Timeless Issues Provides Insight into Idealism

At this point, America seems to be in an abusive relationship.  If We stay in it, it’s our fault for not leaving.  But- if we leave, then we’re letting down the entire world…the World.

Have you ever felt like the only responsible person in your entire family?  In Your extended family?  It feels like everyone else is off living their awesome lives, and here you are- cleaning up the mess and paying for it.  It’s not fun, and you’re going broke trying to keep things afloat.

Yeah, that’s kind of how America feels.  Here we are- trying to fund every bright idea from every country in the United Nations, and being told that we’re just not caring enough.  Few people realize the kinds of projects that the U.S. has funded, and participated in.  It seems like these things rarely make the front page- until we try to back out.  Suddenly, America turns into some horrible entity heck bent on destroying the world, and undercutting all that is good.

The media does a great job of feeding into this dark and uncaring view of America, and ultimately- they end up using guilt to control national behavior.  At this point, America seems to be in an abusive relationship.  If We stay in it, it’s our fault for not leaving.  But- if we leave, then we’re letting down the entire world…the World.  That’s an awful lot of responsibility for one democracy.  Take an honest look at some of the issues we’ve had with the United Nations in the past- you may want to reform the U.N. afterward:

The United States contributes more than twenty percent of the budget for every aspect of the United Nations.  In fact, the United States is one of the only countries that regularly contributes anything at all.  The other countries involved in the United Nations have agreed  to pay, but their IOU’s are currently stacked thicker than a Hugo novel. In all reality- many of the countries have contributed less than two percent of anything in either the regular or peacekeeping budgets.  

Feeling a little used yet?  Let’s be honest- the other countries have the means- but why should they cough up any of their money when the U.S. doesn’t seem to have any issue doing it for them?

In 2002-2003, Iraq was in the process of “ridding itself” of the weapons of mass destruction- or they were supposed to be.  Unfortunately, they weren’t doing it within the agreed upon timeframe- or doing it at all.  The U.N. sent an inspector in who decided that they should allow Iraq to have just a little more time.  The U.S. (and fifty other countries) didn’t agree.  So they decided to go in and disarm Iraq without the support of the U.N.  It worked, and the world was a safer place for it.  

In 2007 the U.S. denied a visa to the foreign minister of a part of Georgia.  Both Russia and Great Britain opposed their decision- saying that they were refusing to listen to both sides of an international argument.  The U.S. didn’t feel that the minister would adequately represent the argument independently of the Russian influence.  The minister was eventually issued a visa, and things went forward as planned- but the conflict was remembered.

There have been several different instances that have resulted in the U.S. creating a special task force to investigate and make changes to the U.N.  This always seems to get wrapped up in some other issue, and is disregarded soon after it’s began. 

 

Our ability to effect reform in the U.N. has been discouraging at best, and disparaging at worst.  It will take something with a greater consequence to finally push the U.S. to action- we can only hope that it happens sooner than later.

For more information on this, the author of this article personally recommend Timeless Issues.