Failures of the UN "Talking Club"

"President-elect Donald Trump tweeted the sad truth about the United Nations on the day after Christmas, saying it was 'just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.'...

Other than its valuable work in supporting and coordinating the delivery by aid workers of food, medical and other humanitarian supplies to areas of the world beset by natural disasters or conflict, the United Nations has failed, or has been largely irrelevant, in key areas for which it seeks to take credit...

For example, the UN boasts about its peacekeeping missions, which it says keep peace on four continents. What the UN narrative leaves out is the cholera its peacekeepers brought to Haiti, killing nearly 10,000 people, for which the UN has very belatedly accepted some responsibility. The narrative also leaves out the continuing sexual abuse and exploitation scandal involving UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, which UN senior officials tried initially to cover up.

And it leaves out the utter failure of peacekeepers in South Sudan to protect women from rape, even right outside the UN's main camp. UN leaders failed to address the underlying systemic problems at the highest managerial levels, revealing that the UN has learned little from its horrible lack of response to the impending genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Instead, a commander from Kenya, whom had only been on the job in South Sudan for only a few months, became the convenient scapegoat and was dismissed.

To make matters worse, on the same day that the UN Security Council adopted, with the Obama administration's consent, its anti-Israel settlements resolution, it was unable to muster a majority to approve an arms embargo and targeted sanctions against South Sudan. Even though South Sudan, in the words of the outgoing Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, 'is on the verge of a genocide,' the Security Council stood by and did nothing while patting itself on the back for going after Israel...

Mr. Trump's characterization of the United Nations as a 'club for people to get together, talk and have a good time' is only partially correct. As he recognized in a subsequent tweet, the UN as it is structured today is actually causing more problems than its purports to solve."