After reading Jordan Greene's viewpoint, "Reject UN-American Values" (March 14) which lambasted the United Nations as an existential threat to the United States, I feel compelled to respond to a number of his more fallacious points.
Greene is correct that the United Nations is a corrupt and inefficient organization. However, he neglects to mention that it is an American-dominated institution with little power to change behavior, lacking any means of enforcing its non-binding resolutions or abrogating state sovereignty. As a permanent member of the most important organ of the United Nations, the Security Council, the United States can veto whichever measures it chooses. Surely, most would agree that Americans are and will continue to be more focused on their own interests than those of the fictional "international community."
To even remotely suggest, then, that continued U.N. membership could lead to the destruction of basic American values "in 40 years," as the author does, is simply ludicrous.
The awful truth that anti-United Nations pundits must confront is that the United Nations has a minimal impact on U.S. foreign policy and world affairs alike, making the supposed debate on leaving the United Nations close to irrelevant. Since World War II, the best administrations have used the United Nations as just another tool of statecraft in efforts to pursue the national interest.
This was the case during the Cold War, when the United States saw participation in the United Nations as an opportunity to advance liberal democracy, alleviate the concerns of allies about expansive U.S. capabilities, and persuade second-tier great powers to accept American leadership in the fight against the Soviet Union. The worst have ignored the United Nations, allowing the body to regress into a superfluous forum in which weak states vainly voice their frustrations.
It is undeniable that the past successes and failures of U.S. policy have had very little to do with the United Nations itself and more to do with material interests and power. That being said, the United Nations has had some success as a facilitator of dialogue and director of worthy humanitarian operations.
The last time that the United States cut ties with an international organization it helped create (recall Woodrow Wilson's ill-fated League of Nations), the organization collapsed upon itself. Less than 30 years later, the United States emerged from a period of self-imposed isolation and economic depression to fight the most destructive war in world history.
I find it hard to see how leaving the United Nations would further any conceivable foreign policy posture the United States might adopt. To his credit, Greene does off-handedly suggest one such option, isolationism, when he identifies the "economic, social, and cultural rights" enshrined in the U.N. charter as fundamentally opposed to American values, instead asserting that "the only right we associate with these is the right to be left alone."
However, in today's volatile global climate, this strategy is mistaken. Pulling out of the United Nations would accomplish nothing, save for diminishing any remaining goodwill other nations currently harbor towards the United States, undercutting America's "soft power" of influence, harming American businesses, and making diplomacy more difficult at a time when current Middle East policy and the struggle against terrorism make diplomatic avenues critical.
I agree that the United Nations is rife with shortcomings, but this is beside the point. It is very clear that Greene's opposition to the United Nations has everything to do with a domestic political agenda and nothing to do with international relations.
Arguing that the United Nations is "a vehicle for smuggling socialism into the fabric of our society" and somehow connected to a "force-march toward feminism" in Western Europe is completely illogical and seems to confirm that Greene is trying to make the United Nations a symbol of opinions contrary to his own.
It is exactly this type of meaningless rhetoric, aiming for cheap political points among the radicalized bases of both parties, that obscures the real problems facing the country today. By passing off a political tirade as analysis of international affairs, inflammatory articles like Greene's would lead one to believe that no true national consensus on foreign affairs could ever exist. This could not be farther from the truth.
What Greene is truly concerned with is combating what he vaguely identifies as "the values of humanist socialism," the "European left," and a shadowy "domestic global governance cabal." He is uninterested in examining the United Nations from an objective perspective and focused on furthering his own particular brand of politics.This is fine, but it would be best that he stop projecting the philosophies he detests onto an institution that merely sums the foreign policies of the world's states.
Skillfully manipulated, the United States can use the United Nations as a means of cementing American primacy, achieving mutually beneficial agreements, and spreading progress throughout the globe.
Andrew E. Title is a senior majoring in international relations.
