The United Nations met this week? Those folks are still around?
Wasn’t it nice to see the United Nations back in the news this week? I’d kind of forgotten about those guys.
I remember them from the days of their Carolina-blue helmeted troops who were deployed to hot spots around the world to keep the peace because that was, you know, kind of their job. The days before they retreated from battlefield to boardroom, sitting around all day thinking up “sustainability goals.”
That is less dangerous, I admit. Why take part in battle when you can be out there measuring icebergs?
But the U.N. meeting this week came at a particularly dry time in world history, which is why anyone even bothered to notice.
Newspapers dispatched teams of reporters, and let me tell you as someone familiar with the business, this was the assignment you did not want to get. You have to triple-check the spelling of all those complex names, the storylines are not compelling or original (The U.S. still thinks the Ruskies were wrong to invade Ukraine? How about that?) and worst of all, you know that less than 0% of the reading public is going to devour a single word you write.
Nor should they, because when was the last time the U.N. did anything that mattered? I mean like beyond passing out bottled water to the Armenians.
Even a week from now, who’s going to remember a single word that was said? What international mind will have been changed — about anything?
The U.N. is so toothless it doesn’t even make a plausible bogeyman for the Far Right anymore. They used to conjure the specter of something called a “New World Order” in which America would lose its sovereignty to a panel of international overlords. Today, that’s too far-fetched for even QAnon to believe.
The Democrats are running child slavery rings out of the basement of a pizza shop, but the U.N. coming up with a plan for international governance? Nah, that just doesn’t seem plausible.
But still, the poor reporters have to go through the motions. “As the rain poured on Turtle Bay, delegates and dignitaries from around the world jostled between checkpoints and security barriers,” wrote The Washington Post. “Umbrellas poked into turbans and dripped onto suits. Bodyguards to foreign ministers fumed as their security details got caught in the soggy scrum to proceed into the U.N. complex.”
And since Putin wasn’t there, you didn’t even have the mild point-of-interest that some of those umbrellas could have been poisoned.
Putin can’t come because he has been charged with being a war criminal and risks arrest if he steps outside the motherland. Yet under U.N. bylaws, Russia still can veto any stab at world progress. How great is that? It’s like giving Al Capone veto power over U.S. tax policy.
What in the name of Dag Hammarskjöld were the founders thinking? You might have thought that they would have included some clause that any member going criminally rogue would at least get a time out.
But I guess we can at least use the annual meeting to brush up on international happenings that might have slipped past us over the years. Wait, some guy named Rishi Sunak is the prime minister of Britain? What happened to Tony Blair?
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, however, protested that the U.N. is capable of action, “And action is what the world needs now!”
Heck yes! This calls for a blue ribbon panel responsible for dispatching a task force that will develop strategies for a committee of special envoys to appoint an elite strike force assigned to draw up a flow chart of mission-critical leadership that will look into goal-oriented and data driven outcomes that will result in someone somewhere possibly doing something.
And by all means, make sure it’s sustainable.
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: United Nations gathering a true slog for journalists
