Maybe not a permanent separation, but a temporary breakup would be good.
The US needs to experience what it would be like to not have the UN.
The UN needs to experience what it would be like to not have the US.
If the US isn’t technically a direct belligerent in a technically still ongoing war with the DPRK, so what?
As a practical matter the US has forces in the ROK under bilateral agreement with that country. It will have them there, ready to meet any DPRK invasion, until the US and/or ROK decide it shouldn’t have them there. The nominal triad title of the US commander as commander USFK, commander Combined Forces Command (with the ROK) and commander UN Command is strictly a formality with regard to the last title, pretty much with regard to the second title as well nowadays.
There might be good reasons for the US to stick with the UN, but the military situation in Korea is not a direct and practical reason. More of a reason in case of DPRK is that at least the ‘stick’ side of diplomacy in sanctions has been applied partly via the UN, although the carrot side of deals/negotiations offered to the DPRK mainly hasn’t been directly under UN auspices but directly with US, ROK, China, Russia, Japan. The UN is partly involved, but that’s the case with plenty of other diplomatic situations around the world too.
NO.
From TED-Ed The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis:
[QUOTE] For the first time in history, the U.S. Military set itself to DEFCON 2, the defense readiness one step away from nuclear war. With hundreds of nuclear missiles ready to launch, the metaphorical Doomsday Clock stood at one minute to midnight. But diplomacy carried on. In Washington, D.C., Attorney General Robert Kennedy secretly met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. After intense negotiation, they reached the following proposal.**The U.S. would remove their missiles from Turkey and Italy and promise to never invade Cuba in exchange for the Soviet withdrawal from Cuba under U.N. inspection. **
Once the meeting had concluded, Dobrynin cabled Moscow saying “time is of the essence and we shouldn’t miss the chance”. And at 9 a.m. the next day, a message arrived from Khrushchev announcing the Soviet missiles would be removed from Cuba. The crisis was now over.
While criticized at the time by their respective governments for bargaining with the enemy, contemporary historical analysis shows great admiration for Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s ability to diplomatically solve the crisis.
[/QUOTE]
For all the criticism, the UN is there to be one of the last escape hatches the world has. Helping when a third party is needed to defuse situations like that one.
That begs the question: how do we know it’s better than nothing? On the Israeli question, the neverending parade of anti-Israel resolutions and speeches surely misleads many people worldwide into a false belief about Israel’s guilt and total awfulness. It can be cited by anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. On the other side, the lack of action against Saudi Arabia and China and other terrible governments gives them cover and an excuse. Reports from human rights groups, think tanks, and universities can provide reliable evidence about what takes place in those countries. But if people get information from the UN instead, they get a sugarcoated view of those nations’ justice systems and wars.
You can argue that the good results from the UN outweigh the bad, but surely it’s a matter of how one chooses to measure, not a definite and provable fact.
Reflect for a moment on the first half of the 20th century.
Also, how would all of those bad things not happen anyway, even if the UN never had existed at all?
Even if the UN were nothing more than a debating society, it’s a good thing. It gets people palavering, which is what diplomacy is all about.
Add to this the other good things the UN has done, especially in relief for the needy and suffering, in conflict negotiation, in peacekeeping patrols, and it really can be seen as of some non-trivial real value to the world.
(Also, I tend to hold very strong ideological differences with those who want the U.S. to leave the U.N. I’m very happy to be on the other side of the John Birch Society, just to name one.)
And they learned from that and have worked together through the UN to not make those mistakes again.
Trump is not Wilson or Roosevelt or Eisenhower. Trump is a geo-political and environmental disaster waiting to happen. A disaster whom the people of the USA elected. And even he is not as crazy as the inmates of that asylum for lunatics you call Congress, whom the people of the USA elected.
When you start acting responsibly again, let’s talk, but until then, please keep the hell away from the rest of the world, for you have changed from a stabilizing influence to a destabilizing one.
The best reason for the US to stay in the UN is so that we can just veto the ongoing stream of bullshit resolutions that spew out of it daily. The amount we pay in is more than worth it to simply log-jam and obstruct the UN.
And on the rare occasions it does something decent (smallpox eradication, for instance) we can support them.
Compare the seventy-two years we’ve had the UN (1945-2017) with the last seventy-two years before we had the UN (1873-1945). The world seems a lot better off in the UN era than it was in the pre-UN era.
And it’s not like the world became inherently better. We’ve had the Cold War, the breakup of European colonial empires, the rise of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the fall of communism, and various national rivalries. But we’ve managed to generally maintain the peace - or at least we’ve managed to avoid any general wars.
Ah, the GOP’s favorite “It’s much better to make sure nobody else can accomplish anything–and even better to forcibly undo any accomplishments they do achieve–than to have any ideas of our own” doctrine.
This is a good example of what I was talking about in post #8. The US has veto power in the Security Council. The General Assembly is a different body.
Except that to serve that purpose, the UN surely needs to be neutral. And the way it has treated the Israel/Palestine situation surely demonstrates that it is not neutral.
The UN may have been a decent situation for the geopolitical realities that emerged in the 40’s, as PatrickLondon suggested. But its structure it not designed well for the situation in which there’s a large group of nations that all want to bully one relatively small and powerless nation, as is currently happening in the Middle East. The organizational structure provides no means of fixing the problem, or even recognizing that it is a problem.
I suspect what you define as “neutral” differs from what reasonable people define as neutral. Neutrality does not mean blindness. And bringing up your self-identified “evll nations” is ridiculous since i) neither is germane to the Israel-Palestine issue and ii) The UN has absolutely condemned these countries many times.
The U.S. is not Israel’s publicist. The only way to “protect” Israel from a truly harmful (and not just mere criticism) Security Council resolution is for the U.S. to be in the room and still a member. Even then, resolutions are not self-enforcing and are reliant on the cooperation of each member-state to actually respect it, if they do proscribe or prohibit certain actions towards another member-state. None of the countries that border Israel currently desire or are in a position to wage war against it.
As for peace negotiations, the UN has not been utilized as a tool for peace negotiations nor is it likely to in the immediate future since Palestine is not largely recognized as a nation-state and does not have UN member state status. So, the UN is largely irrelevant to peace negotiations.
Aside from everything else, Israel wouldn’t allow it.
eta: point made already
“Small and powerless nation” my ass. Israel has nukes and are plenty capable of defending themselves from their neighbors, as they’ve proven again and again and again. The best the neighbors can do is humiliate them in a debate forum. And that mostly because a lot of Israel’s actions lately have been so indefensible even its’ staunchest ally grew tired of their shit.
Netanyahu is a protofascist who is making a mockery of Israel on the world stage. But his time will pass. The US will - and should - stay in the UN to make sure the feeble retaliations and snipes their neighbors can muster never grow any actual teeth.
There are numerous UN resolutions the US hasn’t ratified, which has diminished the UN reputation. There are situations when the US has acted in disregard of what the UN has recommended.
Analysts say the US hegemony is drawing to an end due to the rise of other global centers of power. The entire Western civilization seems to be at risk actually as its capitalists no longer allow citizens to have significant access to power and its Christian values become hollow. They say it’s a matter of time before the West is superseded.
Should the US leave the UN? Sure. And offer other centers of power the influence they crave for on silver platter.
Ah, the liberal’s favorite “Cherry pick part of a quote to slander their opponent, regardless of what they’re actually saying” doctrine.
I note you left out the part about how we can support them when they do something worthwhile, like smallpox eradication.
But…hey…congrats on making your…um…"point. Yay you?