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President Donald Trump did something rather unusual the other day.  He went to the UN and, before the entire body, delivered some of the harshest rhetoric we can recall. He essentially stated that the UN has become ineffective, useless, and generally a nuisance in maintaining world peace.

Some commentators are puzzled as to why he delivered such a stinging assessment.  Others have attacked him for not understanding foreign policy.

The UN staff must have known a rebuke was coming, so they responded childishly by stopping his escalator and shutting down his teleprompter.

We believe such a condemnation is long overdue, and we would like to see the US reduce its support for the UN and relocate its remaining functions to Switzerland, where many of its offices are already located.

The UN has become both useless and sinister at the same time, quite an accomplishment for an international organization.  However, if you are familiar at all with its origins, the people who have led it, and the nature of its multitude of resolutions, you will see why.

We don’t have the space to provide a comprehensive history. Still, we will briefly review its history, the background of the men who became Secretary General, and examine the pattern of its resolutions.

The United Nations (UN) was founded in 1945 with lofty goals of maintaining international peace, promoting human rights, and fostering global cooperation. However, critics argue that it has devolved into an ineffective bureaucracy that fails to deliver on its promises, often exacerbating problems or serving hidden agendas.

In a sense, the UN was drawn from the earlier Wilsonian vision of the League of Nations and was designed to make the organization more robust than the failed League.

The first “temporary Secretary General”, in charge of early organization at the San Francisco conference, was Alger Hiss.  Hiss was later found guilty of perjury; however, most historians, including the definitive work by Professor Alan Weinstein (Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case) and later Venona decrypts, clearly indicate that Hiss was an agent of the Soviet Union.

Also very influential was Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Roosevelt.  She was given considerable leeway to spread her progressive ideas throughout the philosophy of the UN while Hiss was active in selecting the initial personnel. In short, the UN, from its inception to the present day, is essentially a project of the “international left,” and its associated actions and structure continue to demonstrate that case.

From the beginning, the structure of the “permanent member” has paralyzed the organization.

The Security Council’s veto power, held by five permanent members (the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK), paralyzes action.  Moreover, given the growing Islamic constituency of France and the UK that is underway, you can see the US will soon be totally isolated.

Besides a left-wing bias in all that it touches, the UN has been implicated in scandals that suggest negligence or worse, turning it from useless to actively harmful.  A few recent examples to jog the memory might be helpful:

• In 2010, UN peacekeepers from Nepal introduced cholera to Haiti, killing over 10,000 people. The UN delayed its investigation, stalled accountability, and resorted to “political wrangling” despite knowing that its base was the source. This cover-up prolonged suffering and eroded trust.
• Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers is rampant, with reports of abuse in multiple missions, yet accountability is minimal. The UN’s slow response to the COVID-19 origins investigation, hampered by its World Health Organization (WHO) and deference to China, further exemplifies bureaucratic failure.
• Funding scandals, such as the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, involved billions of dollars in corruption. Critics argue these aren’t anomalies but symptoms of an unaccountable organization bloated with bureaucracy.

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, UN peacekeepers were ordered not to intervene, leading to 800,000 deaths. In Bosnia, peacekeepers watched as Serbian forces massacred civilians in Srebrenica. The UN’s “peacekeeping” forces lack independent authority—they’re just loaned troops from member states, with no real enforcement power.

Recently, UN workers were found to be active members of Hamas, an international terrorist organization.

Ongoing conflicts in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and elsewhere highlight this impotence. As one critic notes, the UN is “all talk and no action,” afraid to intervene in wars, while major powers avoid escalation through mutual deterrence (such as MAD during the Cold War), no thanks to UN efforts. If the UN can’t stop “the scourge of war,” its primary purpose seems moot.

Of its 193 member states, only about 75 are true democracies; the rest comprise authoritarian regimes that often exhibit leniency toward human rights abuses. The Human Rights Council has included abusers like Saudi Arabia and China, mocking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. China’s Uyghur concentration camps go unaddressed, while the UN ignores violations if they inconvenience China.

Let’s briefly look at the men who have led the UN.

Trygve Lie (Norway, 1946–1952).  He was a lawyer and a member of the Socialist Party, favoring the nationalization of the economy.

Dag Hammarskjöld (Sweden, 1953–1961).  He grew up in the post-war Social Democratic Party that formed the famous Swedish welfare state.  He was an economist by training and leaned toward pragmatic internationalism, emphasizing UN peacekeeping and decolonization.

U Thant (Burma/Myanmar, 1961–1971). His government under U Nu pursued “Buddhist socialism,” blending local traditions with state-led development.  He was a champion of the so-called non-aligned movement.  These were countries so morally confused that they could not make up their mind to be for Soviet Communism or freedom.  They oscillated back and forth, remaining ambiguous so that they could collect aid from both sides.

Kurt Waldheim (Austria, 1972–1981). While some historians suggest Waldheim should be classified as a man of the right, it can only be done so by using the silly political spectrum taught in school that puts Communists on the Left and National Socialists (NAZIS)on the right. However, it was later found that he had been a member of the National Socialist German Students’ League and that he had hidden his participation in the German Army and its atrocities. From 1942 to 1944, he served as an intelligence officer in the Balkans, including in Thessaloniki, Greece, during the deportation of over 40,000 Jews to death camps. He denied direct involvement, claiming he was a low-level staff officer handling translations and logistics.

Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (Peru, 1982–1991). He is challenging to categorize as he was not clearly a socialist.  He believed in the importance of diplomacy and conflict resolution.  He did believe in international aid, kind of a global view of wealth redistribution, but he appears to be one of the less ideological of the UN leaders.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Egypt, 1992–1996.  He appears to be another exception.  An Egyptian Coptic Christian, he certainly was an internationalist and believed in state interventionism, but he does not seem to be a man of the hard left.

Kofi Annan (Ghana, 1997–2006).  He politically grew up under the socialist ideas of Kwame Nkrumah and was a socialist-leaning leader in his youth.  Again, likely not a man of the hard left, but he believed in public-private partnerships, state intervention, and harbored Third World hostility towards European colonialism. He opposed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, calling it “not in conformity with the UN Charter.”  Later, he had adopted what is now the typical internationalist environmental position, encouraging businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies.  You can only reach that position if you think capitalism is socially irresponsible and that it can’t be environmentally sustainable.

Ban Ki-moon (South Korea, 2007–2016).  While South Korea has been aligned with the US, it is still a state-run economy. His push for global climate agreements and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasized equity, so he, while not a member of the hard left, certainly fit well with the model of the international soft left and its environmental agenda. He is best known for championing the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, often called one of his major achievements.

António Guterres (Portugal, 2017–present).  Here is another hard man of the left.  A Portuguese politician from the Socialist Party, Guterres, was Prime Minister (1995–2002) during a social democratic government. His tenure at the UN emphasizes climate action, refugee rights, and global equality.

This brief survey, we admit, does not do justice to any of these men. However, what it does show is that the UN has always been run by either hard or soft socialists from the Third World or second-tier European socialist governments.  They support internationalism, wealth redistribution, and the left-wing climate agenda.  Not one of them even comes close to the ideas of an American conservative or libertarian. There is no classic liberal among them.

Knowing that, what would you expect from the UN?  Well, its record of resolutions is perhaps the best indicator, as it demonstrates not just the leadership, but also the membership’s views on world issues.

Remember, too, that of its 193 member states, only about 75 are true democracies; the rest include authoritarian regimes that tip the scales toward leniency on human rights abuses. The Human Rights Council has included abusers like Saudi Arabia and China, mocking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. China’s Uyghur concentration camps go unaddressed, while the UN ignores violations if they inconvenience major powers.

In researching the patterns of resolutions, we encountered difficulties in accessing databases and their definitions.  We utilized GROK AI as our research assistant; however, as you might expect, the data is only as good as the database AI accesses, and the definitions we found were wanting. We wanted to see what resolutions were for or against “conservative” or left-leaning governments, and found that databases often classified theocratic autocracies as “conservative.”

We asked GROK to modify the search for right-wing governments (Chile, Hungary, etc) versus resolutions against left-wing governments (China, Russia, Cuba), and a separate category for the religious authoritarian (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan) governments.

We requested a range from 1960 to the present, quite arbitrarily.  We chose 1960 as a good starting point because it marked the height of the Cold War; however, we had to limit the search to a specific time frame.  We think the pattern is striking, even over this 65-year time frame.

Not surprisingly, given the leadership of the UN and its large undemocratic membership, the biggest threat to world order, peace, and harmony is tiny Israel, the only Jewish state and the only democratic state in the Middle East.

All this time, money, and bloviation, and the results are so biased as to defy explanation.

It’s fair to say the UN has been relatively soft on communist or left-leaning regimes, with only ~193 resolutions (~11%) targeting them (China ~4, Cuba ~4, Venezuela 4) compared to ~1,388 (~76%) against right-leaning states, primarily Israel (~1,147). China’s Tibet abuses and Cuba’s political repression face minimal resolutions.  And much of this was tabulated during the height of the Cold War.

About 82% of all resolutions categorized as “right-wing” are against Israel, and many of the others went to countries like apartheid South Africa and Chile under Pinochet. This is even when a Labor or left-wing government ruled Israel.

In any category, the UN’s chief target is Israel.

In short, the UN is essentially a left-leaning resolution machine targeting Israel and a smattering of other countries.  It seems almost as mesmerized by the threat of Israel as Tucker Carlson.

Given this bias, it is hard to see how the UN can ever be effective and live up to the progressive dream of securing world peace and harmony. Given this profound moral confusion, we would not trust the UN on any issue.

Trump was absolutely right to call them out.  We wish he would take concrete steps to weaken the UN and move its headquarters to Switzerland.

Moreover, many conservatives are coming to the belief that the attack on Israel is not a real estate deal gone bad. It is part of the larger attack on the West and its ideals and political system.  Since the Jewish Bible is the basis for much of the Western legal and moral structure,  so is its direct offspring, Christianity. Destroying Israel pulls Western civilization out by the roots.

If that is true, the strange union between the international left and Islamism is now the greatest threat to peace and world order.  And the UN stands not for peace, but unabashedly for the disintegration of the West.