Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next ambassador, has her “work cut out for her” in helping to reform the United Nations and its “profound failings," former U.N. ambassador John Bolton said.
Bolton made the assertion in a guest column for The Wall Street Journal published Thursday.
“Ms. Stefanik joins a long line of U.S. officials dismayed by the U.N.’s profound failings, including its deep-seated bias against Israel,” Bolton wrote, counting himself in that group.
As ambassador from 2005-06, Bolton said he took aim at removing America’s signature from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. As National Security Adviser in Trump’s first administration, Bolton advised to defund UNRWA and withdraw from the Human Rights Council.
“But the job is far from over. No one should underestimate the difficulties that lie ahead or the effort that will be required to achieve real, lasting U.N. reform,” Bolton wrote. "A major obstacle is our own State Department. Its bureaucracy historically has been unwilling to do the heavy lifting required to muster support for transforming the U.N.,” adding that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s nominee to head up the agency, “will need to crack the whip for reform to succeed.”
“The new administration should prove to U.N. members that its goal of reform isn’t merely rhetorical. Washington’s most important weapon will be its wallet — decisions about how much it financially contributes, or doesn’t contribute, to the U.N.,” Bolton wrote, adding that “current spending is out of control.”
The Heritage Foundation reported that in 2022, the $18 billion contributed by the U.S. was more than 185 other U.N. members combined, Bolton noted.
“That year we forked over 8.5 times the amount that China, the second-largest donor, contributed,” he wrote.
Bolton said Stefanik and Rubio should nix the assessed contributions imposed on the U.S. by other member countries and instead decide what to fund “by evaluating the performance of each U.N. agency and program.”
“Using America’s money as an existential threat will rock the U.N. system. While many other reforms are possible, they won’t match the power of unilaterally controlling our contributions. Besides, we need a much larger defense budget; reducing contributions to the U.N. is a good start to find the necessary funding,” Bolton concluded.