But Richard Holbrooke explains how the US is undermining and weakening the UN. This from Steve Clemons.
Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001, says the United Nations faces a future in which it will become progressively weaker without U.S. support.
"If we continue to under-fund, under-support, and undermine the U.N. system it will become progressively weaker and at the same time it will become increasingly a center for hostility to the United States, a combination, a trifecta if you will, that will hurt American national security interests in many ways," he noted.
He suggests a stronger U.S. role in supporting and reforming the United Nations would help ensure the human rights commission acts more aggressively, while not falling under the control of rights violators.
"A weaker U.N. is one where the human rights commission is dominated by such terrible violators as Cuba and Libya," he said. "In other words, what is wrong with the U.N. or the human rights commission, is not the core ideas that it stands for but the instances where due to lack of American engagement and leadership the institution was hijacked by states whose practices are anathema to all the U.N. stands for."
The alternatives are for the US to either go it alone (and pay all the costs of the international interventions we require) or to simply pull back behind our borders and ignore the rest of the world.
The latter option requires American autarky, abandoning all international trade, and will never happen. The Bush admininstration is demonstrating the very high cost of the former choice. The cost will soon force us to either getting help.
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