The United Nations Today

A case study in failure:

The absurd and inconsequential nature of the General Assembly is reflected in the bodies and commissions that depend on it. Groups like the Commission on Human Rights are international laughingstocks and rightly so. At best they are irrelevant; at worse they actively undermine the causes they were, theoretically, established to advance.

…The Security Council represents a 1945 compromise between power realities and political correctness. That is, the UK, the US and the USSR were great powers in 1945. China and France weren’t, but it was convenient to pretend otherwise. Today, a majority of permanent Security Council members aren’t great powers, and there are significant powers (like India and Japan) who aren’t permanent members.

A majority of the Security Council’s permanent members are European states and ex-great powers to boot. This is farcical, and the Security Council’s growing weakness is the natural and inevitable result.

Like the UN, the Outer Space Treaty is outdated as well. In my talk at Space Access on Saturday, I pointed out the real problem with Article VI — its assumption that space activities, and particularly human space activities, would be performed by governments, for governments. Its nanny approach and demands that a government be responsible for anything its citizens do off planet is utterly impractical in a modern era of private spaceflight.

4 thoughts on “The United Nations Today”

  1. ‘Today, a majority of permanent Security Council members aren’t great powers”

    How can this claim be evaluated?

    The five permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

    I assume that a “great power” is one that can project force well beyond its borders.

    Compare the numbers on these two lists.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_by_country
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons

    What other measures would people use?

    I don’t think the claim is correct.

  2. Ok. Let’s look at each of those lists.

    If we go by the aircraft carrier list, only the U.S. is a great power and would defeat the other four. 11 vs. 3.

    For the nuclear power list it’s not enough to have warheads, you need to be able to deliver them. Only the U.S. and Russia qualify in that case.

    You might have looked at missile subs. France, Britain and China each have four operational subs. The U.S. has 14 each with 50% more missiles.

    Economically, the U.S. is the great power, followed by China and Japan.

    While ‘great’ is subjective, I’d say there’s some wiggle room.

  3. That’s exactly right Rand. It is sad that our politicians are stuck in the same paradigm. Whether they actually believe it or not they all talk as if they believe NASA is the only logical path to space. Few even acknowledge private space as a viable alternative. I hope to live long enough to see a moon colony thumb their nose at the UN and start selling time shares.

  4. Of those countries, only one can still fight in two major theaters at the same time, and that’s the U.S. The Soviet Union wasn’t able to do so at its peak, and Russia is a mere shadow of the USSR. China may outnumber everyone else in infantry, but it has no way to get to a battlefield off of Asia. The sun set on the British Empire a century ago.

    As for France, its greatness may be summed up by the following:

    Q: What’s the most common French phrase?
    A: I give up.

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