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OPINION

Do We Still Need the United Nations?

united nations historical at time of inauguration decades ago in the empire state

A crowd attends the ceremony of the inauguration of the United Nations' General Assembly session, on Oct. 23, 1946 at the New York City Hall. (AFP - via Getty Images)

Hugh Dugan By Tuesday, 04 February 2025 11:19 AM EST Current | Bio | Archive

This writer recently launched DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency)-UN which has sparked support from students to former Cabinet members. And an Oxford-style debate in Paris this week has me arguing "Do We Need the United Nations?"

The strategy here, is to reframe the question because there was a United Nations before there was a United Nations Organization.

So, "Do We Need the United Nations Organization?"

The answer is a qualified" Yes," and "No."

Yes, we need the spirit of the post-World War II-era, allied United Nations.

And that spirit matters when it has a means shared by sovereign states to act for cooperation, coordination, and collective action.

As long as there is a UN "table” states find it better to come to the table, in lieu of being on the menu. The UN’s power to convene at the UN organization is its strongest asset.

But today’s underperforming and underwhelming United Nations Organization is losing its reputation for effectiveness and efficiency in its considerations and operations. This puts that power to convene at risk.

Why is that?

The current bricks-and-mortar organization now faces the competition of online retail diplomacy, both actual and virtual.

Globalist profiteers, non-governmental idealists, and billionaire social engineers are all marketing to an info-networked public and meeting demand handily and in new ways.

As Main Street storefronts devolve into Amazon.com, staid diplomatic conferences have fallen to the bottom of feeds as their ambitious declarations exceed 140 characters.

And the UN Organization reverting to pre-pandemic business as usual is as spirit-draining as private sector edicts for "back-to-office" hours — and as outdated.

It is easy to scroll through the headlines and then friend or cancel multilateralism.

What's hard is to take a time-out from the overstimulation of real time international relations. But we must — for performing mainframe maintenance on our shared multilateral machinery.

Otherwise, its slow meltdown would leave us but the stars and wind for navigating today’s hybrid realities and geo-everything.

So, what is the first order here?

Answer: significantly better stewardship by the organization’s member states for accountable administration of the organization.

The charter is priceless. And its pricey dues are over $3.7 billion.

It would be easy to blame the Secretary-General (Scape-Goat) for underperformance instead of membership’s stewardship laxities.

Nonetheless, secretariats of the UN System have become expanding administrative elites: a collectivized deep state. The Secretary-General has become a political actor in his own right, arguably more so than intended.

This has come at the expense of the Secretariat’s job 1: a relevant, robust, and well-resourced organization. Unsupervised it risks performance failings and perhaps corruptions.

That results in a public perception of UN irrelevance, which is a brand killer.

Then instead of going viral like it should daily, the place is going bacterial — and We the Peoples go elsewhere.

So, in addition to improving stewardship, stakeholders must assess whether the noble principles and purposes of the UN Charter are being administered in finest form.

Member States must go into deep gestalt to probe "Is the UN Organization working?" and "Is it working for us?"

The UN Organization’s ambitious agenda has expanded liberally over 80 years, creating a large, complex, and fragmented contraption of international machinery the product of an inter-state system stuck in an insufficient paradigm of international relations and of ineffective and inefficient stewardship by its membership and its secretariat.

As the UN deep state continues to feather, straw and mud its bureaucratic nest, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan go hungry.

Last November’s COP29 green dream conference drew scant interest and flopped.

Again in 2024 the secretariat was spent-out months before its fiscal year end.

The organization is not designed optimally for addressing evolving global challenges that it has absorbed past its original. preeminent purpose for state security.

These new "human security" types of challenges include pandemics, the climate catastrophe, refugee crisis, violent extremism, terrorism, and the regulation of artificial intelligence systems.

The UN Charter’s Article 109 anticipated such imperfection and allows for a Charter Review Conference. This is a practical mechanism — never employed — potentially to update the charter, substantially alter it, or introduce completely new provisions.

In its recent report, the United Nations High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism recommends a Charter Review conference.

But it could risk the status quo, particularly the privileges enjoyed by the P-5; others would be risk-averse as to unforeseen consequences of surgery on the Charter. A coalition of the willing would need to advocate skillfully for the support for a Charter Review Conference.

The United Nations must command stewardship over the United Nations Organization (or an ambitious China surely will). Otherwise the deep State UN will continue to consume resources and squander goodwill whether performing or not.

If the Organization does not soon show that it can do both "the right thing" and "the thing right," who could debate that we need it?

Hugh Dugan served as Acting Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs (2019-20) during his career as a U.S. diplomat. He sits on the advisory boards of Hostage Aid Worldwide and the James L. Foley Legacy Foundation. Read Hugh Dugan's Reports — More Here.

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HughDugan
Today’s underperforming and underwhelming United Nations Organization is losing its reputation for effectiveness and efficiency in its considerations and operations.
doge, globalist
848
2025-19-04
Tuesday, 04 February 2025 11:19 AM
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