Of course the good news, just in, is that reality has penetrated Trump's skull and he realizes that in a special election the GOP would lose her seat and his majority in the House. Trump's loss is the UN's gain!
U.S. Ambassador-Designate to the United Nations Elise Stefanik speaks at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now summit at the Javits Center on March 3, 2025, in New York City. (BRYAN BEDDER/GETTY IMAGES FOR ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2025, pp. 32-33
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
“EVEN A STOPPED clock tells the time accurately twice a day.” The saying comes to mind with each new pensée from Elon Musk and his sidekick President Donald Trump. The Boer buffoon and billionaire is now suggesting that the U.S. should withdraw from the U.N. and NATO. For years in this column and elsewhere I have exposed the idiocy of the “America-and-Israel” first campaign to pull out of the United Nations. I have even suggested that the pernicious U.S. veto was a worthwhile price to keep the U.S. involved in the organization, guided by Lyndon Baines Johnson’s aphorism that “it’s better to keep him inside the tent pissing out than vice versa.”
The Israel supporters in the U.S. have opposed U.N. membership precisely because they felt it might, no matter how improbably, induce the U.S. to live up to the standards it set when it was one of the founders of the organization.
But enough is enough. That adage presumed a minimum of decorum from invitees to the tent, while in fact anyone connected with the current White House regime will unrepentantly micturate on their companions inside the canvas. It is time for the U.N. (and NATO) to suspend U.S. membership and ask Ambassador-Designate Elise Stefanik to make sure she closes the door on her way out. It is perhaps typical of this administration that they went ahead nominating her for her reflexively anti-U.N. and pro-Israel politics without regard to the effect on foreign allies, let alone considering the effect of her impending resignation on their featherlight mandate in the House, so they now have to procrastinate on her taking office.
It is bad enough to have an over-powerful member whose interpretation of the U.N. Charter and international law is wildly eccentric, as that of the U.S. has so often been, but to have an overweening member like a shark in the swimming pool explicitly denying the U.N. Charter and repudiating its principles is a bite too far.
In the past, there was always a chance of the majority cajoling the U.S. back into the mainstream. And even if it wielded the veto like Musk’s chainsaw on major points of principle, at least the U.S. supported a whole range of agencies and conventions that do benefit the world in serious and practical ways. Even USAID, which has so often been a tool of tendentious U.S. foreign policy, has benefited the world in fields like health. All over the world unlikely prayers are raised for George W. Bush for the global AIDS initiative now being shut down by Musk.
It took some time, but the New World Order trumpeted by Bush Senior and Secretary of State James Baker during the First Gulf War has now been totally Trumped in by this shamelessly mercenary U.S. president, who wants untold thousands to die on the beaches off Gaza so he can open resorts, or, in the case of Ukraine, so he can secure control of the mineral wealth under the steppes.
The U.N.’s core commandment is the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force, which sounds principled but is in fact pragmatic. It was intended to avoid the interstate wars of conquest that led to the previous world wars by ensuring that the victors would not have secure title to whatever they might have won on the battlefield. Admittedly, in the same spirit of pragmatism, the Allies did not set the clock running on this rule until after 1945, so Soviet adjustments along the recent Eastern Front were grandfathered in.
In the interests of geopolitical clarity, the old League of Nations’ fussiness about self-determination got lost in the undergrowth, superseded by the votes over vodka and cognac at Yalta, so no one asked the Poles, Kashmiris, East Prussians or Baltics what they wanted.
But as we have pointed out here before, the principle still haunts the world of diplomacy even in the breach. Whatever Trump and Israel say, for most of the world, the status of the Golan Heights, Gaza, West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Western Sahara, Ossetia and the other chips Russia has knocked off its neighbors’ blocks, is “occupied territory.” Northern Cyprus is still in geopolitical limbo, not recognized as an independent state. And East Timor actually rose from a swamp of abstentions similar to those in the recent Ukraine vote to become independent.
In contrast, now the U.S. claims it is fine to acquire territory by force—as long as the Trump Organization gets a percentage. Crimea, Panama, Canada or Greenland belong to the emperor or the tsar who want it. The U.S. volte-face over Ukraine at least tidies up American diplomacy by presenting it a new back to stab after so many years of sticking it to Palestine.
To see the “new paradigm,” we only have to examine the unprincipled General Assembly voting patterns that link Israel and North Korea, the U.S. and Russia voting in predatory harmony for the new international norm. You could rely on some countries to consistently betray principles over Palestine, which made their votes appear less transactional, but at least they stayed bought.
It is time for the U.N. (and NATO) to suspend the U.S. from membership. Washington is not going to pay its dues anyway, and it might induce the other members to renege on the Charter. It is one thing to have a powerful member whose interpretation of the Charter and international law is wildly eccentric, as the U.S.’s has so often been. In that case, there is always the chance of the majority persuading the errant member back into the mainstream. But it is counterproductive to keep a saboteur and fifth columnist with a hand on the helm, who refuses to accept any of the obligations but demands extra privileges.
Hence my conversion to getting the U.S. out of both organizations. With the U.S. out of the U.N., maybe the rest of the General Assembly could reclaim the diplomatic ground lost in the years since Oslo and give Israel the South African/apartheid treatment it deserves. It should be easier since in Elon Musk we get a prominent pariah standing for apartheid nostalgia, Putin’s expansionism and Israeli genocide against whom the Palestinians can rally support. And with the U.S. out of NATO, the rest of Europe could remember its principles. As we have been saying for some time, morally and legally, the Palestinian and Ukrainian causes stand or fall together. And with Trump they both stand out in the cold.
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
