On April 7, news broke of yet another chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians by the Assad regime. As has become customary following such calamities, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting to consider taking action to address the humanitarian crisis. The Council adopted three resolutions on Syrian chemical weapons, and, to no one’s surprise, Russia vetoed them all. It has been six years since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, and the Security Council still has yet to pass a single resolution condemning the Assad regime for its Human Rights violations.

The UN is a garbage organization. It is astounding that Washington annually assigns $8 billion of your tax dollars, 22% of the UN’s budget, and 28% of its peacekeeping budget, to an organization that proceeds to criticize Western standards of morality and prop up some of the worst regimes on the face of the Earth. It has failed to live up to the goals of its charter, it has become a swollen entanglement of bureaucracy, and a forum for anti-Semitism that the United States should immediately stop funding.

The primary reason the UN is failing is that the realities of power politics have prevented nations from working together for the betterment of the world. Immediately, the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union turned the UN into a battle royale between Western and Eastern values. By 1973, just three decades after its creation, the USSR had used its permanent member veto 128 times. Today, the Russians continue to veto to shield Iran and Syria.

As it turns out, nation-states with competing interests and opposing values were never going to work together as judges of international peace. Because of competing interests, the UN has failed miserably to prevent atrocities across the globe, from Rwanda to Kosovo, Darfur, Syria, and Burma.

Another major issue with the UN is that it lacks an enforcement mechanism, rendering its policies completely worthless. If the Security Council adopts a resolution, all 193 member countries are expected to abide by it. Nations, however, are still sovereign. America unilaterally invaded Iraq against the will of the UN, Israel constructs settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, North Korea has expanded its nuclear weapons program, and the Assad regime still uses chemical weapons against its civilians. There is no reason for the U.S. to continue to fund an organization whose policies are practically unenforceable.

The most heinous and immoral issue with the UN, however, is its unfair treatment of Israel. The influence of Arab and third-world dictatorships has fostered an anti-Western and anti-Semitic orientation within the UN. The organization gives some of the most oppressive regimes in the world the platform to cover for their human rights abuses by criticizing thriving Western nations. The UN has a long history of anti-Semitism going back to General Assembly Resolution 3379, in effect from 1975-1991, which declared Zionism a form of racism. The UN’s anti-Semitism continues to this day.

According to UN Watch, between 2006-16 the UN Human Rights Council adopted 135 resolutions criticizing countries for their Human Rights records; of these, 68 were against Israel. From 2012-2015, the UN General Assembly adopted 97 resolutions criticizing countries; 83 of these were against Israel.

UNESCO declares the Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel’s Tomb, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount as Palestinian heritage sites, and revoked the recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. An Arab-led UN report from last year attempted to declare Israel, the only Middle Eastern country with any sort of ethnic and religious diversity, an apartheid state. All this culminated with the infamous Security Council resolution from December 2016 that declared East Jerusalem, including the Western Wall and Temple Mount, as occupied Palestinian territory. At the same time, the Security Council has never passed a resolution condemning China for forcing abortions on its citizens, the Putin regime for murdering journalists and political opponents, Venezuela for detaining and torturing protestors, or Iran for being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.

The truth is an organization of nation-states working together for the greater good was always an idealistic fantasy dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. In reality, states are sovereign entities seeking their own interests in an anarchic international system. Nation-states that build their own coalitions, such as the coalition that took down Islamic State’s caliphate, have proven more capable of tackling global issues than the structural and bureaucratic mess that is the United Nations.

There is no reason why the United States should continue to cut checks bigger than the contributions of the 176 other UN countries combined for useless ventures that have no real impact, except to bully our most crucial ally in the Middle East. It is time for Washington to come to its senses and defund the UN.

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Gregory Price Gregory Price is from Yardley, Pennsylvania and a 2019 graduate of Sacred Heart University. While in college, he was a goalie on the lacrosse team and President of the College Republicans. Greg has also knocked over 20,000 doors on Republican campaigns in Pennsylvania and Connecticut and has also written for NewsBusters and the Washington Examiner.

The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Lone Conservative staff.