00:00:00.000The United States helped build the United Nations to prevent World War III.
00:00:04.000But we ended up with a global HOA that sends angry letters and loses your money and lets the worst people in the neighborhood sit on the board and run your life.
00:00:14.000So, yes, it is time for America to end the United Nations.
00:00:17.000Tear down the building in New York, turn it into a park so the leftists in Manhattan can finally go outside and touch some grass.
00:00:23.000The squirrels in that park would have a significantly better record of creating international peace than the bureaucrats inside the UN building today.
00:00:29.000After more than a century of failed internationalist experiments, the verdict is in.
00:00:33.000The UN does not stop wars, it does not stop atrocities, it does not stop dictators.
00:00:37.000So, why are we all still pretending it does any of those things?
00:00:40.000It actually helps all of those people.
00:00:43.000Let's go back to where it all began a liberal internationalist fantasy.
00:00:46.000In the wake of World War I, dueling visions of a future world order began to emerge.
00:00:50.000World War I shattered the old system of sprawling empires.
00:00:53.000A new system of nation states began trying to find a way to coexist and prevent World War II.
00:01:15.000The League of Nations proposal had a particular clause called Article 10, which stipulated that if any member of the League were attacked, everybody else would then jump in to protect them, sort of like NATO, except for the whole world.
00:01:26.000Which sounds nice in a Princeton seminar, but is actually totally insane and also at odds with the United States Constitution.
00:01:32.000At the time, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge read Article 10 and said, hold up a second.
00:01:36.000This means that an international body now has the power to decide if Americans ought to go to war.
00:01:41.000It guts Senate war powers, it hands them to a council of foreigners.
00:01:44.000Americans agreed, and the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations covenant, and the U.S. sat out of the international body that the president had originally proposed to the rest of the world.
00:01:53.000The League of Nations continued to exist, by the way, it just had no power, and it did nothing to prevent World War II.
00:01:59.000The League basically was completely defunct for the entire rise of Nazi Germany, the rise of Soviet Russia, and the rise of Fascist Italy.
00:02:09.000You know, that massive global war the League was designed to prevent.
00:02:12.000In fact, there is a case to be made that without the illusion of collective security that restrained particularly Britain, France, and the United States, that those countries may have rearmed sooner and adopted an effective containment policy toward Hitler's expansionism.
00:02:26.000And what did the internationalists do?
00:02:28.000They re-ran the experiment with better branding.
00:02:31.000While the world was reeling from shock and horror after the war, the UN was launched with the soaring promise to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.
00:02:38.000Spoiler alert, that didn't work either.
00:02:41.000FDR had made the UN his legacy project.
00:02:43.000He coined the term United Nations for the anti-Axis coalition during the war.
00:02:47.000And then he sought a permanent institution anchored by something he called the four policemen: the UK, USSR, US, and China.
00:02:54.000He even mused about becoming the first Secretary General of the UN after concluding his term as the United States President.
00:03:00.000You may review those countries again: US, UK, USSR, like the evil Soviet government.
00:03:08.000And China, which at that time was not, in fact, a communist government but would shortly become one.
00:03:14.000Again, this whole idea was steeped in Wilsonian faith that if people just sat together in a room, then war could be managed like an HOA zoning dispute.
00:03:21.000But underneath all of the rhetoric was the same question.
00:03:24.000When international law, ill defined international law, undefined international law, law as decided by a random agglomeration of nations, voting, when that clashes with American constitutional law, who wins?
00:03:36.000For the people who fetishize the UN, the answer is not the American voter.
00:03:40.000So, who's actually in charge at the UN?
00:03:42.000Well, it's called the Security Council.
00:03:44.000There are five permanent members with vetoes the US, the UK, France, Russia, then the USSR, and China.
00:03:52.000Well, because Stalin ended up on the winning side in 1945.
00:03:54.000That was after he started the war by joining the losing side, the Nazis, with the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact and grabbing most of Eastern Europe.
00:04:02.000Well, because originally China was run by a guy named Chiang Kai shek, who ended up as the head of Taiwan when he had to run to exile when Mao took over.
00:04:10.000So, built into this system from the first day, this genius idea America's biggest adversaries would have veto power over all UN mechanisms.
00:04:18.000You want to do something about the Syrian government massacring its own citizens?
00:04:22.000Russia will shoot it down with a veto.
00:04:32.000The UN emblem shows the Earth from above at the North Pole flattened out, with all the continents compressed and the Americas shoved off to the side.
00:04:40.000The global East and West are visually closer, no country more powerful than the rest.
00:04:44.000Well, after World War II, the Allies set up Nuremberg.
00:04:47.000Nazi leaders were prosecuted for crimes against humanity on the bizarre legal theory that was a mix of existing and new norms.
00:04:53.000In 1949, the updated Geneva Conventions were codified into what we now call the laws of war how you treat prisoners, civilians, the wounded, and war torn.
00:06:18.000The idea of a neutral, technocratic U.N. peace force swooping in with their blue helmets to fix failing states starts to look like what it was, a fantasy.
00:06:26.000And during the Cold War, the Security Council spent most of its time doing nothing because, again, the U.S. and the USSR were the opposite sides of the Cold War and both were on the Security Council.
00:06:36.000America was built by people who worked hard.
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00:07:29.000Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly became a tool of the worst countries on planet Earth where they just vote routinely for random third world policies that mean nothing because none of them can be practiced.
00:07:39.000In 1974, the arch terrorist Yasser Arafat showed up to address the UN wearing a holster.
00:07:45.000To the hall where people are supposed to talk about these.
00:07:48.000And one year later, the UN General Assembly declared that Zionism is racism.
00:07:52.000Again, the only Jewish state, there are some 50 odd Muslim states, the only Jewish state was singled out as inherently racist, while all the actual racist dictatorships voted yes.
00:08:01.000That resolution was not revoked until 1991, by the way.
00:08:04.000If you want to know when a lot of Americans began to realize the UN wasn't neutral, well, you can start during this period.
00:08:09.000The 1990s saw the permanent destruction of the myth that the UN is some sort of global guardian, just protecting people.
00:08:16.000In Somalia, the UN's failed humanitarian interventions resulted in the entire Black Lockdown disaster in Mogadishu.
00:08:21.000That should have been the UN's job, it ended up being American soldiers.
00:08:24.000In Rwanda, an inept UN mission watched as a full on genocide unfolded.
00:08:28.000Lawyers in New York were arguing about the word genocide while people were being hacked to death with machetes, and safe areas guarded by UN soldiers were not, in fact, safe.
00:08:36.000In Bosnia, the UN declared Srebnica a safe area while Serb forces walked in, massacred everybody, and peacekeepers stood by under paralyzing rules.
00:08:44.000In fact, in many areas in which UN peacekeepers were present, there ended up being giant sex scandals because it turns out the peacekeepers were, you know, abusing their positions of authority.
00:08:52.000Bill Clinton almost became more interventionist in spite.
00:09:17.000There is nothing more ridiculous about the UN and nothing more indicative of their corruption than their incessant condemnations of the state of Israel.
00:10:01.000Climate is the same story with different buzzwords.
00:10:04.000Copenhagen 2009, that's Greta Thunberg's world premiere, was hyped as the last chance to save the planet.
00:10:09.000It collapsed into a weak, non binding accord.
00:10:12.000Paris 2015 was sold as historic, but the reality was countries were performatively limiting their carbon emissions without any judge or jury or penalty or enforcement mechanism.
00:10:21.000The United States, the most powerful country on earth, was climate shamed by people who flew in private jets to the conference where they shamed them.
00:10:28.000This is what international law often means in practice TED Talks with motorcades and shaming America.
00:10:35.000When it comes to military action, the UN has never been more irrelevant than it is today.
00:10:39.000But there are a bunch of examples from over the years.
00:10:41.000In 2003, the United States went to the Security Council to get an Iraq war resolution since Iraq was refusing to abide by a wide variety of UN Security Council resolutions.
00:11:56.000He ridiculed the idea that the UN's job is to boss around sovereign countries.
00:11:59.000He threatened to cut funding, and he has.
00:12:02.000It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.
00:12:06.000The room would freak out that Trump was undermining what they called multilateralism, but Trump's point was and is correct.
00:12:12.000The job of the American president is not to do what earns him plaudits from the UN General Assembly, it's to defend American interests.
00:12:19.000And mostly that involves ignoring the UN.
00:12:22.000Over a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson's utopianism gave way to a brand new vision of a liberal institutionalist world order, where presidents like FDR and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama believe that if you write charters and hold conferences and pass resolutions, you can bureaucratize war out of existence.
00:12:38.000There is a competing view of geopolitics.
00:12:40.000Realist nationalists like Teddy Roosevelt or Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan or President Trump, who say correctly, sure, nations have interests, creating more committees in Geneva or New York is not going to repeal that.
00:12:50.000The best case scenario is that the UN is considered mostly necessary but useless.
00:12:54.000The worst case scenario is that It's necessary, useless, and dangerous because internationalism chips away at sovereignty, and because internationalism is basically a way for the worst people on earth to pretend that they have moral authority.
00:13:07.000So, let's just knock over the UN building.
00:13:10.000Give it to President Trump to build a tower.
00:13:12.000Admit what over a century of evidence shows the UN and the League of Nations before it failed to prevent world war, actual genocide, pandemics, and every other human rights abuse imaginable.
00:13:21.000They have succeeded in creating an enormous, unaccountable bureaucracy that isn't worth the building it exists within.