo_ 5y agoThat's not quite true, as the USSR was heavily involved in the planning discussions for the UN. It was from the very beginning an attempt to codify the winning alliance of WW2 into a more permanent structure to create world stability. Stalin balked at the last moment, and was convinced by FDR to join because it was believed that if the USSR wasn't part of the UN it was doomed to fail just as the League of Nations had before it. It was better to have the world's major powers be committed into and part of it, rather than outside, even if that meant having less freedom of action to pursue interventions as the UN. It was a conscious decision to make the world more stable.
- baybal2 5y agoThis is untrue, and the historic record of this is untrue, put into records long after FDR left the office. While FDR himself was a big proponent of US joining the League of Nations, he himself was fully conscious that him inviting Stalin into the UN would make it pointless, and useless. His fear was exactly that UN will not be toothless, and US position as the biggest post-war power will be hampered by an international body, or it being dragged into conflicts by Europeans, so Stalin was his way to put a deadweight on UN's neck from the beginning. UN was an organisation which even originally rejected many quite decent democratic nations for minor flaws, and principally, opposition from major powers. Heck, even Germany was only allowed to join in seventies. So, no illusions about that. Maybe, his another concern was that he would've never be allowed to join the UN by the congress, unless he were to provide the republicans with assurance that the body is useless. That's my own theory I developed when reading on FDR in high school.
- tomjen3 5y ago>The World Health Organisation? Completely fucked up their response to covid, mostly of of a fear of Xis ego. >The World Food Programme? The world has fought famine by economic growth, not charity >The UN Security Council? Can't stop a genocide in Rowanda, Bosnia, let alone in China.
- _djo_ 5y ago>Completely fucked up their response to covid, mostly of of a fear of Xis ego. No global agency can work if countries don't cooperate or report false information. We don't have a world government. > The world has fought famine by economic growth, not charity False, millions are supported by WFP feeding programmes. This isn't even difficult to look up. >The UN Security Council? Again, the UNSC is just a venue where the world's most powerful countries can cooperate. It's not an independent agency with its own army. See point 1, of 'we don't have a world government', above. All these things you're blaming 'the UN' for should actually be directed at the world's major powers, because they're the ones making all the key decisions. Not UN bureaucrats.