The United Nations — Lake Failure

We were disappointed, we must say, by the news that President Trump supports the United Nations remaining in America. The report, from an interview of Mr. Trump with Politico, surfaces as the world body is warning, in a letter to all 193 ambassadors of “imminent financial collapse.” Mr. Trump now says that he doesn’t want the UN to leave America and that he’s prepared to help get the deadbeat members to put up the money the UN says they owe.We call this “Lake Failure.” It’s the fate of an organization that began with such high hopes at the Long Island, New York, town called Lake Success. It did one great thing, partitioning Palestine in November 1947 to assist the emergence of a Jewish State in 1948. Then, year by year, it turned against the Jewish state it had midwifed. Today the world body seethes with hostility to Israel. Why would America borrow more money to help it out? We don’t mind saying that we’d hoped the United Nations would take the hint — America has been withholding dues — and begin exploring plans to leave America. Then would be a good time for America to begin rethinking the concept of world government and maybe look at a global organization of freely elected democracies. It had seemed to us logical that Mr. Trump, with his penchant for bold action, might take on this project.Yet now, Politico reports, Mr. Trump is changing his tune. In a brief phone call with Politico, the wire reports, he “cast himself as the savior for a United Nations in danger of financial collapse” and touted “his ability to get members to pay unpaid dues.” The president declined Sunday, in speaking to Politico, to say whether America would make good on the billions of dollars on which it supposedly is in arrears to the international body.What Mr. Trump did say is that “if they came to Trump and told him” — here the president was speaking of himself in the third person, a charming construct in our view — “I’d get everybody to pay up, just like I got NATO to pay up, right?” Wrong, in our view. The North Atlantic Treaty is one thing; Communist China and Russia lack for a veto in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the UN our dues go toward continuing the problem.The UN’s hostility to Israel, and to America, has been amped up during the tenure of the current secretary general, Antonio Guterres. “I’m determined to oppose,” he said last week, “and to oppose in a very strong way all the efforts that Israel is doing to undermine the two-State solution, namely through, in the West Bank, the construction of settlements, demolitions, evictions and the violence of the settlers.”Then he noted, disapprovingly, “the country that has more power to put pressure on Israel is the United States.” As yet, Washington’s answer has been tepid. “The days of blank checks to the UN are over,” our ambassador at Turtle Bay, Mike Waltz, tweets. “We’re shutting down ideological waste and defunding the bloated UN system (2900 bureaucrats cut; $500M budget reduction) and we are just getting started. The President has put the @UN on a DIET.”Mr. Waltz then added that we want to help the UN “realize its potential.” Mr. Guterres, in a letter to members, warned that unless countries pay their dues, the UN could run out of funds, and close its New York headquarters, by July. Mr. Trump is said to harbor a long-ago grudge over not being asked to renovate the UN’s headquarters. It could, though, be a good project for his post-presidency — the Trump-UN Retirement Condominiums.

The United Nations — Lake Failure

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