By Rick Boettger

When I explained “neoinstitutional theory,” about how all bureaucracies stop doing their function in favor of giving themselves cushy easy jobs for life, I threw out the United Nations as probably the worst one in the world.

OMG, was I right!  I just read a very long article* detailing at great length how utterly, hilariously dysfunctional it has become.  I have to share.  

It starts by recounting a performance of their Christmas choir, in “national dress” but singing mostly Western songs.  The writer spent a year deeply attending everything going on there, and remembered “it seemed to so perfectly capture the essence of the [UN]: Western-dominated multicultural pageantry and desultory disorder in an Upper East Side church. Professionals sucking on lollipops while faraway crises festered and spread.”

That’s the funny part of the UN.  I knew it was likely that.  But it is indeed far worse than even my scornful soul could imagine.  I did not know that not only did it fail completely on its prime mandate, keeping the world peaceful after two world wars, it actually encourages wars.  The following I’m including at length, as it is almost impossible to find in an internet search, although you can read the whole article online for free: 

Jeffrey Wells, a former Navy SEAL and current fellow at think tanks including the Council on Foreign Relations and the Truman National Security Project, told me the United Nations was “heavily corrupt by nature,” “untrustworthy,” and “not effective at stopping conflicts. They’ve never had a program that’s been successful,” he said. 

Wells even wondered whether the world might be safer without the United Nations, rattling off crises he felt the organization had aggravated: Sudan, North Korea, Somalia, Gaza, Afghanistan. “Without the U.N., I could see Ukraine not having happened,”** he said, meaning Russia’s invasion. The United Nations was beyond wasteful and ineffective, he went on. It was actively causing harm.

Ain’t that a kick in the heart.  Being not just a giant waste of money, but actually making the world worse.  Small versions of this are when road construction make-work projects close off a lane, or, here, crosswalks, for extended months in order to make “improvements” invisible to the naked eye.  

For parts of our government, I’d just rather give them the money to stay home–people need income to keep the economy going.  But the insult of making things worse for us, like the UN writ large, makes this hard man cry.

* “Wishful Thinking: The aspirations and failures of the United Nations,” by Amanda Chicago Lewis, Harpers Magazine / June 2025, pp. 76-85.

** Emphasis added.

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