Tomorrow, at 8:30 p.m. in Pearson 104, the Tufts Republicans host former Congressman Bob Barr, who will speak on the topic, "Why America Should Get Out of the UN, Yesterday!" There is a wide range of topics on which the Congressman could have spoken, from the Clinton impeachment (which he managed), to gun rights (which he supports), to the Patriot Act (which he opposes), to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (which he authored).
All are worthy topics, but none touches closer to the question of whether we, as Americans, wish to preserve a country we will recognize in 40 years.
I believe it is dangerous to expend too much effort measuring and cataloguing the gross wastefulness and inefficiency of the United Nations. Doing so only encourages those seeking to reform it. Renaming committees and creating new oversight panels only begs the question of why reform is needed to begin with.
The size and composition of the United Nations ensure that most of its inefficiencies are structural and cannot be decoupled from its membership. But most of us know, or at least sense, that the United Nations' problems extend beyond mere inefficiency.
The Original Sin of the United Nations is the collection of values on which it was created - more specifically, the amalgamation of economic, social, and cultural rights it purports to recognize. Americans know that people have economic, social, and cultural aspirations, but the only right we associate with these is the right to be left alone.
We recognize rights against property theft and extermination. To these, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights adds "protection against unemployment" in Article 23, "periodic holidays with pay" in Article 24, and what I feel equates to universal healthcare in Article 25.
Not since the British monarchy have so many Americans tolerated an institution so anathematic to their values.
The domestic global governance cabal, in Washington and at Tufts, seeks to portray opposition to the United Nations as opposition to diplomacy. They skirt the values question - or focus on vague and irrelevant values like "peace" and "justice" - because they know Americans won't swallow what they bring to the table.
Thus, they make the United Nations out to be an essential diplomatic body, not a vehicle for smuggling socialism into the fabric of our society. How Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck ever got along without the United Nations is never addressed.
If talking and opinion-sharing were the only purposes of the United Nations, it wouldn't need one-tenth of its current budget.
Even diplomacy, though, is a poor reason to hold onto a corrupt bureaucracy: ad hoc bilateral and multilateral diplomatic schemes should work just as well and shouldn't be hard to create if all parties involved are serious about finding a diplomatic solution. This, of course, is usually not the case, and highlights another flaw in the U.N. system: it essentially acts as a pressure valve, allowing regimes with no interest in long-term peace to feign diplomacy and ward-off untimely conflict.
The truth is that Americans don't oppose multilateralism, but most of us do oppose multilateralist zealots who would have us believe that that multilateralism is an end unto itself.
Reflexive opposition to American unilateralism is predicated on a deep distrust of traditional American values. It reflects an effort to replace long-held American beliefs with those of the European left. One only needs to peer across the Atlantic for a preview of what awaits our country, should we accept the values of humanist socialism.
Progressive Europe long ago accepted these values, enshrining universal healthcare, paid holidays, and union membership as fundamental rights.
These rights have operated in synergy - leading to stratospheric entitlement spending and low productivity - bringing about an economic crisis where double-digit unemployment figures are no more of a surprise than consistently negative population growth.
The result has been a force-march toward feminism. If a country's men won't work more than 35 hours a week and its women aren't having enough children to replace the population, the only chance it has of competing with developing Asiatic economies is to drive every able-bodied adult into the workforce.
The newly elected Socialist government in Spain invented a creative solution: it has proposed a law that housework be equally divided between husbands and wives. Additionally, publicly-listed companies must set aside at least 40 percent of their board seats for women.
Only writers of apocalyptic fiction can predict what feats of social-engineering will next be attempted by the jackbooted thugs of equality seeking global influence.
The United States is capable of solving its own problems, and the world's oldest constitutional Republic doesn't need the frequent suggestions of Arab sheiks, European bureaucrats, or African warlords.
If the rest of the world needs saving, they're more than welcome to it. But the United Nations isn't our savior, and the more faith we place in permanent international institutions, the more we necessarily sacrifice our own values for a global mean of socialist humanism.
Jordan Greene is a junior and the president of the Tufts Republicans.
