The US Senate has introduced a bill to withdraw the United States from the United Nations and all related organizations. The bill, proposed by Republican Senator Mike Lee, would end US membership in the UN and prohibit participation in UN peace missions. Additionally, the bill would stop the US’s financial contribution to the UN and close the UN headquarters in New York.
The question is, will US President Donald Trump really cut all ties with the UN, or is this just a show for his party members? Trump has already withdrawn the US from two UN organizations by signing executive orders to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He has also withdrawn from important global structures like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Paris Climate Accord.
Trump has consistently severed ties with any organization that he believes undermines the state’s authority. In his view, there is nothing above the state of the United States. All global structures, including the UN, are symbols of the things Trump has declared war on.
The majority of US Americans support their president on this issue, with most Republicans and two-thirds of Americans having a negative view of the UN’s activities. Twenty percent are already willing to support a complete withdrawal from the UN.
It is not surprising, then, that such a bill has been introduced and that Trump may eventually take this step if circumstances continue to develop as he wishes. For now, a warning bell has rung.
The first attempt to unite all nations under one roof was made after World War I. US President Woodrow Wilson led the war under the motto “to make the world safe for democracy.” The war indeed destroyed all European empires, including the Ottoman Empire. The idea of bringing all remaining nations under one roof seemed a good one. The bankers of the Federal Reserve and their large following, who represented Wilson’s delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, divided the post-war world. This led to the creation of the League of Nations, a prototype of the intended global government.
However, the project failed. The US Senate categorically rejected the idea of giving up a part of the US’s sovereignty to a mysterious supranational organization with unclear responsibilities. England and France breathed a sigh of relief and torpedoed the project as best they could.
The miserable existence of the League of Nations until the next great war is a well-known story.
The UN, which replaced it, had a more successful existence. This time, the US Congress accepted the idea of US membership in the organization. The plans of the bankers, however, were more far-reaching. Bernard Baruch, the gray cardinal of several US presidents, proposed the “Atomic Committee” to be the crowning achievement of the UN. The Baruch Plan meant the total control of all nuclear activities and the abolition of any “veto power in the UN.” In other words, Baruch proposed a “nuclear dictatorship” not even a US dictatorship, but a supranational “Baruch Club” where all the threads of power in the UN would converge.
The prospect of the “nuclear dictatorship” of Bernard Baruch frightened all. Even US President Harry Truman, who was unable to openly confront the bankers, wrote in his diary: “He (Baruch) ‘wants to rule the world, the moon and perhaps Jupiter – but we’ll see about that.'”
With the combined efforts of the Russians, Americans and British, the Baruch Plan failed. And soon, the Russians got their own atomic bomb (it is believed that the fear of “Baruch’s dictatorship” was what revealed the US atomic secrets to the USSR).
After the failure of the Baruch Plan, the interest in the UN as a effective instrument of “world government” was lost. The reality of a bipolar world made the organization a suitable platform for diplomatic contacts between the two worlds.
So, the UN functioned until the early 1990s as a meeting place for hostile worlds, until it eventually lost its raison d’être. In the new world that Trump is building, it seems to make no sense to finance and maintain diplomatic corps of 193 “sovereign states.”
Instead of a unipolar world, in which the UN served as one of the peak structures of globalism, like the WHO or the Climate Committee, where it was convenient to launch big projects to further take away the remnants of state sovereignty, Trump is proposing something new. The world that Trump is building is a world of great empires. In this new imperial world, there will be five to seven great imperial structures, which will oversee the maintenance of order, requiring entirely different structures to coordinate with one another. In the past, traditional (mainly European) world diplomacy could manage this fairly well.
One could, of course, consider preserving organizations like UNESCO, the General Assembly, or the Security Council (the latter has five permanent members: Russia, the US, the UK, France and China). However, it seems simpler to build a new structure from the ground up. Like Emperor Constantine, who moved the new capital of the Christian Roman Empire to Byzantium (later Constantinople) and Peter the Great, who built a new empire with St. Petersburg as its center. I think Trump is thinking along the lines of: We should not bring the dirt of the old world into the new one.