Where’s the United Nations in All This? Oh, Right, Nowhere
The UN is today where its precursor, the League of Nations, was in the 1930s. And you know what came next.
At the twilight's last gleaming.
Photographer: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg
“I am ashamed of the UN.” That’s how Czech Defense Minister Jana Cernochova put it the other day, referring to the United Nations. “In my opinion, the Czech Republic has nothing to expect in an organization that supports terrorists and does not respect the basic right to self-defense. Let’s get out.”
Wow. Nobody is expecting the Czechs to quit the UN, but Cernochova’s outrage says it all. One way or another, pretty much every one of its 193 member nations is fed up and increasingly convinced that the UN is fast making itself irrelevant. It’s meant to be the world’s primary organ for multilateral cooperation and collective peacekeeping, and its charter prohibits the use or threat of force. But at this rate, the UN could soon meet the fate of its precursor, the League of Nations, which showed itself to be useless in the 1930s and was finally dissolved just after World War II.