Word: What's wrong with the United Nations

Ronald Niezen, Sapiens -When the United Nations General Assembly convened its annual meeting this September, amid growing nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the U.N. for being overly bureaucratic. “Too often the focus of this organization has not been on results,” he said, “but on bureaucracy and process.”

I have to admit that he had a point (even if he was playing to his nationalist base). As an anthropologist who has studied the U.N. for some 25 years—and who recently co-edited a book about the U.N. comprised of contributions from 13 other anthropologists—I can say that what emerges from almost any conversation I’ve ever had about the U.N. is a lingering depression about its incapacity and the corruption of its goals.

Critics accuse the U.N. of being costly and wasteful—its upper echelons occupied by bureaucrats with inflated salaries. Its most significant failures have marked it with indelible stains: U.N. peacekeepers stood by helplessly during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, brought cholera to Haiti in 2010, and committed rampant sexual abuse in the Congo. The civil wars in Iraq, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia do not exactly stand out as shining examples of the U.N.’s powers of peacemaking. The list goes on.

But threatening to withdraw funding from the U.N. in response to its inadequacies, as Trump is so fond of doing, is not the solution. Now more than ever, we need the U.N. to intervene in what are perhaps the greatest challenges the world has ever faced: environmental catastrophe, displacement and conflict spurred by climate change, rising economic inequalities, internet-facilitated hate that fuels terrorist recruitment and violent populist movements, and the looming threat of conflict between nuclear-weaponized states. Again, the list is long.

A closer look at the U.N. reveals the hypocrisy behind the views of its most vocal critics. There is some truth to the claims of the organization’s incapacity. But the real source of its powerlessness comes from the actions of its members. It has as much or more to do with the states that are withholding their payments as they play diplomatic games than with any inherent failure of the U.N.

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