U.N.-Plugged

Claudia Rosett wrote in OpinionJournal Imagining the end of the "world" as we know it.

On Monday afternoon the electrical power blew out at U.N. headquarters, forcing the secretary-general and the foreign ministers of four of the world's most powerful nations, along with France, to evacuate the executive offices on the 38th floor. Nonessential U.N. staff were sent home--leaving a friend to quip, "Does that mean all of them?"

Good point

Power has since been restored. But Monday's blackout was about as close as anything's come to Ambassador John Bolton's much-quoted line that the U.N. could lose its top 10 stories and nothing would be different. The General Assembly session, continued without interruption in another part of the U.N. complex. The global economy ticked along. The world turned on its axis. On schedule, the sun set. All of which led to a taboo line of thought: What if we simply left the U.N. unplugged?

It is worth trying.

In the debate over U.N. reform, that is the no-go zone. It is accepted practice to issue tons of documents outlining endless reform, argue over all of it, despair of most of it, mangle the remainder and then recite as an axiom of the modern universe that the U.N. is a flawed institution, but it's all we've got. To whisper that maybe the U.N. is a relic beyond repair, and perhaps a new age of the world deserves a new and better institution, is to knock yourself right out of the debate. No one would want to do that; or at least no one who has invested the eons it takes to read Kofi Annan's 87-page reform plan, Mr. Bolton's sagely line-edited version of the ensuing reform document, the final version of the "outcome" document, the stack of U.N.-reform-related congressional proposals and testimony, the think-tank documents, the zillion-and-one op-eds, and of course the recent 847-page report of Paul Volcker's inquiry.

I may not have read all of those documents, but I believe we should push the UN out of New York, and make it set up in some third world country, and use the UN building for a new Union of Democratic Nations.

But in the fleeting twilight moment this past Monday of contemplating a U.N. without power, I did wonder what a new world council would look like, if instead of restitching the creation animated by our forefathers in 1945, we created an institution tailored to our own era--not the 20th century, but the 21st.

The upside of an entirely new U.N. could go well beyond better electrical circuits at headquarters, or more agile computer backup (for a while, the U.N. Web site went out along with the lights). The current U.N. dates back to a time when the frontier of information technology was the vacuum tube, the ascendant philosophy in the developing world was communist central planning, and the kind of war the U.N.'s founders sought to prevent was chiefly the domain of uniformed armies clashing under the flags of sovereign states.

The U.N. founders wrote a charter at the end of World War II filled with wonderful words about reaffirming faith in "human rights" and "the dignity of human beings." They then contradicted themselves in practice from day one by respecting thug regimes enough to provide Stalin's Soviet Union a permanent seat on the Security Council and two extra seats in the General Assembly. They set up a U.N. system that not only failed to prevent a long series of wars but today fails to curb terrorism, or even adequately define it. In other words, to create an inclusive gathering of nations in 1945, our forefathers made some big practical compromises with their lofty ideals. In making those tradeoffs, their priorities did not reflect a world in which Osama bin Laden could surf the Internet.

But they did set up a UN that would like to control the Internet, because many of the thug regimes want to control information flow into and out of their country.

Nor did they set up a U.N. replete with the checks and balances and transparency widely recognized these days as necessary to good governance. The U.N. founders did not provide adequate defenses against the tangled growth of U.N. bureaucracy, the packing of the ranks over the decades with cronies and rival national cliques, or the formation of influential lobbying groups of despotic regimes such as the former Soviet bloc or the current Arab League. And in setting up the U.N. as the mother of all multilateral aid agencies, the U.N. founders never came to grips with the vital principle that if private enterprise is the real engine of prosperity--which it is--then the secret is not to jack up government-channeled aid at every opportunity but to push chiefly for more liberty, even if that means a lesser role--and smaller budget--for the U.N.