Could the Israel–Hamas war be the death knell for the United Nations? For decades, waste, fraud, and abuse have characterized the organization. The perks of patronage — first-class travel, high salaries, fancy titles, and pretensions to make policy absent democratic accountability — attract elites. Progressives, academics, idealists, and those seeking to check American power block reform and seldom acknowledge that the U.N. does not live up to its founding principles. Minor budgetary cuts get reversed, and U.N. officials filibuster reform until they outlast whoever is in the Oval Office.
A second Trump administration may change that. Former President Donald Trump cares little about elite opinion. Policy shifts once deemed beyond the realm of the possible could suddenly rebound. John Birch Society conservatism never posed the threat to U.S. support for the U.N. that Trump might. For the first time in decades, “UNexit” is a possibility.
The U.N. does itself no favors. The League of Nations formed in the aftermath of World War I but floundered on its leadership’s pacifism and ineptitude. Its leaders advocated disarmament in Britain and France, even as Germany undertook an unprecedented military buildup. Idealists and diplomats involved in the league condemned all violence as unjustified and believed that they could wish war away. They were disastrously wrong, and 75 million people died during World War II in part as a result.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is no student of history. From the very beginning, the former secretary-general of the Portuguese Socialist Party and president of Socialist International has epitomized every caricature of U.N. arrogance and aloofness.
It is wrong to say he draws moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas because he appears to favor Hamas. He has presided over a system that discounted Hamas’s rape and mutilation of women. Repeatedly, Guterres has called for ceasefires and Israel to stand down but failed to address the reason for Israel’s war.
The moral inversion reached new heights when the U.N. Human Rights Council suggested that Israel violated the laws of war by rescuing its civilians. “The manner in which the raid was conducted in such a densely populated area seriously calls into question whether the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution — as set out under the laws of war — were respected by the Israeli forces,” the council’s spokesman, Jeremy Laurence, explained.
While Guterres demands a ceasefire, he ignores that Hamas invaded Israel during a ceasefire and that Hamas’s release of hostages would end the war immediately. His insipid pronouncements deny Israel’s right to self-defense, and he also undermines the Palestinian quest for statehood as Hamas opposes the “state of Palestine” government the U.N. recognizes.
Hypocrisy damages the entire organization. Guterres may not only be antisemitic but also racist. How else to explain his constant condemnation of the world’s only Jewish state, while a slaughter far greater happens simultaneously in Sudan and China imprisons almost 2 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps?
Guterres sees himself as the world’s conscience, though history will remember him as a symbol of moral perversion. The real problem, however, is his refusal to do his real job. The secretary-general should administer the U.N. He should have neither any right nor ambition to opine on legality or pass judgments. The same holds true for bureaucrats such as Laurence, whose background is in journalism, not law.
The failure to police the organization leads to multibillion-dollar corruption schemes such as the Oil-for-Food scandal in Iraq. U.N. mismanagement costs more children’s lives than Israel’s urban warfare. U.N. peacekeepers’ dumping of raw sewage in a Haitian river caused a cholera epidemic that has killed more than 10,000 Haitians. Outside the World Food Program, few U.N. agencies fulfill their mission with efficiency and in a manner smaller nongovernmental organizations could not.
Guterres may be too blinkered to realize he has guided the U.N. into a danger zone. Pleadings for peace in the face of evil are moral perversity, not sophistication. If U.N. cheerleaders want the organization to survive, they can gamble on a second Biden term, conduct meaningful reform, or come to terms with the reality that it could dissolve much as the League of Nations did when powerful countries abandoned it.