"As an assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, I worked vigorously to repeal a hateful United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism... We ignored the foreign objections and persisted because that abominable resolution cast a stain of illegitimacy and anti-Semitism on the U.N. It paid off. On Dec. 16, 1991, the General Assembly rescinded the offensive language.
Now, a quarter-century later, the U.N. has come close to repeating Resolution 3379's original sin. Last week the U.N. showed its true colors with a 128-9 vote condemning President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital...
Despite decades of U.N. 'reform' efforts, little or nothing in its culture or effectiveness has changed. Instead, despite providing the body with a disproportionate share of its funding, the U.S. is subjected to autos-da-fé on a regular basis. The only consolation, at least to date, is that this global virtue-signaling has not yet included burning the U.S. ambassador at the stake.
Turtle Bay has been impervious to reform largely because most U.N. budgets are financed through effectively mandatory contributions. Under this system, calculated by a 'capacity to pay' formula, each U.N. member is assigned a fixed percentage of each agency's budget to contribute. The highest assessment is 22%, paid by the U.S. This far exceeds other major economies, whose contribution levels are based on prevailing exchange rates rather than purchasing power parity. China's assessment is just under 8%.
Why does the U.S. tolerate this? It is either consistently outvoted when setting the budgets that determine contributions or has joined the 'consensus' to avoid the appearance of losing. Yet dodging embarrassing votes means acquiescing to increasingly high expenditures.
The U.S. should reject this international taxation regime and move instead to voluntary contributions. This means paying only for what the country wants-and expecting to get what it pays for. Agencies failing to deliver will see their budgets cut, modestly or substantially. Perhaps America will depart some organizations entirely. This is a performance incentive the current assessment-taxation system simply does not provide.
Start with the U.N. Human Rights Council. Though notorious for its anti-Israel bias, the organization has never hesitated to abuse America. How many know that earlier this year the U.N. dispatched a special rapporteur to investigate poverty in the U.S.? American taxpayers effectively paid a progressive professor to lecture them about how evil their country is...
Next come vast swaths of U.N. bureaucracy. Most of these budgets could be slashed with little or no real-world impact...
If the U.S. moved first, Japan and some European Union countries might well follow America's lead. Elites love the U.N., but they would have a tough time explaining to voters why they are not insisting their contributions be used effectively, as America has. Apart from risking the loss of a meaningless General Assembly vote-the Security Council vote and veto being written into the Charter itself-the U.S. has nothing substantial to lose.
Thus could Mr. Trump revolutionize the U.N. system. The swamp in Turtle Bay might be drained much more quickly than the one in Washington."