UNthinkable

An interesting editorial in the WSJ on the question of who elected the UN?

To ask this question is not to dismiss the U.N. out of hand. It does serve helpful functions on the likes of post and telephone service. Its efforts to aid the world’s refugees have often been exemplary. On a grander scale, it is a forum where the world’s governments meet and talk; if the U.N. didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. At times it has even advanced the interests of security; when the first President Bush was seeking support for the first Gulf War, the U.N. signed up before the U.S. Senate did. Even in its darkest hours its promise–a forum for settling disputes among nations without violence–is a promise worth preserving.
A moral exemplar it most emphatically is not, however. Its moral standing and moral record deserve to be rehearsed just now. Whatever its pretensions, and however much they’re cheered by the limp-minded, in fact the U.N. is the epicenter of world cynicism. Here idealistic rhetoric is routinely invoked on behalf of power politics and often sheer tyranny. In extenuation, it could scarcely be otherwise

I remain a supporter of the positive things the UN can do when it’s trying to actually help. I do not see it as the global arbiter of morality or as the sovereign authority over US foreign policy.

UPDATE: On a related note, consider:

Would the world be a safer, better place, if the United States turned over control of its ICBM’s and nuclear missile subs to the United Nations? After all, wouldn’t the Security Council only use them for the most moral and multilateral of purposes?