Under Trump, Washington has simply stopped writing blank checks to bodies it considers unreformable. At the horribly corrupt UN, Ambassador Mike Waltz is the tip of that spear.
👏👏👏 An outstanding article by Fred Fleitz! UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and the Trump administration are forcing the UN to work in spite of itself. I support the United Nations generally speaking. I think the world needs a forum where we can resolve our differences peacefully and the UN does much good humanitarian work around the world. All that being said, the UN is also corrupt, weak, feeble, politicized, and in recent times, completely ineffectual and toothless. Not to mention that antisemitism is rampant in the organization and it has anti-Israel and anti-western biases. On top of all that, it gives dictators and terrorists a free ride and legitimacy. The UN needs to reform and return to the noble vision that Eleanor Roosevelt and others had for it. Mike Waltz and his team are doing just that! Donald Trump has made himself clear: the UN needs to do less, do it better and make American’s taxpayer dollars count. Mike Waltz and Jeff Bartos have turned that directive into a reality. They did the deepest cut of the UN’s budget in decades. They withdrew the United States from the UN’s hopelessly politicized agencies like the UN Human Rights Council and the ICC. They treated America’s UN dues as leverage rather than tribute. They are reviving an old strategy that Ronald Reagan pioneered in the 1980s. It helps that neither Waltz a military man nor Bartos a businessman, are career diplomats. They’ve been working hard and it shows, as the UN has made serious cuts to their budget and they have abolished about 2,900 posts. The U.S. share of their budget fell by a whopping $126 million dollars a year. Waltz has also pushed for changes in how the UN reimburses troop-contributing countries for equipment which in effect, ended payments for gear that sits unused. UN peacekeeping is shrinking even faster. The UN recently announced it would cut a quarter of its peacekeeping troops and police. Also, peacekeeping spending by 15%. Missions that have run for decades with no clear exit strategy have been majorly downsized. These reforms were driven by a cash crisis. The primary cause of it? Washington not paying its dues was the primary reason for this.
The Trump administration made the wise decision to pull the United States out of the UN Human Rights Council which is a total joke and routinely seats human rights abusers while treating Israel the only democracy in the Middle East, as a permanent defendant. Tellingly, its investigators are accusing the United States of war crimes in Iran but it has never said a word about Iran’s many, many human rights abuses. Such as oh I don’t know, being the number one of funder of terrorism in the world, brutally repressing they’re own people, having a gender apartheid, trying to build a nuclear weapon, discriminating against Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Balochi, Azerbaijanis, Afghans, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, the Bahai’i, Sunni and Sufi Muslims, Gonabai Dervishes, black people, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people, sending drones to kill Israeli civilians, murdering U.S. soldiers, kidnapping Americans and taking them hostage, mass killings of peaceful protesters, arbitrary detention and torture, providing Hamas with the funding to do October 7th, summarily executing political prisoners, extrajudicial killings, using amputation, stoning, flogging, and blinding as punishment for crimes, and praying child marriage. Girls in Iran can be married off at 13 and boys in Iran can be married off at 15. The UN Human Rights Council apparently sees no problem with any of that. The United States also pulled out UNESCO for the third time. Altogether, the President got us out of 66 international bodies, 31 of them UN entities. The United States also made the wise decision to cut off funding for UNWRA which has long been a giant grift and some of whom’s employees participated in October 7th.
Donald Trump is not the first one to do these things. Ronald Reagan withdrew from UNESCO in 1984. Followed in 1985 by Congress passing the Kassebaum-Solomon Amendment which capped the U.S.’s share of the UN’s assessed budget at 20% down from 25, until the UN adopted weighted voting on budget matters. While the UN didn’t end up doing this, it did adopt consensus budgeting. The UN also cut Secretariat staff and limited the practice of government’s seconding their own officials into UN jobs. George H.W. Bush took a more conciliatory path. His administration began paying down Reagan-era UN debts and largely stopping withholding dues as a weapon. This strategy helped secure some important wins, such as the Security Council resolution authorizing the liberation of Kuwait from Ba’athist Iraq in 1991 and the revocation of the egregious UN Resolution 3799 which declared that Zionism is a form of racism from 1975. Waltz and Bartos learned from both Reagan’s hard ball strategy and Bush’s more cooperative approach. Contrary to what the critics say, these cuts at the UN, are NOT destructive to U.S. interests. For example, the UN endorsed Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining. Nor has this hurt the UN which is still chugging along. The United States is simply no longer writing blank checks to bodies it considers unreformable. Jeff Bartos saw first hand the good the UN can do when he visited refugee camps in the Central African Republic and saw UN aid workers risk their lives for strangers. These events convinced him that the answer was NOT for the UN to grow but that these workers deserve a competent institution who supports them.
We shouldn't be a part of the UN. Its unnecessary, wasteful and most importantly a corrupt amalgamation of diametrically opposite worldviews. If you think the Islamic world gives a rats you're sadly mistaken. If you think Russia or China do, you're also sadly mistaken. Been trying to get through Americans and it's politicians for decades but we keep stockpiling these worthless corrupt circuses.
Our presence is almost entirely due to our ability to veto things in the Security Council. Which, if we gave it up, would dramatically increase the power of our enemies to use the UN against us.
Leadership
Near perfect
Leadership is leaving post haste
I would agree with you, except somebody needs to be there too speak truth to idiocy and veto their nonsense.
Yes. The biggest reason we're at the UN at all is that we get to veto their worst stuff.
👏👏👏 An outstanding article by Fred Fleitz! UN Ambassador Mike Waltz and the Trump administration are forcing the UN to work in spite of itself. I support the United Nations generally speaking. I think the world needs a forum where we can resolve our differences peacefully and the UN does much good humanitarian work around the world. All that being said, the UN is also corrupt, weak, feeble, politicized, and in recent times, completely ineffectual and toothless. Not to mention that antisemitism is rampant in the organization and it has anti-Israel and anti-western biases. On top of all that, it gives dictators and terrorists a free ride and legitimacy. The UN needs to reform and return to the noble vision that Eleanor Roosevelt and others had for it. Mike Waltz and his team are doing just that! Donald Trump has made himself clear: the UN needs to do less, do it better and make American’s taxpayer dollars count. Mike Waltz and Jeff Bartos have turned that directive into a reality. They did the deepest cut of the UN’s budget in decades. They withdrew the United States from the UN’s hopelessly politicized agencies like the UN Human Rights Council and the ICC. They treated America’s UN dues as leverage rather than tribute. They are reviving an old strategy that Ronald Reagan pioneered in the 1980s. It helps that neither Waltz a military man nor Bartos a businessman, are career diplomats. They’ve been working hard and it shows, as the UN has made serious cuts to their budget and they have abolished about 2,900 posts. The U.S. share of their budget fell by a whopping $126 million dollars a year. Waltz has also pushed for changes in how the UN reimburses troop-contributing countries for equipment which in effect, ended payments for gear that sits unused. UN peacekeeping is shrinking even faster. The UN recently announced it would cut a quarter of its peacekeeping troops and police. Also, peacekeeping spending by 15%. Missions that have run for decades with no clear exit strategy have been majorly downsized. These reforms were driven by a cash crisis. The primary cause of it? Washington not paying its dues was the primary reason for this.
The Trump administration made the wise decision to pull the United States out of the UN Human Rights Council which is a total joke and routinely seats human rights abusers while treating Israel the only democracy in the Middle East, as a permanent defendant. Tellingly, its investigators are accusing the United States of war crimes in Iran but it has never said a word about Iran’s many, many human rights abuses. Such as oh I don’t know, being the number one of funder of terrorism in the world, brutally repressing they’re own people, having a gender apartheid, trying to build a nuclear weapon, discriminating against Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, Balochi, Azerbaijanis, Afghans, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, the Bahai’i, Sunni and Sufi Muslims, Gonabai Dervishes, black people, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people, sending drones to kill Israeli civilians, murdering U.S. soldiers, kidnapping Americans and taking them hostage, mass killings of peaceful protesters, arbitrary detention and torture, providing Hamas with the funding to do October 7th, summarily executing political prisoners, extrajudicial killings, using amputation, stoning, flogging, and blinding as punishment for crimes, and praying child marriage. Girls in Iran can be married off at 13 and boys in Iran can be married off at 15. The UN Human Rights Council apparently sees no problem with any of that. The United States also pulled out UNESCO for the third time. Altogether, the President got us out of 66 international bodies, 31 of them UN entities. The United States also made the wise decision to cut off funding for UNWRA which has long been a giant grift and some of whom’s employees participated in October 7th.
Donald Trump is not the first one to do these things. Ronald Reagan withdrew from UNESCO in 1984. Followed in 1985 by Congress passing the Kassebaum-Solomon Amendment which capped the U.S.’s share of the UN’s assessed budget at 20% down from 25, until the UN adopted weighted voting on budget matters. While the UN didn’t end up doing this, it did adopt consensus budgeting. The UN also cut Secretariat staff and limited the practice of government’s seconding their own officials into UN jobs. George H.W. Bush took a more conciliatory path. His administration began paying down Reagan-era UN debts and largely stopping withholding dues as a weapon. This strategy helped secure some important wins, such as the Security Council resolution authorizing the liberation of Kuwait from Ba’athist Iraq in 1991 and the revocation of the egregious UN Resolution 3799 which declared that Zionism is a form of racism from 1975. Waltz and Bartos learned from both Reagan’s hard ball strategy and Bush’s more cooperative approach. Contrary to what the critics say, these cuts at the UN, are NOT destructive to U.S. interests. For example, the UN endorsed Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining. Nor has this hurt the UN which is still chugging along. The United States is simply no longer writing blank checks to bodies it considers unreformable. Jeff Bartos saw first hand the good the UN can do when he visited refugee camps in the Central African Republic and saw UN aid workers risk their lives for strangers. These events convinced him that the answer was NOT for the UN to grow but that these workers deserve a competent institution who supports them.
Finally(!!!), an ‘adult’ in the room at the UN representing America and Americans.
We shouldn't be a part of the UN. Its unnecessary, wasteful and most importantly a corrupt amalgamation of diametrically opposite worldviews. If you think the Islamic world gives a rats you're sadly mistaken. If you think Russia or China do, you're also sadly mistaken. Been trying to get through Americans and it's politicians for decades but we keep stockpiling these worthless corrupt circuses.
Our presence is almost entirely due to our ability to veto things in the Security Council. Which, if we gave it up, would dramatically increase the power of our enemies to use the UN against us.