My view: the world would be a better place if the American support of the U.N. received the same treatment in 2025 as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations received in 1946. Drums, marching soldiers, flags, the playing of Taps, a final 21-gun salute, then a private burial service.
The U.N.’s grandpa, the League of Nations, was designed and promoted by the biggest sunshine pumper and Democracy thief of 20th Century America: Woodrow Wilson. Now I will admit Teddy Roosevelt never saw a war he didn’t like. But then it was “Kaiser” Wilson’s turn to make the world safe for democracy – but just not in the United States. The former president of Princeton University was an avowed white supremacist who gave pink slips to all the well-educated black Americans holding federal jobs, then he segregated the entire federal civil service system. Wilson demanded Congress criminalize all anti-war speech, which they did, doing what Americans often think about: sending prominent American politicians to prison.
He got Americans so riled up against Germany that some Wilsonian patriots were killing German Shepherd dogs.
After the war, Wilson chose to become history’s hapless pawn for an impossible job. Not only had he dragged American public opinion through his pro-war muck adversely affecting his popularity at home, after the war his huge ego boarded a ship headed for Europe to implement his League of Nations so he could help supervise international disarmament. The crosses on the military cemeteries in France had not yet settled in the ground when Wilson’s pig-headed optimism docked at the French port of Brest in 1919, to begin his quest.
European nations had bled profusely in the Great War and were skeptical. French Prime Minister George Clemenceau wanted to know how the League would enforce its decisions, given the war killed 25% of the Frenchmen age 18 to 30 and left thousands more permanently wounded by shells and poison gas.
Although Wilson could not get the U. S. Senate to approve his idea, Great Britian, France, and Italy were among the League’s first permanent members. While deeply skeptical of the League’s ability to prevent another global conflict, these nations recognized the League as a potential mechanism to manage disputes under the peace Treaty of Versailles.
Japan initially joined the League, but when Japan invaded Manchuria, the worldwide condemnation did not stop the invasion – although Japan did withdraw from the League. Italy got out when Mussolini toadied up with Adolph Hitler. The Russians, after losing 1.7 million soldiers on the eastern front, under Lenin decided to spend the 1920s eliminating by murder the 300 year Romanov Monarchy and turning the Russian Empire into the communist Soviet Union.
Germany was the great conundrum. The armistice of 1918 burdened Germany with colossal reparations paid to the Allies. The nearly bankrupt Weimar Republic managed a fragile place in the League of Nations in 1925. In 1933, however, Adolf Hitler withdrew Germany from the League when he boasted rearmament was a means of national economic salvation and employment during the global Depression.
When France and Britain did the same thing, in 1939 the world plunged once more into the brink of world war, then toppled into the abyss. Wilson’s 1919 idealism was overtaken by the brutal realities of power and conflict.
Cockeyed Optimism. Optimists, bless their hearts, see the United Nations as the ultimate beacon of international cooperation, peacebuilding, and tackling minor issues like climate change, human rights, and poverty. Realists see things differently.
After World War II, those dreamers decided Wilson’s dusty old League of Nations needed an upgrade, so they rolled out the shiny new United Nations. Each nation got one vote and a simple majority made decisions—unless, of course, one of the five Security Council members decided to wave their magic veto wand. And the U.N. did not go to war. The U.N. was all about peacekeeping! Just ask the 36,000 Americans who lost their lives and over 100,000 who were wounded in Korea when Harry Truman sent the Army into its first grand foray into assisting U.N. peacekeeping.
While the U.N.’s record of preventing wars since 1945 is shoddy, the first great issue presented after World War II – before the peacekeeping in Korea — was what to do with a devastated European Jewish population that had survived the Holocaust.
In 1917, the Balfour Declaration proclaimed British support for a “national home” for the Jewish people. This was not an act of altruism. Britain’s history with the Jews was reflected in the Aliens Act of 1905, which sought to stem Jewish immigration amidst a tide of xenophobia. The Balfour declaration in World War I was a strategic military maneuver against the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany and held sway over Palestine. The Zionist Movement provided an answer to the discrimination in the 1905 Aliens Act. The Jews of Europe would go to Israel. Yet Britain’s war diplomacy had also promised Palestine to the Arabs if they would fight the Turks. Balfour became a duel-edged promise fraught with complexity.
Vice President Harry Truman became President after FDR’s death in 1945. The Allies knew well of Germany’s death camps even before the end of the war. By 1947 England had been unable to stop Jewish migration into what they claimed was a historic Israel. Rather than deal with disappointed Arabs, the Brits turned the “Jewish problem” over to the U.N.
The U.N. was new and unprepared. It proposed partitioning Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and the other Jewish. Jerusalem would be placed under an International Trusteeship system. Neither Jews nor Arabs liked the proposal, but nobody had a better one. At midnight May 14, 1948, the switch was flipped, and Israel came into existence. Ten minutes later, Truman was the first national leader to recognize Israel.
The next morning, tanks and infantry from five Arab nations rolled into Israel, triggering the first Arab-Israel war. Given the U.N.’s record at solving international problems since its 1948 beginning is bleak, Israel has had to fight for its existence ever since.
Weak International Support. The United States contributed $18.1 billion to the United Nations in 2022, a third of the U.N.’s total operating revenue. This was three times what Germany paid, the second highest contributor. The problem is that unlike direct American government agencies, we give money to the U.N. and its third world nations but with little ability to track how it is spent, which is a formula for corruption and mismanagement.
Memberships on U.N. committees explain other weaknesses. The U.N. Human Rights Council has 47 members including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Cuba, and Russia. Perhaps we should ask Ukraine if Russia is currently violating any human rights. If Ukraine said yes, Russia could veto any action the Human Rights Council recommended. Or the people of Cuba, under the magnificence of their socialist government, recently endured three days of no electricity in the entire island. A lot of Cubans would volunteer to row the next freedom boat to Miami.
Iran chairs the Human Rights Council’s Social Forum. Yet Iran did not object to October 7, 2023, when Iran’s proxy terrorists, Hamas, was killing more Jews since the Holocaust, raping women attending a rock concert, and taking 240 hostages from several nations (including the USA) into dark Gaza tunnels where most have died.
Nobody in the U.N. volunteered to help Israel fight Hamas except us. We provided weapons and munitions, and Israelis did the fighting. This delighted some American college students at our best universities who have never learned critical thinking skills to question the theories of the activists who call themselves professors. They learned nothing useful except to chant “From the river to the Sea,” calling for the genocide of the Jews.
The U.N.’s Human Rights Council is not the only U.N. body which has cheered terrorists, despots and dictators. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded its 2005 José Martí International Prize to Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chávez. Given personally by Cuban human rights champion Fidel Castro, the award recognized Chavez’s efforts for the “struggle for liberty” in Latin America. In 2007, Chavez began efforts to turn Venezuela into a socialist country. Murder rates increased and so did government corruption. Many Venezuelans voted on socialism with their feet, the largest outflow of refugees and migrants in the world, event greater than in Ukraine after the 2022 Russian invasion. Venezuelan immigrants to the United States have nearly tripled since 2010, 50,000 from Venezuela in September 2023 alone. Unfortunately, some are undesirable gang members.
Tell me again why we prolong the myth that the U.N. has a valuable function?
Let Us All Disarm. But what of Wilson’s grand idea that a world body like the League or the U.N. can help the world disarm? Okay! Three cheers for the U. N. Conference on Disarmament. The active members are Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel and the USA. But, uhh, all these countries possess nuclear weapons. None are giving them up.
WHO’s Health? The World Health Organization (WHO) has become an oxymoron. The Chinese were sure they had allies managing COVID at WHO until WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proved to be complicit in covering up Beijing’s role in the Covid pandemic’s beginning.
Further, a new treaty-plan by WHO is being distributed on how the world’s nations should respond to the next pandemic. In other words, the U.N. – not our Center for Disease Control under the auspices of our elected American President – would decide the best course for the health of Americans.
On July 7, 2020, then President Trump pulled us out of funding WHO because he felt that organization mismanaged and covered up the spread of the Covid virus. The afternoon of President Biden’s 2021 inaugural, he reversed course and began repaying WHO the funds that Trump had sequestered. The annual WHO contribution from Biden’s administration reached $893 million U. S. dollars in 2023, with more to come.
UN Intolerance. Membership in the U.N. does not require members to give up their prejudices. In the late 2024 fighting between Israel, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, while Iran was showering Israel with missiles and Israel was considering how best to retaliate in Lebanon, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the U.N. to give a speech about this corner of the world and the warfare underway there. Lebanon is also where multinational U.N. peacekeepers were caught in the middle. Surely the U.N.’s members would want to know how peacekeeping was going.
Apparently not. Most U.N. delegates left the building.
This 1948 U.N. snake, in 2024-25, is eating itself.
Except for some 19th Century military incursions into Mexico and some genocide efforts of Native Americans on the plains, we have no history of military conquest. The UN serves no purpose today to keep our military tame. Like Wilson’s League of Nations, for us, the U.N. is an example of form over substance. Americans have a huge national defense budget, yet we cannot transform the world like we’d like it to be. Neither can the U.N.
The U.N.’s pièce de resistance is the International Criminal Court. If for no other reason, the USA should stop funding the ICC’s hillbilly justice system. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for the “war crime” of defending their nation against Hamas. The Palestinian terrorist organization carried out the October 7, 2023 atrocities in Israel then retreated into Gaza. Arabs in Gaza admittedly have died in the fighting that followed. But does anyone seriously disagree that the war was started by Hamas? The U.S. government under President Biden has supported Israel. Are President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin war criminals too? Should UCC issue arrest warrants at the White House and the Pentagon?
All Americans need to reflect not only on international policy but on what it means for international organizations to wield influence irresponsibly. War is an ugly beast, and Arabs in Gaza have indeed perished in the fighting. Had Israel not been attacked, it is doubtful Israel would have gone after Hamas fighters in Gaza. But the question lingers: did Palestinians perish in a conflict they sought, or in one that Hamas brought to their doors in Gaza?
There comes a time when the cost of indulgence must be weighed against its benefits. American politicians have long mastered the art of squandering tax dollars. We do this here at home, and on a bipartisan basis. We need not give our money to the U.N. to squander. The United Nations is riddled with third world political entanglements and questionable endeavors. It is a relic we can no longer justify supporting. If other nations see value in the U.N.’s work, let them finance it.
The time has come for the United States to reclaim its sovereignty—not from any one adversary, but from shadowy international bodies like the United Nations and global trade organizations. We have alliances that should truly be honored. And let there be no mistake: the United Nations is not one of them.
Ron Smith – Special to The Informer
Dean Halliday Smith is a fifth generation Kansan, a retired attorney, a grandfather several times over, a Vietnam veteran, and a civil war historian. Territorial Kansas, the Civil War, and the post-Civil War west are his subjects of interest. Manhattan KS graduate, graduated Kansas Wesleyan in ’73. Worked on Governor John Carlin’s staff in 1980-81. Lobbied for the Kansas Bar Association for 14 years. His small farm is near where the historic Santa Fe Trail converged on the “Pawnee Fork” along the west route of the SFT.
