Every September, world leaders take turns at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and give pointless speeches.
If they really cared about CO2 emissions, they’d skip the event entirely, because the only thing coming out of their mouths is lies and hot air.
But a few days ago when it was Argentina’s turn, President Javier Milei spoke honestly and boldly.
He told the auditorium the UN “has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.”
He then piled on a heap of charges to prove his point.
Milei said the UN “allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish,” and that it had “sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets.”
Of course, this type of hypocrisy is nothing new for the UN.
We’re talking about a body that has appointed China, Cuba, and Venezuela to their Human Rights Council.
Then Milei turned to the pandemic. He said UN agencies pushed lockdowns that were “a global experiment in social control disguised as science,” which he said is why Argentina quit the World Health Organization.
“There’s no shortage of words or resolutions. What is lacking is consequences.”
He’s right, and the proof is the people in that very room who run the place.
The United Nations, along with other ‘supranational’ bodies like the EU and NATO, has become a sort of retirement home for failed politicians who destroyed their own countries with terrible ideas and worse execution.
In June 2024, after running his country into the ground, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo came out of a national election with barely 5% of the vote.
He resigned that night and left behind a deficit so large that the EU opened disciplinary proceedings against Belgium.
Yet while Belgian voters threw him out for being incompetent, the United Nations made de Croo the head of its its development agency (UNDP) with a $5 billion annual budget to advise poor countries on how to manage their finances.
It’s the same job the UN gave to former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark in 2009, a few months after voters threw her out.
Then theres António Guterres, former Portuguese prime minister who was thrown out of elected office by the voters. The UN then elevated Guterres to the unelected office of running its refugee agency. And he later became Secretary General in 2017.
Speaking of former Portuguese politicians, António Costa resigned as prime minister of Portugal in November 2023, hours after police arrested his chief of staff in a corruption investigation.
Police found more than €75,000 in cash inside the prime minister’s official residence, stuffed in envelopes hidden between books and in champagne crates.
Prosecutors put Costa himself under investigation, after which EU leaders decided he was fit to be President of the European Council, the group of the EU’s 27 national leaders that sets the bloc’s direction.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown was thrown out of office by his voters in 2010. The UN subsequently invented a brand-new title for him: “Special Envoy for Global Education.”
And another ex-prime minister who was ousted from office, the ridiculously unpopular and failed Keir Starmer, is reportedly waiting in the wings for his fancy (and unelected) EU/UN post. Rumor has it that he wants to be the next secretary general of NATO… or even of the UN.
This is the pattern that Argentina’s president has correctly identified: incompetent politicians who couldn’t manage their own countries are often put in charge of global organizations.
Unsurprisingly, the UN’s track record looks exactly like you’d expect.
Last year the world had more armed conflicts than in any year since it was founded in 1945; ironically, the UN was founded “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Great work!
The UN passed nine rounds of sanctions to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea carried out six nuclear tests anyway.
UN peacekeepers have spent 20 years trying to keep Hezbollah’s weapons out of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah armed itself anyway.
In 2015, it promised to end extreme poverty by 2030. Poverty is still everywhere.
The UN is also a gigantic financial failure. All of these ex-politicians rake in pretty serious salaries, in addition to massive benefits ranging from security details to tax-free earnings. It literally pays to be a failed politician.
Partly as a result of such lavish spending, the UN is now in serious financial straits…
In January, the UN’s secretary-general even warned of the organization’s “imminent financial collapse” and “race to bankruptcy”.
The same guys who want to tell developing nations how to manage their finances can’t manage to stay afloat themselves.
The biggest irony is that these are the same politicians that their respective democratic nations already threw out. Yet now they’ve all been elevated to jobs where they can’t be fired, don’t answer to voters, and were never elected by anyone.
Milei was right: what is lacking is consequences.
The only real consequence the UN may ever face is bankruptcy… and that can’t come fast enough.
