John Bolton on fixing the U.N.
September 7, 2007| By Nathaniel Ward
The United Nations suffers from “a kind of entitlement mentality” and ignores American reform efforts, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton said yesterday at The Heritage Foundation.
America should consider new ways of funding the United Nations to hold the corrupt body accountable for its failure to uphold human rights and American interests, he suggested. He proposed a system of “purely voluntary contributions” so that the United States pays only what it wishes to, instead of being billed each year by the U.N.
Right now, the U.N. assesses America for 22 percent of its general funding and 27 percent of its peacekeeping funding. But 97 member countries (constituting a majority vote in the General Assembly) pay less than one third of one percent of the budget.
(In a new paper, Brett Schaefer of Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom explains why a proposal to increase America’s funding of U.N. peacekeeping is a bad idea. Schaefer also tackles, separately, the disastrous first year of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.)
Take our poll: Should America spend so much taxpayer money funding the United Nations?
Bolton outlined some of the organization’s many failures to the audience at the fourth Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture, held in Heritage’s Allison Auditorium. Cuba and Sudan hold top positions in the U.N.’s human rights group, he said by way of example, and the institution’s leadership remains unaccountable.
Taking questions after his remarks, he warned against proposals for a United Nations tax as “a stealth idea that we need to watch out for.” France, for instance, has already imposed a tax on airline tickets to fulfill its funding obligations.
He also noted that left-wing non-governmental organizations are trying to use international forums like the U.N. to bypass their own governments. “NGOs are among the leading proponents of taking issues out of the purview of national governments and putting them in the international system,” he said. These groups can then present their ideas to national lawmakers as what “everyone else” in the world is doing and enact their radical agendas through the back door.
Touching briefly on the ongoing North Korean nuclear crisis, he explained that it is “wrong to believe Kim Jong-il will ever voluntarily give up his nuclear weapons.” He went on: “He’s going to do what he has consistently done for the last decade or more: promise to give up his nuclear weapons and then lie about it.”
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.