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Subject: Should the US withdraw from the UN
Y. pestis    2/9/2003 3:37:07 PM
As noted on another thread the UN is a treaty organization. It has no authority in and of itself to do anything. It has no fiat-no ability on its own to impliment any of its resolutions which is why they are just that-resolutions. With this in mind, should the US withdraw from the UN. The US has been one of the biggest funders of the UN. We have been the de facto military arm of the UN - when it needs to bring out the 'big guns'. Without the US the UN is religated to small 'peace keeping' operations. It did nothing to to stop the killings in Rowanda, let the food aid be seized in Somalia, allowed warlords to terrorize Somalia's people - now that the US has left Somalia is the basket case it was before (where is the UN?) at least the US tried - to our own detriment. What did the UN or the EU do to stop the serbs from killing muslims-not much. Now the world and the UN (or at least 3 members on the security council and countless member states) has turned its back on the Iraq issue, Iraq will be the next chair on the disarmament council, and Syria is in charge of human rights. Has the UN ceased to be revelent?
 
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Jeff from Michigan    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/9/2003 5:50:13 PM
Not yet but it is very close to becoming so. It is rapidly going down the path of the League of Nations in the late 30's. France is not helping matters at all. This fact is starting to seep into the liberal multinational conciousness. Witness Friedman's Saturday column about kicking out France and putting India in it's place. If that thought gains any traction then I believe you will see France and Russia "grow up" in a hurry. What I would wish for is a person like Rumsfeld to become UN ambassador to tell it like it is. Call a thug like Mugabe, Saddam and Chavez what they are. Call repressive regimes like Eygpt, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to account. Make the UN account for itself. If Jesse Helms was healthy he would be a great choice. You could expect the liberal press and the diplomatic corps to blow a fuse which would be a side benefit. Right now I think the U.S. should keep the pressure up on the U.N. and make them serious. If they aren't then give them a one way ticket to Geneva. For the moment I cannot recall the U.N. ambassador's name during the Reagan administration who called the U.N. to account but it did create waves and started some badly needed reforms which Jesse Helms kept pushing.
 
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bsl    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/9/2003 6:17:07 PM
There's a problem in this. Withdrawing from a failing organization is one thing. Withdrawing from an organization which is operating in a way which makes us unhappy, but which will not collapse and is a center of international legitimacy is quite another thing. I understand the analogies with the League of Nations. I even think they're justified. But, they're misleading in the sense that while the UN has failed, utterly, in it's promise, it doesn't seem to be collapsing. To the contrary, I'd say it's been highly successful in establishing itself as the center of legitimacy for the world as far as international relations go. It's not just the small and weak nations who feel this way, either. We need do no more than peruse the European media to see that this is the way most of Europe feels, too. For better or worse, most of the world, including most of our allies, have no intention of breaking the thing up. In these circumstances, if America were to withdraw, and to act, generally, as if the organization did not exist or had no legitimacy, we'd wind up painting a giant bull's eye on ourselves. The rest of the world would tend to see **us** as the international outlaw. Worse, the UN, itself, would serve as an organizing force for the opposition to America.
 
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Y. pestis    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/9/2003 9:48:02 PM
I don't know if the US should with draw-just posing a question to see what others thought. I realize the UN has done a lot of good, especially the WHO. It has also helped in small regional conflicts however it still takes a power regional or otherwise, to stick its neck out and mediate the problem usually under the auspices of the UN-really giving undue credit to the organization. Such mediation can be done without the UN. Peace keepers can also be sent in without the UN under some form of joint command of the mediating contries. When there is a major problem the UN is rather ineffective. As seen with Iraq and North Korea, as well as the Arab-Israeli conflicts, Pakistani-Indian conflicts-Kashmir, Tibet. That being said the UN does provide a good starting place for solutions to conflicts before they start or become too serious-airing out of grievences, organizing initial meetings, ect... I just think we really need to re-evalute the role of the UN in the post cold war world. Its major role now seems to be in limiting the US position in the world, many other countries already see the US as a 'rogue state' and have already organized against the US.
 
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Final Historian    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/10/2003 12:11:08 AM
I think that the UN is in need of reform, not removal. Serious reform will be difficult, but necessary. Whether or not it will happen is anyone's guess.
 
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Phoenix Rising    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/10/2003 2:58:39 AM
Why withdraw? It would save a little cash and cause a worldwide hissy-fit, but other than that, it wouldn't really accomplish anything. BSL is right that the structure of the organization itself doesn't seem to be collapsing. In this case, it's better to be working for change from the inside than giving up and trying to change the world all by ourselves from the outside ... especially because, as we're proving now, it is quite possible to do both. Let's not forget that it was hardly an effective guarantee of international peace or law during the Cold War, either, with the proxy wars between the Security Council members and all the other issues that paralyzed the body, and the GA off doing their own thing (mostly just passing meaningless resolutions condemning Israel). That doesn't mean that it was a bad idea, or that it has become worse since. People's standards have gone far too high since Gulf War I, which was as close to true consensus as we've ever gotten from the international community. Most of history has not worked like that, and likely won't in the future, either, unless something like "Independence Day" comes to life. It's easy to poke fun at the U.N. Three of the biggest jokes in international relations right now are Libya chairing the human rights commission, Iraq chairing the conference on disarmament, and France holding a veto on the Security Council. It has a great deal of institutional blindness built in. However, at the end of the day, underneath all the posturing and statements, most of the members of the U.N. are much more rational than we often bash them as on StrategyPage. Note that when Bush talked, despite how much they hate him for saying that the emperor has no clothes on, how much they wish that there were another true competitor of America to play us off against, how many other ways they hate this country or wish that someone would humble us, they listened. We did the talking, and they did the listening. There is realism built into the U.N. You just sometimes have to shovel through a lot of dung to get to it. --Phoenix Rising
 
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American Kafir    RE:Should the US withdraw from the UN   2/10/2003 7:01:46 AM
The United States can not promote democracy and freedom in a forum where totalitarians have veto power. The United States needs to do two things. 1.) Seize the assets of the United Nations to retrieve the $4+ billion it owes us, and use the money to renovate the: 2.) New World Trade Center, located in the former United Nations complex. Let 'em move to Libya, where human rights are treasured.
 
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The Scales    Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/1/2004 7:47:56 AM
link Yes, the US has no business financing the UN.
 
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sentinel28a    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/2/2004 5:35:20 PM
Absolutely not. Had the League of Nations had some teeth in it (maybe supported by the US), it might have prevented or possibly mitigated the rise of the Axis. The UN has done some good around the world. Usually accomplished with some screaming, yelling, and pulling of hairs, but has done some good. The Sarajevo airlift and keeping Cyprus from blowing up comes to mind, as does the supervision of Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. There's a lot of others, too. Right now, the benefits outweigh the problems, and like Bsl said, withdrawing would just make us Public Enemy Number One. *Some* of the world hates us, but I doubt even our most rabid French posters would want to see the fall of the US.
 
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Nanheyangrouchuan    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/3/2004 5:38:33 AM
Pheonix makes a good point about the UN possibly being used to rally against us. This would be even easier if we aren't there to build support for ourselves or help allies. The UN may also be a major battleground before any shots are fired in the next major war. China is working very hard to use the UN to align nations to at least oppose us if not align with them, the French as well. If we do not play the game we cannot win. The US would find itself diplomatically alone in the short term and abandoned by MNCs to whither in the longer term. That would leave us militarily highly vulnerable.
 
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evlstu    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/3/2004 11:35:38 AM
Then we need to start playing the game at the UN to win.
 
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Sikman    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/3/2004 11:53:19 AM
The UN is too much of loudspeaker for third world despots. Why don't we create a new UN where only democratic nations qualify to join. If France has a problem with it, why dosen't the US decide to arbitrarily count the votes in the GA of countries that WE consider to be democratic enough and act according to their wishes. Unfortunately FRANCE is a democracy but you know sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad and all that.
 
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sentinel28a    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/3/2004 3:29:40 PM
There's the problem. Our definition of democracy is different from the socialist form of it in France, or the supposed form of it in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. *snort* Ah, for the days of Adlai Stevenson and Jeanne Kirkpatrick...
 
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Sikman    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/3/2004 8:00:47 PM
well the beauty of my proposal is that being the most powerful nation on earth, the US can use its standards to decide what constitutes a true democracy. I mean its better than just pulling out altogether.
 
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Nanheyangrouchuan    RE:Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/4/2004 8:31:26 AM
That's what we are doing already and look where it gets us. I say play on the current field to win, I don't think anyone will come to the US's UN under Sikman's terms. Besides, the US was the spearhead to create the orginal UN.
 
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The Scales    Petition to Withdraw US from UN   2/8/2004 1:13:19 PM
You can talk or do something. Please support, sign, endorse and forward the petition at the following link to Withdraw the US from the UN link Thanks! The Scales link
 
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