What More for the United Nations?

Almost a year ago I made the very rational suggestion that the United Nations be evicted from its valuable real estate in Manhattan and, if it chose to stay in the USA, it be moved forcibly out to western Kansas.  It's right here, and a fun read, especially when the Chamber of Commerce of Scott City, KS, read it and invited me to come out and see the place.

At any rate, I got to thinking a bit when President Trump, who is in New York to address the august group of 163 nations today, met with UN people yesterday and issued this message via tweet after using the same words in his remarks: "We commend Secretary General Antonio Guterres and his call to focus the UN more on people and less on bureaucracy."

So let's think about that for a second.  President Trump certainly issues a lot of tweets that appear to be firing from the hip, but this was a planned one with a specific message, sort of like when he makes a speech from a TelePrompTer (although even then he wings a lot of it).  When this president likes what someone says, he tends to reinforce it as if to say "OK, you just said that, I'm going to remind everyone right now that you did, so your feet can be held to the fire."  This sounded like one of those.

I have so little patience with the UN.  It was, in fact, President Trump himself who has often lamented the unfulfilled potential that such an organization could have, a term he does use.  He is so different in his non-Washington approach to things, that I wonder if he might have designs on trying to press some reinventing there too.

I don't think that will involve a relocation to Scott City, Kansas, but let's face it, if the member states could ever decide what is important, it wouldn't matter where they were located.

Right now, I can tell you what is important.  You have a nut case running North Korea and shooting missiles into the air and having a jolly time doing it.  I don't care how many bags of wheat the UN is sending to poor countries in Africa (by way of the USA, of course, but who counts?); if that fat panda in charge puts a nuke on the end of one of those ICBMs and lights it, we won't be worried about wheat.

That is where the UN needs to show it can be effective.  Suppose that the FPIC sends up a test missile and it ends up landing in Japan by accident.  North Korea doesn't talk to anyone, so how would Japan know it was an accident?  Is that missile an act of war, if you are the Japanese?  They certainly haven't done anything to provoke North Korea, which means that there has to be a "next step."  Does Japan unleash -- well, I don't know what they have there, but something in retaliation?  Does the USA respond to an attack on our ally by leveling Pyongyang?

I'm just a dumb old columnist and surely I can see that possibility.  Do you not think that the sainted holy representatives in the UN also see that and, much as they'd like to see the FPIC vaporized as quickly as possible, really want to avoid that scenario?  Well, if they can see it, why are they not doing something about it?  And by "doing something", I mean putting a massive flotilla of ships from 25 nations on course for the Korean peninsula, steaming there until the FPIC waves the white flag and declares that he is grounding all his missiles and shutting down his nuclear program.

And some of those ships need to be Chinese.

You see, when the president visibly commends the UN secretary-general for making sounds about focusing the UN on people and not bureaucracy, the subtext is that the UN has turned into Congress, and he's not a big fan of this Congress.  He's a builder who got things done, and if the UN has a purpose, well, we need to see it act on that purpose and protect millions of Asian lives now.

You see, if the UN can't even put some muscle on the fat panda, then it might as well relocate to Scott City, or maybe Turkmenistan, and the USA can just pull every penny of our support.

Because we owe our taxpaying citizens, and our allies, at least that much.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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