Jeane Kirkpatrick is a valiant lady. Like Horatius at the bridge, she is standing almost alone against the onslaught of enemy forces in the United Nations. It must seem, most of the time, that the entire weight of the UN is against her and against the United States. |
The UN was born of high hopes after World War II. As a student at Harvard writing a thesis on the UN, only lack of funds kept me from traveling to San Francisco to sit as a starry-eyed observer at the first UN conference held there in April 1945. (I didn’t know that its presiding officer, Alger Hiss, would be convicted a few years later for perjury in falsely denying that he gave secret State Department documents to Soviet agents.)
Disillusionment set in rapidly. By the time of the Korean War, it should have been obvious to anyone who had an ounce of realism that there was no hope for an organization based on the fraud of calling the Soviet Union a “peace-loving nation.f But the UN had become a dogma of faith for so many Americans, a sort of pseudo-religion, a cult, and the shackles of that allegiance were difficult to break.
Today, the UN usually rates little more than a smirk among average Americans. It wouldn’t even be worth writing a column about if it didn’t cost us so much money. The UN has already cost the U.S. taxpayers more than $10 billion. Now it is costing us almost $1 billion a year in membership assessment, voluntary contributions, and other funds from foreign aid.
Until 1964, the United States paid 40 percent of the UN assessed budget. Since 1974, we’ve paid “only” 25 percent. Russia pays less than 13 percent.
The Soviet Union has consistently used the UN as a haven for its KGB agents in the United States. By getting them hired by the UN Secretariat, Russia can shift the payroll expense of its professional spies onto the United States. Arkady Shevchenko, who held the second-highest post in the UN before his defection to the West in 1978, said that a very high percentage of Russians employed by the UN Secretariat report to the KGB.
The veto power of the Security Council (made up of the big powers) makes the UN an unworkable organization. The international goals of the Communist and non-Communist powers are simply irreconcilable.
That’s why the Soviet Union has cast more than a hundred vetoes. About half were to blackball admission of non-Communist nations. Other vetoes stymied any UN investigation of Communist aggression, including the takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the invasion of Hungary in 1956. In more recent years, the United States has been compelled to use our veto in order to protect the vital interests of our friends from UN interference.
As the Security Council became immobilized because of its veto, the General Assembly flexed its muscles and began to think it was important. A recent study by the Heritage Foundation catalogued General Assembly impertinence.
The General Assembly has become a forum for inflammatory insults against the West in general and against the United States in particular. The United States is repeatedly and falsely accused of racism, aggression, colonialism, and imperialism. In September 1981, 93 Third World nations accused the United States of being the only threat to world peace and prosperity today!
The General Assembly and various UN agencies have tried hard to redistribute U.S. resources and to regulate U.S. business activities in the Third World. Vehicles for these efforts have included the Law of the Sea Treaty (which would block using our mineral deposits between our West Coast and Hawaii), the efforts to restrict private enterprise on the moon and in space, and the efforts to regulate the pharmaceutical industry.
UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has been busy trying to license and regulate journalists in order to censor the free flow of information. Such policies are totally anathema to our concept of a free press. UN financial aid has been funnelled to terrorist groups such as SWAPO (Southwest African People’s Organization).
It’s time that we face up to the fact that the UN is anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist, anti-industrialist, and looks upon the United States as a sucker on whom the rest of the world can make outrageous demands. If President Reagan is looking for more places to cut the Federal budget, the UN would be a good place to start.
