The United Nations could not function without the United States. While every UN member must contribute to the organization’s budget to fund administrative costs, the United States contributes more than others do. In 2023, the UN asked the United States to provide its usual 22 percent of its operating budget and asked taxpayers to foot the bill for 27 percent of peacekeeping expenses, although Congress caps this donation at 25 percent. Put another way, the UN charges the United States almost twice as much as China, five times as much as fellow Security Council members France and the United Kingdom, and nine times as much as Russia.
The Biden administration has further increased donations to the United Nations above these figures by restoring donations to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and other controversial bodies and contributing to emergency drives. US donations to the United Nations equate to about one-quarter of the $51 billion the United States spends on direct foreign aid.
For too long, the United Nations has treated such funds as an entitlement and eschews accountability for their proper management. Turtle Bay oozes anti-Americanism. Secretaries-general view themselves more as the world’s top diplomats, not as administrators to ensure proper management. The lack of accountability costs lives. In Kenya, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees engaged in collective punishment, depriving women and children in camps of food to retaliate for protests that destroyed a feeding pen. In Haiti, UN peacekeepers dumped sewage into a waterway leading to a cholera epidemic that killed thousands. UN peacekeepers engaged in multiple instance of sexual abuse in conflict zones. After the venality of Kofi Annan, at the time director of UN peacekeeping, enabled the 1994 anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, he failed upwards to become secretary-general, where he presided over the worst corruption scandal in UN history.
The wholesale diversion of UN-administered humanitarian assistance to Gaza approaches the same magnitude of scandal. While former Secretary General Ban Ki-moon labels Israel an apartheid state and exculpates Hamas, and while his successor, António Guterres, condemns Israel and draws moral equivalence between rapist and victim, gunmen and hostage, and terrorism and self-defense, UNRWA held hostages and allowed its facilities to store weaponry. With UNRWA’s knowledge, Hamas built headquarters under hospitals and an elaborate tunnel system utilizing diverted humanitarian assistance, concrete and fuel. Guterres and his underlings deflect and deny, but evidence mounts each day. UNRWA knew the problems decades ago.
The US Congress cannot force testimony as Ban Ki-moon and Guterres are not US citizens. Nor do foreigners, with very few exceptions, testify in Congress. Rather, they have “meetings.” The phraseology is less important than the substance: Congressional leaders invite the current and former secretary general to appear to explain both how:
- UNRWA enabled Hamas
- What the UN is doing to hold UNRWA employees to account
- What reform plans if any the UN has for UNRWA, or whether it would be preferable to fold UNRWA’s operations into the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; and
- The legal and policy basis and deliberations that colored the decisions of both men to condemn Israel and draw moral equivalence with Hamas.
Naturally, both Ban Ki-moon and Guterres, let alone the UN bureaucracy will circle the wagons and resist testimony. That is their prerogative but, if the UN’s former and current chief administrator do not wish to identify and address problems then it behooves the United States to suggest a freeze on all contributions to the United Nations until either they do so or Guterres resigns and his successor chooses to right the UN’s wrongs. American taxpayers should never subsidize terror. Whether deliberately or through the incompetence of their management, that is exactly what Ki-moon and Guterres have allowed.
